Hello Isthat0, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.

Starting with your organic intersections you're doing a good job of keeping your forms simple, which helps them to feel solid and 3D.

There are places where you're drawing your forms in front of one another, for example this red form sits entirely in front of the blue one, so it looks like it would fall off. Instead, with each new form you add, imagine you're dropping it in from above, and letting it fall and come to rest in a position where it is stable and supported. Think of these forms as being soft and heavy, like well filled water balloons, so as they come to rest they will slump and sag, wrapping around the forms below. If we redrew the red form with this in mind, it might look something like this.

You're projecting your shadows boldly enough to cast onto the forms below, which is good. They do appear incomplete, like you're not always considering how the entire form casts a shadow. I've added some missing shadows to one of your pages here. Try to consider how the whole form sits in space when designing your shadows in future.

Moving on to your animal constructions, your observations have improved substantially since your lesson 4 work. For example with this springbok I can see you've paid attention to the placement of the feet and the shapes between the legs, helping to keep your construction organised, good work. There are some areas that came out more clearly informed by the reference images than others, for example your kitten is almost bolt upright, instead of leaning forward, to the right as we see in the corresponding reference.

Observation isn't just about getting the proportions right, although it will help with that. At the end of the day, observing our reference carefully and frequently will help make our drawings more realistic in a lot of ways - proportion only being one of them. It comes down to picking up on some of the more nuanced, subtler elements that play a role in an object, being able to identify the major structural elements, and then the smaller forms that may be attached after that, gradually whittling down from big to small, simple to complex.

It looks like you're putting a lot of effort into building your constructions "in 3D" too, and figuring out how to fit all these solid pieces together with tight specific relationships. There were a few hiccups, such as these examples on your wren, where you'd extended the wing off the body as a flat partial shape, and it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of the form you had established for the beak, undermining its solidity. These actions "in 2D" are mostly confined to your earlier constructions, as I'm seeing a fair bit of growth across the set.

Moving on to leg construction, I think you were aiming to work with the sausage method here, though for most of your pages you're constructing your legs from ellipses instead of sausages. This is actually noted in the lower left of the sausage method diagram as something to avoid as it makes the construction stiff. Try to stick as closely as you can to the properties of two balls of equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. We only draw around sausage forms one time (going around multiple times can lead to accidentally making them elliptical.)

Good job remembering to apply a contour line for the intersection at most of the joints, this is something students often forget, and it is a very effective tool for reinforcing the solidity of the construction.

You've made a start with exploring the use of additional forms on the legs some of your constructions, most notably the bears, but you'll often leave the legs completely bare (ooh a pun!) and over simplified.

The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo.

We also discussed observing the legs carefully to pick up on subtlety and complexity in the context of this sawfly construction.

When it comes to constructing paws, I'd like you to study these notes which show how to introduce structure to the foot by drawing a boxy form- that is, forms whose corners are defined in such a way that they imply the distinction between the different planes within its silhouette, without necessarily having to define those edges themselves - to lay down a structure that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes. This will give a much more solid 3D illusion than cutting back inside your basic paw form to create toes, which is what appears to be your strategy on this squirrel.

Keep in mind that every line you draw in these constructions should serve a clear purpose. You generally hold to this quite well, though there are some areas, such as this foot, where you appear to be going back over your lines automatically, without necessarily thinking through what each line is contributing to the construction. Be sure to use the ghosting method for each line, as going through the planning phase will help you to avoid automatically redrawing your lines and making your constructions messy and confusing.

On a similar note, you have a tendency to add line weight to places that seem a bit random. Line weight is a tool, and in this course we use it for a specific purpose. I'd like you to reserve additional line weight for clarifying overlaps between your forms, and restricting it to localised areas where those overlaps occur. Please watch this video which explains how to use line weight in this course. It was added after you completed lesson 1, so you may not have seen it yet.

