Organic Arrows

There's a lot of definite improvement here in terms of generally improving the confidence of your linework. Instead of chicken-scratching through the whole thing as you did before, you've shown the confidence to execute the marks in singular more purposeful strokes, and that's a big step forward.

The main spot where your linework suffers is when you add line weight. You get considerably scratchier there, going back over it several times with marks that appear more hesitant (focusing too much on tracing over those lines to achieve strong accuracy). As with all your other marks, these should be focused on a confident execution, using the same ghosting method to produce smooth strokes. It's normal for students to focus a lot on accuracy, but as explained way back in the super imposed lines exercise, accuracy doesn't matter until your mark is confident and smooth.

So yeah- you might miss the mark when adding line weight, but that's okay. Don't attempt to correct it. You're not producing a masterpiece here, every arrow is just another exercise. If you end up making a mark that isn't accurate, there's nothing to be gained by going out of your way to fix it. Doing so will merely reinforce the pattern in your mind that causes you to strive for accuracy over confidence.

To that same point, don't cross things out, or point things out as mistakes. Students do this in an attempt to say, "don't worry I know this was wrong" because they don't want to be judged for it. They're afraid of what people will think. The first step to move past what others might think is to simply leave it all on the table for others to assess without trying to talk them through it.

Organic Forms with Contour Lines

On the first page (the contour ellipses one), you're clearly making a more concerted effort to control the sausage shapes themselves, attempting to adhere to the characteristics of simple sausages. This is something you don't appear to do in the second. Remember that it is indeed an important part of this exercise to strive for forms that feature ends that are circular and equal in size (rather than stretched out or having one larger than the other). We also want to keep the tube that connects those ends consistent in width throughout its whole length.

This isn't easy - it requires us to still execute our marks confidently, but while retaining an amount of purposeful control. Fortunately executing our marks with confidence does not mean drawing them as quickly as we can. When first introduced to this concept, often students do resort to just drawing quickly - which is fine at first, because it basically guarantees that you can't steer your marks with your eyes.

When we hit something like this however, you may want to try slowing down a little bit, and finding that threshold where your confidence wavers and your line starts wobbling. Always avoid the wobbling, but see whether you can execute your mark a little more slowly (still making a point to execute from the shoulder, of course), to maintain control. And of course, employ the ghosting method to reinforce that control as well.

This applies to your contour lines as well - both ellipses and curves. Looking at these lines, I get the impression that there are two main things causing problems:

• While some of your contour curves are pretty good, I am seeing a lot where you stiffen up quite a bit when making that sharper turn at the edge of the sausage. This suggests to me that you're drawing them from your wrist, resulting in a much more stiff and sharp turn that is not as gradual as you intend. Always reinforce the habit of drawing from your shoulder.

• Like what happens with the sausage shapes themselves, there's often a lack of control (for example here) where the marks just come down so quickly that you don't have a chance to control where they're actually going. Those marks certainly are smooth and confident, which means you are pinning down that first step - but now you have to work on getting them to fall where you want them, which means slowing down while maintaining that confidence and leveraging the planning/preparation of the ghosting method beforehand.

Again, I am pleased to see that you're not going back over your marks needlessly as before, and overall there is improvement here, with plenty of room for further growth.

Texture Analyses

All things considered, I'm pretty happy with how these are going. You're focusing much more on clearly defined shadow shapes (rather than trying to build up shadows stroke by stroke as you did before), and you're showing progress in regards to thinking about how those shadow shapes relate to the forms that are present in your surface's texture. You're also doing a pretty good job of creating a smooth transition from dense to sparse, although the huge splotch of solid black throughout the left side of the last row undermines it in that particular case. The key here is to think of it as though you've got a very bright light source on the far right side. The closer you get to it, the more impossible it is for the cast shadows to actually survive under the onslaught of direct light. Conversely, further to the left, you get far enough away from the light source that there's very little surface that will actually pick up the light, allowing the shadows to swell and expand, merging into one another. Overall you show that you are grasping this concept.

For the record, your homework assignment is not the place to vent your frustrations with "I can't X", "I can't Y", and "I hate this". Yeah, it's a difficult exercise. Lots of people struggle with it, and it's an introduction to a concept that you aren't expected to have a firm grasp of right now. You're leaning hard into this misconception that you're only going to be assigned tasks where one is expected to be able to succeed. That's not how Drawabox works - it's not how it worked with the rotated boxes, and it's not how it works here.

You aren't here to impress people, or to make people think more or less of you. You're here to learn, and in order to achieve that, you're simply given a series of instructions and the request that you follow them to the best of your current ability. If that current ability results in tons of mistakes, that's perfectly normal and it's something we'll work through together. That's not a problem. A problem would making the conscious decision that you have to meet a certain standard in order not to be frustrated.

