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

Starting with your organic intersections these came out well. You're keeping your forms simple, and giving them a good sense of volume. You're showing a good grasp of how these forms exist in 3D space, and in places you're capturing how the forms slump and sag over one another with a sense of weight.

There are a couple of forms in your piles which appear precariously balanced, such as the two forms on the far right of this page which feel like they might topple off at any moment. When practising this exercise in future imagine you're dropping each form in one at a time from above, and allowing it to fall onto the pile and come to rest in a position where it feels stable and supported.

You're doing a good job of projecting your shadows boldly, so that they cast onto the surfaces below, and you're keeping their direction reasonably consistent. Something that will help the whole pile to feel grounded and stable is to also include cast shadows on the ground plane. Leaving these out gives the impression that the piles are floating in space.

Moving on to your animal constructions, overall you're showing a strong understanding of how the various pieces of your constructions exist in 3D space, and connect together with specific relationships. You're doing well, although I have a fair bit of advice that I hope will help you when tackling these kinds of constructional exercises in future.

Jumping right in with how you're arranging your constructions on the page, you are unfortunately doing yourself something of a disservice in this regard, and making things harder than they need to be. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are (to some extent) thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing.

The previous paragraph might sound familiar, as I brought this issue up in your lesson 4 feedback. Keep in mind that the advice provided in these critiques is designed to be applied by the student as they move forward, so issues do not need to be called out repeatedly. As you move forward through the course the constructions will get more complex and demanding, so I urge you to start drawing bigger (sticking to 1 or 2 constructions per page, instead of cramming in 4 or more) so that you can really get the most out of each individual construction.

I do see that you've made a real effort to address the point I made about line weight in your previous feedback. I can see that you're (usually) keeping your line thickness more consistent and not tracing back over every line you want to keep visible, good work. I do see quite a lot of extra marks on your constructions, and these look less like deliberately redrawing your lines, and more like you may be accidentally touching the paper with the pen tip while ghosting. I'd suggest you try holding the pen slightly further from the surface of the paper when ghosting to avoid this.

While we're on the subject of things covered in previous lessons, just a quick reminder to always draw around your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen off the page, even if you feel like you can nail them in a single pass. This is something we ask students to do for every ellipse freehanded in this course, as introduced in this section of lesson 1.

Continuing on, I'm happy to see that you've stuck with the sausage method of leg construction throughout the set, and most of your sausage forms look solid. Don't forget to apply a contour curve at each joint as shown in the sausage method diagram. These little curves might seem insignificant, but by defining the intersections where the sausage forms connect in 3D space we can very effectively reinforce the solidity of the construction.

The last point to reiterate from previous feedback is the idea that every action we take when engaging with these constructions should be done "in 3D" by drawing complete new forms and establishing how they connect to the existing structures in 3D space. Overall I'm seeing a lot of places where you're doing a jolly good job of building your constructions up in3D, as well as a few places where you're hopping back into working in 2D by altering the silhouettes of forms you have already drawn. I've highlighted a few examples here on one of your canine constructions, giving them the same red for cuts and blue for extensions treatment as your previous critique. Instead you should be clearly defining how each addition connects to the underlying structures by giving it its own complete fully enclosed silhouette. I believe that you do understand this concept, as you're leveraging complete 3D forms in many areas, but perhaps get a little hasty in places and add a quick bit of refinement to your forms with single lines, which unfortunately flattens them out.

Moving on to the specifics of lesson 5, where previously we introduced the idea of building constructions with 3D forms, here we get a little bit more specific about how we design these forms, by introducing the concept of additional masses. I'm happy to see that you've been making use of this tool to build onto your constructions through the set, and you're generally doing a pretty good job of establishing how these masses connect to the existing structures in a way that feels believable.

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, with this in mind I've made some edits to the same construction I marked up earlier, here.

Where I've labelled "A" I've taken one of the places where you'd extended the construction with a one-off line, and used an additional mass to build the addition out in 3D.

Where I've labelled "B" I'd taken a mass that was trying to achieve too much and falling flat, and drawn two masses here instead, allowing each mass to remain simple (an outward curve) where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to press against it.

Where I've labelled "C" I've pulled the mass down from on top of the spine, around the side of the body, to give it a firmer grip on the construction. I've also made use of the shoulder mass (which you had blocked in with an ellipse) to help anchor the additional mass to the construction even more. Note the specific inward curve where I've pressed the additional mass up against the top of the shoulder. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

You're off to a good start in the use of additional masses along your leg structures, but this can be taken even further. A lot of these forms focus primarily on masses 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, from another student's work - as you can see, Uncomfortable has blocked out masses along the leg there, and included the one fitting in 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.

As a quick bonus I'd like to share these notes on foot construction with you. These show how instead of drawing feet with soft rounded forms, we can give them a greater sense of structure by using boxy forms. By that I mean 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.

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. 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. Your spatial reasoning skills are developing well, and I'll be marking this lesson as complete. I do hope you'll go through the advice provided here and apply it to your constructions independently, in your own time. For now though, feel free to move onto the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.