Hello Kai, the power of Boxes and Sausages? Let’s see...

Starting with your organic intersections these are working very well. I’m happy to see that you took my recommendation on board and drew through your forms in the second page. Drawing each form in its entirety does make the exercise more difficult, but the payoff is that it forces you to think through how each form sits in 3D space so it helps develop those spatial reasoning skills.

If I were to get really nitpicky I’d say that the interaction between forms A and B here seems to be more about the 2D shapes on the page, rather than really thinking about how the two forms are sitting in the depth of 3D space. Your contour curves suggest that B would probably fall behind behind A, rather than rest on top of A. Every other 3D relationship between the forms is very clear and convincing though, suggesting that this was an entirely normal one-off issue, rather than any misunderstanding with how to handle the exercise.

Moving on to your animal constructions, I’d better start by cross-posting these notes on your mongoose so you don’t have to hop over to Discord to find everything, and so I can acknowledge that you’ve done a great job of applying these pointers to subsequent constructions.

Your pages completed after that mongoose certainly show greater attention to working more consistently in 3D by adding complete new forms when you want to build up your constructions, rather than the partial shapes I’d marked with blue, and that’s great.

I didn’t see this often, but it is still worth calling out, don’t cut back inside the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn, as you did with the sections I’ve marked with red on the shoulders of your hybrid. While it's entirely possible to do this correctly in 3D space, I'm advising students not to work subtractively at all when building up organic structures within this course, just because students tend to be prone to doing it wrong without realizing, and then reinforcing 2D thinking instead. Sticking to working additively in 3D space will on the other hand be a lot harder to do wrong (as long as you're somewhat mindful of what you're doing), and will ultimately reinforce that 3D thinking and eventually help you subtract more effectively as well.

On the same hybrid I wanted to make a (rather minor) point about the tail. It looks like you’d placed an ellipse on the rump where the tail was meant to connect to the body of the animal, but when you defined the upper edge of the tail is didn’t connect to that an ellipse, but an arbitrary point along the silhouette back of the animal. That ellipse was a problem you’d solved, and a decision you’d made, so I’d suggest you use it to construct the tail so it attaches to rump in 3D. You can always add some more bulk along the top there by constructing another form, if needed.

You’ll also see a couple of spots on the hybrid that I’d traced over with blue. These look like cases where you were intending to draw additional masses, but for one reason or another didn’t fully enclose their silhouettes. This can leave it less clear how the new addition is supposed to connect to the existing structures in 3D space, so the viewer is more likely to perceive them as just lines running across the flat surface of your paper. Here is how I’d handle those blue sections, giving them their own complete silhouette to help show how they wrap around the existing structures.

Honestly most of the time you are building things up with 3D forms, and the design of your additional masses is excellent. You’re making great use of the logic shown in this diagram and clearly thinking through how each form in the construction sits in 3D space, and how your mass would respond to their presence and attach to the construction in a convincing manner. I particularly like how willing you are to wedge your forms together, for example pressing your masses against the protruding shoulder and thigh forms, because the more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

I also like that you’re not just using masses to capture specific bumps along the silhouette, but also considering forms that exist "internally" within that silhouette- like the missing puzzle piece that helps to further ground and define the ones that create the bumps along the silhouette's edge. This way of thinking- about the inside of your structures, and fleshing out information that isn't just noticeable from one angle, but really exploring the construction in its entirety, will help you yet further push the value of these constructional exercises as puzzles.

While you weren’t necessarily relying on additional contour lines to make your masses feel 3D, sometimes you do add a lot of them. Contour lines themselves fall into two categories. You've got those that sit along the surface of a single form (this is how they were first introduced in the organic forms with contour lines exercise, because it is the easiest way to do so), and you've got those that define the relationship and intersection between multiple forms - like those from the form intersections exercise. By their very nature, the form intersection type only really allows you to draw one such contour line per intersection, but the first type allows you to draw as many as you want. The question comes down to this: "how many do you really need?"

Unfortunately, that first type of contour line suffers from diminishing returns. The first one you add will probably help a great deal in making that given form feel three dimensional. The second however will help much less - but this still may be enough to be useful. The third, the fourth... their effectiveness and contribution will continue to drop off sharply, and you're very quickly going to end up in a situation where adding another will not help. I find it pretty rare that more than two is really necessary. Anything else just becomes excessive.

Be sure to consider this when you go through the planning phase of the contour lines you wish to add. Ask yourself what they're meant to contribute. Furthermore, ask yourself if you can actually use the second (form intersection) type instead - these are by their very nature vastly more effective, because of how they actually define the relationship between forms. This relationship causes each form to reinforce the other, solidifying the illusion that they exist in three dimensions. They'll often make the first type somewhat obsolete in many cases.

One such example would be leg construction, where we use one contour line at each joint to show how the forms penetrate one another and establish a 3D relationship between them- just like the contour lines introduced in the form intersections exercise from lesson 2.

Moving along to feet, as a bit of a bonus I'd like to share these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot using a boxy form (which you’re doing nicely in some cases) and take it a step further by using similarly boxy forms to attach toes. Please try using this strategy for constructing paws in future.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is head construction. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos. This is due to how the course had developed over time, and how Uncomfortable is finding new, more effective ways for students to tackle certain problems. So not all the approaches shown are equal, but they do have their uses. As it stands, as explained at the top of the tiger demo page (here), the current approach that is the most generally useful, as well as the most meaningful in terms of these drawings all being exercises in spatial reasoning, is what you'll find here in this informal head demo.

There are a few key points to this approach:

• The specific shape of the eye sockets- the specific pentagonal (5-sided) shape allows for a nice wedge in which the muzzle can fit in between the sockets, as well as a flat edge across which we can lay the forehead area.

• This approach focuses heavily on everything fitting together- no arbitrary gaps or floating elements. This allows us to ensure all of the different pieces feel grounded against one another, like a three dimensional puzzle.

• We have to be mindful of how the marks we make are cuts along the curving surface of the cranial ball- working in individual strokes like this (rather than say, drawing the eye socket with an ellipse) helps a lot in reinforcing this idea of engaging with a 3D structure.

I can see you’re fairly familiar with this method, and successfully applying those key points to some of your constructions, such as this faun. Sometimes it seems like that informal head demo is not a good fit for certain heads, but as shown in the rhino head demo just beneath it on the same page, it can be adapted to work for a wide array of animals.

One thing that can also help, specifically when dealing with eyes, is to draw the eyelids themselves as their own separate masses, as shown here. This can help us better focus on how they're actually wrapping around the eyeball itself, more than we would when drawing the eyelids as a single "eye" shape.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your sausages were indeed powerful. Once again you’ve done an excellent job, and should be pleased with what you have achieved here. I can give you another shiny badge for your collection, I hope it gives you strength for the cylinder challenge, which is up next.