Uncomfortable

1. Pressure control, remember that these are exercises so the idea is to try, and over time you'll get better at it. There's a lot of ranges of thickness one can get from a 0.5mm fineliner (which is why we use them) but it's something you unlock over a lot of mileage and experience.

2. Mandatory for the organic forms with contour line exercise, because it helps with what that specific exercise focuses on. Again - each exercise serves a purpose, challenges you in different ways. So each exercise has specific rules depending on what it's designed to focus upon.

3. It all depends on the nature of the form - a contour line wraps along that surface. Our sausage-like organic forms are made up of circular cross-sections in one direction, which allows us to explore contour lines in a simpler, more narrow scope - as ellipses. But not all contour lines are ellipses, they're all gonna be determined by how that surface exists in 3d space.

The thing to remember in general is that the exercises we do help develop specific areas of your spatial reasoning skills. Bit by bit and from different angles, this advances your more general, instinctual understanding of how the things you draw on a flat page exist in 3d space.

These are things the exercise develops in your subconscious, so focus on doing the exercises as they're instructed, and don't worry too much about trying to consciously understand how it all works in practice. The goal is that when you're drawing your own stuff, gradually what you learn here will influence how you think about it and how you naturally approach it, so your conscious mind can remain focused on what it is you wish to draw rather than how.

Before we get to looking at your work, I did want to quickly point out that while it's not at all abnormal for students to feel like they need to complete Drawabox before moving onto other things, and that those feelings are certainly valid, they do not reflect the reality of learning drawing. There's two aspects of this to drill down to a little further:

• Firstly, even with Drawabox we encourage students to engage in more advanced concepts and courses if they're interested in them, right from the beginning. Yeah, it's certainly reasonable to expect that you're not going to get as much out of them if the fundamentals they leverage aren't up to a given standard, but in applying those fundamentals as best you can while also learning them from Drawabox, it creates a feedback loop that increases overall efficiency and helps you learn in a more well-rounded fashion. The important part is that we not go in with hard expectations of what we will get out of those courses, other than the fact that they'll broaden our horizons and help us avoid getting too hyper-focused on any one skill, and lose focus on what it is we actually want to produce.

• Secondly, Drawabox is one approach. I've probably mentioned this before, so I may be sounding like a broken record, but Drawabox is not the be-all end-all of art education, nor of learning the fundamentals. It is one strategy of many. There are situations where you run into a roadblock and you have no choice but to bash your head against it until it breaks apart if you want to reach the other side. But there are also plenty of cases where it makes more sense to find another route that is better suited to you and what you're struggling with. One area that I've called out before is observation, and that honestly isn't something Drawabox really addresses in any meaningful way. We leverage observation, and because we aren't asking students to replicate their references in full detail, but rather use them as a source of information to help understand how forms sit together in space we don't need observational skills to be that well developed - but in a case where a student's observational skills require more assistance, our course isn't designed in a manner that handles that super well. Conversely, many other drawing courses focus on observation first and foremost. That is definitely something that could help.

It is often worth taking a step back and considering where the ideas we hold to come from, as we'll often find that we're prone to inserting ideas of our own, without them being based on fact or coming from reliable sources.

Anyway, let's take a look at some of your work.

Looking at this squirrel construction, what jumped out at me pretty quickly was the big difference between the ears in the reference, and those in your construction. Looking at the earlier squirrel construction, where it was sitting, its reference did cause the ears to appear more ellipsoid and rounded from that angle, so it makes me wonder if you had observed it in the previous one, and then opted to work more from memory than direct observation - that's just a theory though. Either way, observing the reference you're working with at the given moment is an area where you are not allocating enough time.

Another point that drawing helps to illustrate is that there are two key points about your approach that are hindering you:

• The first is that you tend to stop your construction pretty early, and tend to rely on those earlier steps to accomplish more than they strictly need to. For example, with the squirrel's head, you started that cranial ball very large, and so everything felt kind of inflated. I often find that when we start with an oversized cranial ball, it quickly throws things off and can make us feel lost. Erring on the side of smaller rather than larger is generally preferable if you're not confident that you're able to get the proportions right, because you can always build upon a smaller form with additional masses. It is on the other hand difficult to work our way back, given the specific limitations to the constructional drawing approach we're using to develop our spatial reasoning skills here.

• There are still a ton of steps you're skipping, or applying differently from what was called out to you - not defining the forehead area, drawing eye sockets with six sides rather than five (I noticed that in your notes you were using screenshots from the tiger demo, but didn't have shots of the head construction demo we frequently reference, and is also referenced in the tiger demo itself as being more up to date. The rhino head demo DIO shared would also be useful).

Using your reference, I put together this demonstration as to how I would tackle it. I want you to go through it, and compare it back not to the quality or result of what you achieved, but the actual steps you employed. Every construction is going to be its own little puzzle to solve - we start from the big structures that we observe, and gradually shift focus to smaller elements, while mixing in logical deduction (like where in step 9 I identified a bulge along the silhouette of the face, then added the same form under the other eye despite it not being as clearly visible in the reference, since I can trust in the squirrel being fairly symmetrical).

Continuing on, I want to take a moment to talk about this horse construction which, while it does have similar issues to those I've called out already, as a whole I think it is a vastly more successful construction as a whole, for a number of reasons:

• Your markmaking in general is way more confident and consistent, resulting in really good sausages to lay down the basis of your leg structures.

