Hello Brett, congrats on making it through lesson 5, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your critique.

Starting with your organic intersections I’m pleased to see your linework is smooth and confident in this exercise, and you’re doing a fantastic job of keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid.

It looks like you are, to varying degrees, having some difficulty in placing your forms in positions where they feel stable and supported, with a few forms looking like they might topple off at any moment. The second page is definitely stronger in this regard, with the form I’ve highlighted in green here slumping over the forms below in three dimensions with a sense of weight, so that it feels stable.

With each form you add, imagine you’re dropping it in from above the pile, and thinking about how gravity will pull it downwards, over and around the forms that are already in place. One thing that can help here, (in addition to avoiding laying forms parallel to one another as discussed in the exercise instructions) is to have the edge of the upper form follow the surface of the lower form like a 3D contour curve, as shown in these diagrams.This will help to create the illusion that the forms are wrapping around each other. You can see this applied to the form I’ve redrawn in blue here allowing it to sag over the form below, and swapping the direction of the contour curves allow the right-hand end of the form to face towards the viewer.

When adding cast shadows, try to keep a single light source in mind for any given pile, and project all your shadows away from it. As noted here you appear to be casting the shadows in multiple directions at once, which will give the impression that the light source is moving around. Also keep in mind that cast shadows occur when one form blocks the light from hitting another surface so they can’t cling to the form like the area circled in orange. Instead, in this instance the shadow would be projected down onto the ground plane below.

Moving on to your animal constructions, I’m pleased to see you’ve made a concerted effort to take actions on your constructions that reinforce the 3D illusion, and it looks like there is a fair bit of growth occurring through the set. This pig in particular has some tricky foreshortening, but you’ve been clear about showing your understanding of how the pieces fit together in 3D space so it doesn’t fall flat. I do have a few recommendations for you, which I’ll discuss below, but overall you’ve done a bang up job.

So, one of the first steps for a quadruped construction is to combine the ribcage and pelvis masses into a torso sausage. When doing this, we want to stick fairly closely to the characteristics of a simple sausage form, as this simplicity helps it to feel solid. I noticed on about half your quadrupeds that you’d pinched the underside of this torso sausage inwards, which results in a weaker foundation upon which to build the rest of the construction. Sometimes animals don’t really look like they sag in the middle. When we want to build an animal with a narrow waist, instead of adding complexity to the torso sausage, we can adjust the size and tilt of the pelvis mass, as shown in this dog demo which I put together for a student who ran into a similar issue.

Moving along, one of the main points we dig into in this lesson, is using additional masses to develop the construction, once the basic ball and sausage forms are in place. I’m pleased to see that you’ve been using this tool quite liberally throughout the set, and your hooved quadrupeds especially show that you’re getting to grips with how to design them so they attach to the existing structures in a convincing manner.

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.

The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Even this bobcat from quite early in the set has some masses which are working quite well, such as the large mass along the back. I have marked up the construction with a few notes where masses had room for improvement.

• The addition on the neck appears to be just a one-off line, which doesn’t provide enough information for the viewer to understand how it connects to the construction in 3d space. In this drawover I’ve replaced it with an additional mass, with its own complete, fully enclosed silhouette.

• Along the front of the hind leg, I can see you were intending to construct an additional mass, but left it open-ended. In the drawover I’ve completed it, to give a clearer connection to the underlying sausage form.

• There a re a couple of spots where you’d included an inward curve in the silhouette of an additional mass along the outer edge of the construction, where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing physically present to press into it. Try to stick to simpler outward curves in these areas, and if you really need to build up an inwards curve with additional masses, this can be done by layering them, as I’ve shown along the hind leg in the drawover.

Speaking of legs, it is great to see that you’ve stuck with the sausage method to construct them in 3D- at least for the most part. There are a few places where you took a bit of liberty with what constitutes a simple sausage form- such as the lower sections of the far side legs of this pony but you’ve demonstrated a good understanding of the method and most of your legs are working well.

I wanted to mention that you’re off to a great start with using additional forms to build upon your sausage armatures, but there is a way this can be pushed further. A lot of these additions focus primarily on forms that actually impact the silhouette of the overall leg, but there's value in exploring the 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. Here is an example of what I mean, on another student's work. Uncomfortable has used green to block out masses along the leg there, and included one fitting between them all, even though it doesn't influence the silhouette. 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.

One thing I liked about your komodo dragon was how you handled the feet. Those boxy forms are great for giving structure to the feet, and showing how they’re planted on the ground giving the animal a feeling of weight. I also liked that you’d constructed the claws as complete new 3D forms. I would have loved to see you continue this approach with the hybrid, where the toes on the front paws have been added as single lines, which as discussed back here in lesson 3 only really works when we want to add to forms that are already flat.

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 has 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.

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. I’m definitely seeing that you’re making an effort to inscribe angular eye sockets onto your cranial balls, but it does look like muzzle construction is something of a sticking point. I’ve put together some notes on this pony which I hope will help you understand how to construct the muzzle as a simple boxy form with a clear 3D connection to the underlying cranial ball.

All right, I think that should cover it. Your spatial reasoning skills appear to be coming along well, and 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. Keep up the good work.