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

Starting with your organic intersections you've done a good job of keeping your forms simple, and it looks like you're paying attention to how your forms relate to one another in space. It is good to see you've drawn through the majority of them, as this helps to reinforce your understanding of the 3D space you're trying to create.

While I think you understand how your forms exist in space, something that jumps out is that I don't think you're necessarily applying gravity to all of them, some of them appear to be weightless. We want our forms to feel heavy in this exercise, and for them to feel stable and supported, like we could walk away from the pile of forms and nothing would topple off.

Here I have highlighted a specific example of a form that feels unsupported. At a glance, you might feel that the upper end is supported by the forms on the left, but if you think about it, you have asserted this form as going behind and beneath the forms on the left, so there really is nothing underneath it to support it in this position. If we think about how gravity would affect this form, it might come to rest in a position more like this, slumping and sagging around the form below it.

With each new form you add to the pile, imagine you're dropping it in from above, and think about how as it lands on the forms below it will slump and sag with gravity, and come to rest in a stable position. Your pages are fairly chock-a-block, I'd recommend you draw fewer forms per pile until you get more comfortable with applying gravity to your forms.

You're projecting your shadows far enough to cast onto the forms below, but they're not very consistent. On the first page there a few shadows missing, and on the second page they're being projected in fairly random directions, sometimes in multiple directions from a single form. Just like how we must apply gravity to all the forms, we also need to apply the shadows consistently to all the forms. Pick one direction for your light source and apply it to the whole pile. You can mark it on your page if you have trouble remembering it, top left or top right are good choices to start with.

Moving on to your animal constructions your work is by and large very well done. I can see that you've really focused on taking actions on your constructions that reinforce the 3D illusion, and you're demonstrating a good understanding of how all the pieces of your constructions connect together with specific relationships, good work.

I did spot a couple of little hiccups when it comes to taking actions on your constructions in 3D space, here I've marked a couple of examples on one of your birds. In red I've highlighted a small spot where it looks like you accidentally cut back inside the silhouette of the form you had already established for the leg. I've used blue to show a couple of places where it looks like you tried to extend the construction using one-off lines or partial shapes, which doesn't really provide the viewer with enough information to understand how those additions are meant to exist in 3D space. These areas do appear to be the exception, rather than the rule, and in most cases you are drawing complete 3D forms with their own fully enclosed silhouettes whenever you want to build on your constructions.

I'm happy to see you drawing through your forms in these pages, including fully constructing the far side legs and figuring out how they connect to the far side of the body, even though you can't see this in the reference. This is a great way to really get the most out of these constructional exercises and will help you to develop your spatial reasoning skills. You're making effective use of the sausage method of leg construction and you are off to a great start with exploring the use of additional masses to build on your leg structures, but this can be pushed farther. A lot of these 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, 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 and puzzles.

It is good to see that you're using complete forms to construct feet, though you have a tendency to revert to drawing one-off lines when you add the toes. When it comes to constructing feet, I have some advice on how you can tackle the construction of the base foot structure, and then the toes. As shown here on another student's work, we can use boxy forms - 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 structured that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes.

One of the key aspects I check on with animal constructions if whether a student is using additional masses to build on their basic constructions, and if they are being designed in a way that wraps around the underlying structures convincingly.

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, you're doing a good job of exploring the use of additional masses throughout your pages, and they're design is pretty solid. I do have a couple of nitpicks that should help you to improve them further, and I've marked them out on this rhino.

• With the red mass on top of the shoulder I've pulled it down from the spine and around the sides of the body a bit more, and taken advantage of the ellipse you had established for the shoulder mass to press the additional mass up against.The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

• The green mass above the neck and shoulder I have simply completed the silhouette.

• For the alterations I made on the legs, while it seems obvious to take a bigger form and use it to envelop a section of the existing structure, it actually works better to break it into smaller pieces that can each have their own individual relationship with the underlying sausages defined, as shown here. The key is not to engulf an entire form all the way around - always provide somewhere that the form's silhouette is making contact with the structure, so you can define how that contact is made. For the hind leg you could probably have started with a wider sausage form for your base armature instead.

Proportions aren't our main concern here, but I did notice that you have a tendency to start with a cranial ball much larger than it aught to be, which makes some of the constructions appear cartoony or off balance. It is most prominent on some of the early pages, like this kitten, but does persist to a lesser degree though to your hybrids. Keep in mind that the cranial ball doesn't represent the entire head, but serves as a fist step that we will build upon as we progress through the various stages of construction. The cranial ball will almost always be significantly smaller than the rib cage.

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:

1- 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.

2- 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.

3- 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 banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.

Conclusion

Your animal constructions are progressing well. I will ask you to take another swing at the organic intersections exercise before moving forward. Please complete the following:

• One page of organic intersections. Stick to no more than 7 forms in your pile, and try to apply both gravity and shadows more consistently.