Hello Mikerad83, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections, these are lovely. You’re keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid, and they have a good feeling of weight to them. I can see that you’re thinking about how gravity pulls down on the forms until they come to rest in positions where they are stable and supported, which gives your piles a sense of believability.

Your shadows are good too, you’re projecting them boldly onto the surfaces below, and using them to clarify the relationships between your forms.

Moving on to your animal constructions, overall it looks like your spatial reasoning skills are developing well, you do a great job of drawing through your forms, and you’re demonstrating a good awareness of how your forms are oriented in 3D space.

Something I’d like you to focus on when practising these constructional exercises in future is the specific relationships between forms, and establishing how the pieces fit together in 3D space. By defining these relationships either with a contour line where the two forms penetrate one another (like the form intersections exercise from lesson 2) or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure, we actually reinforce the 3D illusion we’re attempting to create, making the construction appear more solid as a whole.

One good example that benefits from the intersection lines is the sausage method of leg construction. As shown there on the sausage method diagram, once the sausage forms are in place we add a contour line to each joint to help define the relationship between them. You’re doing very well with the sausage forms themselves, but frequently omit the intersections.

Something I discussed in your lesson 4 critique, is that when we want to build on forms that aren’t already flat we can’t just add one-off lines or partial shapes, because this doesn’t give us enough information to understand how the addition is supposed to connect to the existing structure in 3D space. I’ve marked with blue on your deer several examples where you did exactly that.

With no clearly defining elements that help the viewer (or you, for that matter) to understand how these blue lines are meant to relate to the other 3D elements at play, it reminds us that we're drawing something flat and two dimensional, and in so doing, reinforces that fact to you as you construct it. Creating believable, solid, three dimensional constructions despite drawing on a flat page requires us to first and foremost convince ourselves of this illusion, this lie we're telling, as discussed here back in Lesson 2. The more our approach reinforces the illusion, the more we make new marks that reinforce it even further. The more our marks break the illusion, the more marks we make that then further break the illusion, for us and for everyone else.

While in this course we're doing everything very explicitly, it's to create such a solid belief and understanding of how the things we draw exist in 3D space, that when we draw them more loosely with sketching and other less explicit approaches, we can still produce marks that fall in line with the idea that this thing we're drawing exists in 3D.

So, instead of extending the silhouettes of existing forms by adding one-off lines and partial shapes, instead we add complete new forms, with their own complete, fully enclosed silhouettes. In lesson 5 we introduce a very effective tool for students to use to flesh out their constructions in 3D- additional masses. I'm happy to see that you've been experimenting with additional masses on the majority of your constructions, although it can be quite puzzling to figure out exactly how to design their silhouette in a way that feels convincing.

One thing that helps with the shape here is to think about how the mass would behave when existing first in the void of empty space, on its own. It all comes down to the silhouette of the mass- here, with nothing else to touch it, our mass would exist like a soft ball of meat or clay, made up only of outward curves. A simple circle for a silhouette.

Then, as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course- always changing in response to clear, defined structure. You can see this demonstrated in this diagram.

I’d like you to take a look at this image where I’ve replaced several flat extensions with additional masses, using this logic. I also made a few relatively minor adjustments to two of the additional masses you already had along the torso.

• I’ve simplified the upper edge of the mass on the shoulder area, as there’s nothing present there to press into it and cause the wobbling undulations.

• I’ve made the mass more complex where it reacts to the forms that are already present in the construction, including an inward curve where it presses against the top of the protruding shoulder mass. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• On the other hand, the ribcage mass does not protrude, as it has already been engulfed by the “torso sausage”. So instead of pressing the mass along the back against the back of the ribcage, I’ve allowed it to wrap around the torso sausage.

• The type of contour line introduced in the sausages with contour lines exercise suffers from diminishing returns, where adding one may help clarify a form, but the second much less so, and the third (or fourth or fifth) will be largely obsolete. 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 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. You’ll notice with the masses I’ve drawn that I haven’t placed any additional contour curves on them, instead relying on intentionally designing their silhouettes to establish how they relate to the other structures at play, and keeping them simple where they are exposed to fresh air.

There are some cases where we can get away with altering the silhouette of an existing form. One example would be adding feathers. Because the feathers are paper-thin, we can use the concepts introduced in the leaves exercise from lesson 3. By this I mean starting with a simple shape, then adding the larger feathers one at a time as pieces of “edge detail” which attach to the basic shape. This allows us to build the construction up in stages. When we try to achieve too much with a single step (as you did with the wings of the hawk) we can find ourselves with a flat form made with wobbly hesitant lines.

Speaking of hesitant lines, make sure you remember to draw 2 full circuits around your ellipses before lifting your pen off the page, as this helps to keep them smooth and even. You usually do this correctly, but I noticed on your two most recent ibex constructions that you’d not done this for the ribcage masses and they’re a bit stiff and uneven.

When it comes to constructing paws, I'd like you to take a look at these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows how to introduce structure to the foot using a boxy form. By that I mean a form whose corners are defined in such a way that they imply the distinction between different planes within its silhouette, without necessarily having to define the edges themselves, to lay down a structure that reads as solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes. Please try using this strategy for constructing feet in future.

The next 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. (Edited to update links in this paragraph.)

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.

Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can/ Sometimes it seems like it's 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.

The last point to call out is that it seems you forgot to apply the advice from your lesson 4 feedback for texture.

On a few of your constructions such as this dog it looks like you got carried away with decorating the drawing using a brush pen in a rather painterly manner. What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review, at minimum.

All right, there is a lot of information here, and I hope you’ll take some time to go through it carefully, so you can apply it when practising these constructional exercises in future. Despite forgetting a couple of things here and there, I do think your overall understanding of 3D space is developing nicely, so I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.