You're simply assigned tasks, no different from taking a hammer and striking a nail. Take a swing, and you might hit the nail on its head, you might strike a glancing blow, or you might miss entirely. The only expectation is that you take the swing.

Dissections

These are a bit more mixed, with some textures being done particularly well, and others somewhat less so. The ones that worked out well are those where you focused on clearly defined shadow shapes (corn, tree bark, sausage, etc.) and those that came out more poorly were those where you fell back into drawing individual marks with a greater tendency to scribble (like the straw and palm tree). Neither are disappointing as far as our expectations here, but I am pleased to see that there are several where you did think more in terms of clearly defined shadow shapes.

When tackling something like straw, it does make sense that you fell back to making individual strokes, because it's entirely normal to think of the straw as being individual, thin forms - thus they should cast individual shadows, right? A similar problem would arise when trying to draw hair. This is a common mistake beginners make. They try to zoom in real close to a given object/surface/texture, and focus on what they would see at the finest resolution.

In truth, how we perceive an object is subject to how far back from it we choose to be. If you put a little more distance between you and that straw, you'll find that the individual forms start merging together, creating larger clumps and forms. For the purposes of this exercise, we can treat those larger chunks as being our textural forms, focusing on the shadow shapes they'd cast - rather than looking at every individual piece of straw on its own.

All in all you're moving in the right direction. Keep working on focusing on specific shadow shapes, and work on refining them and designing them to be more and more specific. For example, looking at the corn your shadow shapes are a little clumsy. With practice you'll be able to make them a little more purposeful. If you aren't already, try outlining the shadow shapes first, then filling them in.

As a side note, the little specular highlights (the bright spots) on the corn kernels appear to be outlined in your drawing. Don't do that in the future - focus only on the strong shadow shapes. If you had more options in the range of tones we can apply (other than straight black and straight white) you might have the option to imply these highlights. Since we're limited in our options, we have to choose where to draw the threshold between those two tones, and so the strong specular highlights get thrown in with the normal non-shadowed tones. The fact that students are forced into making these decisions is part of why we use ink like this. It's difficult, but a very valuable exercise.

Form Intersections

So there are a few observations, both good and less good that I'm just going to share in bullet point form:

• You're clearly using the ghosting method a great deal. This has resulted in a considerable improvement in your overall line quality.

• There is still plenty of room for improvement in your line quality. Ghosting is a big step in the right direction, although investing some more time in the planning and preparation phases should help you continue to improve on avoiding things like gaps where lines ought to be meeting at a shared corner, and on generally improving the overall solidity of your forms. Overall, there is some sloppiness still to work on reducing.

• I'm assuming that you did watch ScyllaStew's videos while working on all your exercises throughout this lesson (since I mentioned them in my last critique), but just in case, looking at how slowly she works through a page of form intersections should help as a reminder for how one ought to pace themselves as they plot out every mark.

• There does tend to be more sloppiness when you've got pages with more forms on them - suggesting that you're subconsciously putting less time/effort into each individual mark when you know you've got a lot more to draw. This is a common phenomenon, where students change how much they're willing to put into an individual stroke depending on how much of the overall drawing it constitutes. This is of course, wrong, but it's a common habit that one needs to work consciously at overcoming.

• Your actual intersections - which are another one of those things where we don't expect students to be able to figure these things out at this point - are actually better than what I'd consider to be average, or expected. You're demonstrating a well developing understanding of how these forms relate to one another in space.

**Organic Intersections

So there are a few issues here:

• Not sticking to simple sausage forms, as discussed in regards to the organic forms with contour lines. This basically makes those forms feel less solid and three dimensional - any kind of complexity will make it harder for the viewer to understand a shape as representing a 3D form.

• The same issues in regards to the control of your contour lines I mentioned earlier come into play here as well.

• You're not drawing through the contour ellipses at the tips, and need to keep them more firmly placed right at the tip of each given sausage.

• Your cast shadows are inconsistent. Try to always keep in mind where you want to place your light source in the scene. The shadows themselves will be cast based on this light source's position - meaning you're going to have those shadows cast either to the left or to the right of a form, not both. This also applies to whether shadows are cast upwards or downwards. I can see that you are thinking about how your shadows wrap around the surfaces upon which they're being cast, so that's good, though there's still room for progress here.

Conclusion

Overall, the only area I want to particularly target for now before we mark this lesson as complete are your organic forms with contour lines, and the organic intersections that follow. I'm going to assign some revisions pertaining to these below.