The next point I wanted to talk about is additional masses. It's nice to see you using this tool to build onto your basic armatures, and I can see that you're trying to make them feel 3D, although right now you're relying pretty heavily on adding a ton of contour lines to do so. This was something that came up previously, although it was back in lesson 3.

Those kinds of contour lines, the ones that sit on the surface of a single form, only serve to take a form that can already be interpreted as 3 dimensional, and clarify it. In truth, they're useful for introducing the concept of a contour line, but in practice their usefulness is somewhat limited. It's better to avoid these types of contour lines, and instead simply focus on the ones that establish intersections and the different ways forms connect in 3d space.

You appear to be using contour lines to try to "fix" your additional masses to make them feel 3D, but they don't actually address the problem at hand, which is a lack of clear 3D relationship between the additional mass and the existing structures. This is something we achieve through intentional design of the mass' silhouette.

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.

So, I've used this cat as an example of specific ways we could improve the design of your additional masses, to help them to reinforce the 3D illusion and the solidity of your constructions.

• With masses A and C, you seem to be avoiding certain kinds of complexity, such as corners and inward curves, resulting in a lot of softer, rounded corners instead. Unfortunately this absence of complexity robs us of the very tools we need to use to establish contact between these 3D structures, instead making the masses appear flatter and more blobby. In this image I've redrawn mass A, breaking it into a series of carefully considered lines. For each numbered stroke I'd considered how the additional mass attaches to the existing structures. With stroke 1 I'd pulled the mass down from on top of the spine around the side of the body. Where the mass meets the top of the shoulder (which protrudes from the side of the torso sausage) I've pressed the shoulder into the additional mass, creating an inward curve with stoke 2. The mass then continues to wrap around the torso sausage, transitioning between curves with stroke 3. Stroke 4 consists of a soft outward curve where the mass is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present to press against it

• With mass B I can see you're introducing more complexity to your additional mass, and thinking about how it will interact with the existing structures. Here you appear to be pressing your additional mass against the rib cage and pelvic masses- there's a pretty specific inward curve running along the back edge of the rib cage there. One of the standard steps we apply to most of our animal constructions is taking the rib cage and pelvis and using them as the basis for a larger torso "sausage". In doing this however, the sausage swallows up the rib cage and pelvis masses, leaving no trace of those initial masses to protrude. If they were sticking out from the torso sausage, then we'd certainly have something to press the additional masses against, but since the rib cage and pelvis end up blending smoothly and seamlessly into this new sausage mass, there's nothing left of them to wrap around. The only surface for our new masses to attach to is that of the sausage. When adding masses to our construction, what we're focusing on is the structure as it exists at that moment - where is it flat, where is it rounded, where does it have parts that stick out, etc. - so we can understand how this thing exists in 3D space right now, in order to build upon it. So here I've redrawn mass B, wrapping it around the smooth surface of the torso sausage, until it meets the top of the thigh mass, as the thigh does protrude from the torso sausage we can use it to help anchor the additional mass to the construction (instead of using the rib cage or pelvis mass).

• C was an example of not allowing your mass to overlap the structures it is attaching to. Running it along the outer edge of the back of your thigh instead of allowing it to overlap makes it feel flimsily attached, like it might wobble off if the animal were to move. We can wrap the mass more boldly around the back of the thigh here to give it a firmer grip, like this.

The last point to discuss is more of a recommendation for how to approach head construction in next set of animals. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos. Given how the course has developed, 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 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 in this rhino head demo it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

All right, I think that should cover it. I can see that you're working hard, and you're making good progress here. This feedback is pretty dense, I expect you may need to read through it a few times, and possibly take notes in your own words, to help to absorb it all. I have discussed several things to work on, and I'd like you to complete some additional pages to demonstrate your understanding of these points before moving on to the next lesson.

Additionally, I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions when approaching these revisions:

1- Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.

2- Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.

Please complete 4 pages of animal constructions.