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

Starting with your organic intersections, you're doing a good job of conveying how most of your forms slump and sag with a shared sense of gravity, with the first page being a bit stronger than the second one.

If we take a look at these two forms I've traced over on your second page, notice how B has been drawn almost parallel to A, giving the impression that it might roll off the pile. With each form you add, imagine you are dropping it in from above, and allowing it to fall and come to rest in a position where it feels stable and supported. We want to be able to walk away from the pile knowing none of the forms will topple off.

Your shadows are working, you're projecting them boldly enough to cast onto the surfaces below and their direction is consistent. You can try experimenting with placing your light source in a different position (such as further over to the left or right) when practising this exercise in future.

Moving on to your animal constructions, you've honestly done a great job with these. I can see you've paid a great deal of attention to how to build up your constructions "in 3D" by drawing complete forms and establishing clear, specific relationships between each element you add and the existing structures.

Actually I did spot one construction that wasn't quite as solid as the others. It is worth calling out that with this rat it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of the shoulder and thigh masses when you constructed the legs, leaving the sections I've hatched in red outside your construction, reminding us that we're looking at lines on a flat piece of paper instead of a solid 3D construction. Try to work additively when engaging with organic constructions in this course, even if it means your construction turns out looking a little different from the reference image.

Continuing on, where in lesson 4 we introduced the idea of building onto our constructions with complete 3d forms, here in lesson 5 we get a bit more specific about how we design the silhouette of these additional forms. It can be quite challenging to figure out just where we want to use an inward curve, or an outward curve, or a sharp corner.

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'm happy to see that you've experimented with using additional masses quite liberally throughout the set, and there are some places where you're designing them to wrap around the underlying structures with a fair bit of attention to the various surfaces at play. The interaction between two large masses on the back of this rat is handled very well.

I also wanted to point out that you did a great job of pressing this mass on the back of your moose against the top of the thigh, helping to anchor it to the construction.The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears.

Something I did notice with some of your additional masses is a bit of a tendency to introduce unexplained complexity, things like inward curves where the mass is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present to press against it, or sometimes sharper corners where the underlying surface is smooth and rounded. I've redrawn one of the masses on this moose as an example, with notes on where to keep the mass simple, along the top where nothing presses against it, and where we can introduce complexity, using structures such as the shoulder to introduce corners and inward curves to specific places. If necessary we can build up inward curves along the silhouette by layering masses.

I see that on a few of your pages you'd piled quite a few additional contour lines to the surface of some of your additional masses. Adding this type of contour line (like from the organic forms with contour curves exercise) can help a form feel more 3D in isolation, but doesn't really help to clarify the relationships between your forms or solidify the construction as a whole. The type of contour line introduced in the form intersections exercise is much more effective in this regard, and it also only allows us to add one contour line per intersection. The type of contour line running along the surface of a single form allows us to add as many as we want, but unfortunately they suffer from diminishing returns, where the first one may be quite helpful, but the second much less so, and the third is largely redundant. While adding contour lines that don't contribute much isn't a big deal in itself, it can sometimes lead students to thinking that adding contour lines will "fix" a mass that doesn't feel 3D, causing students to invest less thought into the design of their masses. So, when you go through the planning phase of each contour line you wish to add, be sure to ask yourself what it is contributing to your construction, and if it is the best tool for the job.

Moving on, another point I check on in this lesson is how students are doing with the sausage method of leg construction. On the whole you're doing really well. You're keeping most of your sausage forms simple, and have been pretty conscientious about including the contour curves for the intersections at the joints. I did notice a couple of pages where you'd strayed away from simple sausages for the upper sections of the legs. As shown here we can stick to simple sausages for the armatures, then flesh them out with additional masses.

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 think you may find it helpful to take a look at these notes on foot construction where Uncomfortable shows 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.

On a fairly minor note, I think colouring in the markings on this gecko probably came from watching the tiger demo, where Uncomfortable colours in some of the stripes. Unfortunately that demo is a little outdated in this regard, and over the years we've found it is more beneficial for students to focus on texture in the manner that is introduced in the texture section of lesson 2. If you're not sure what to focus on, these reminders should help to jog your memory.

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. I can see you working through similar principles when you approach head construction, and there are definitely areas where you're following parts of the process shown in that informal demo, but bring it all together in the way the demo shows, and you should be able to get even more out of the exercise.

And that about covers it! All in all, great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.