• The positioning of the back hooves creates a strong illusion of it standing on a three dimensional ground plane. The front hooves achieve this as well, though to a slightly less clear extent.

• While the curves you use to define the joints between those sausages (I'm looking specifically at the knee) do tend to be a little too broad in their curvature (if we were to draw the complete ellipse, I basically mean that their degree is too wide to convey the angle at which that cross-section would be set, which is more parallel to the ground), you've generally placed them well and avoided them spilling outside of the area where the two sausages overlap.

Looking back at my previous round of feedback, I had given you a list of points to keep in mind - let's take another look at that list and see if the issues are absent from this new round, or if they are still present to some degree:

When drawing your additional masses, don't draw them with just one stroke.

Honestly there aren't a ton of places where you actually use additional masses - and more importantly, there are definitely places where you should be using additional masses, but don't, like with this squirrel's back. That said, I did see a couple of additional masses on your alligator, and it does seem that you are still attempting to draw them in one stroke, as shown here.

Keep working not to draw what you think is there - always look back at your reference and confirm that you are at least pulling from an accurate impression of the animal you're drawing

Based on the ear issue with the squirrel (which is similar to the example I provided previously, which related to the ear on one of your wolf constructions), this still appears to be an issue that is present.

Head construction follows a specific process when approached in this course, and it is critical that you follow it in its entirety, rather than in bits and pieces.

I'd say you're still applying it in bits and pieces - skipping the forehead, six sided eye sockets instead of five, and so forth.

Draw through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, every time.

In many cases you are drawing through your ellipses properly. There are some cases where you draw through them one and a half times instead of two full times though, so be sure to be attentive - it's easy to think we're drawing through our ellipses two full times, and as a result not pay attention to the actions we're actually taking.

Do not draw through your sausages, as this will shift them more towards being ellipses rather than sausages.

This one's mixed - you did a great job on the horse, although with the squirrel I can see that you are still frequently drawing through your sausages more than once.

Use the foot construction demo that was provided.

By and large it does not really seem like you're employing the foot construction demo approach. I can see that you're often blocking in the feet with a box-like form, but you usually neglect to add the toes onto that structure. When you do add toes, like in some of the squirrel's feet, it tends to be as flat shapes rather than actually establishing how those forms relate to one another in 3D space, as shown in the demo.

Lastly, let's talk about your notes. The thing about note taking that I find to be especially useful is the actual act of taking the information you're given and reframing it in your own words. Screenshotting and saving bits and pieces can be somewhat helpful in terms of having access to those references on the side so you don't have to go digging through them, but it doesn't necessarily help in you remembering that those demonstrations exist - which could perhaps be why despite having those demonstrations on hand, there were still things you skipped or missed in your approach that were shown in your notes.

While this is considerably more time consuming, what you might try is the following:

• Go over the last handful of rounds of feedback you've received (going back to DIO's initial critique for this round and everything after that should suffice), then summarize for yourself every issue that is addressed, while also recording the links to the diagrams associated with them. This is to basically build yourself a little catalogue of the issues that come up, and associated information/explanations provided to try and correct them. Rephrase those explanations in your own words.

• Every time you start an animal construction study, go over those notes. Pick out and rewrite in a new, smaller set of notes, anything that will specifically pertain to the animal you're setting out to draw for the study. Best to still keep this in categories, like "general block in", "head construction", "leg construction", and so forth - the goal is for you to be able to get that information easily when you need it.

• As you progress through the construction, refer to those various categories, and take your time in going through the demonstrations. When a demonstration gives you something you can follow more directly, do so. Don't try to hold it in your mind in a more ephemeral fashion, hoping you'll be able to apply it subconsciously - everything we're doing throughout this course demands that every choice be a conscious one, as the goal is to rewire what our brain considers normal and natural ways of doing things, so as to push those behaviours down into our subconscious. Right now, your subconscious tendencies are to oversimplify, to focus on your drawing rather than your reference, and to work from memory.

It also would not hurt to actually do your own attempts at following along with the demonstrations provided, to get more direct practice in applying them. I'm not sure how much of what I've suggested here repeats what I suggested previously, but I'm under the assumption that you made a concerted effort to apply what I had said there.

Anyway, that's it for this round of review. Feel free to do another 5 animal constructions, and submit them when you're done, and I'll give you another round of feedback. Of course, do your best to apply what I've stated here, and try and reflect on why the issues that are called out keep coming up - consider what aspect of your approach may be responsible for lapses in memory, or what may be hindering you from applying the information/demonstrations you need for a given problem when it comes up.

To put it simply, not all cases of a given issue are really suitable for explaining it. It varies from topic to topic and issue to issue, but having a really on point example can help me illustrate to the student what the issue is, as well as why and how they might avoid it. As long as the work is organized and clear, the quantity of pages to go through isn't really an issue - although in cases where they are haphazard, half-complete, and otherwise disorganized, that can definitely make things harder.

Doesn't happen often, and when it does, it's memorable - I remember on December 24th 2021, I received a Lesson 5 submission made up of half drawings across some 50 pages... That one was a challenge, and took a solid 3 hours just to explain why it required a full redo.

In most cases however, effective critique benefits from examples that are clear. It's very easy to have examples of an issue that aren't quite as obvious or neatly packaged, and that simply makes the task more difficult.

I completely understand where you're coming from, and how a student may be inclined to view the situation, but I still feel like you're missing a key point here, and it's a difficult one to make without discussing money, and who gets paid what, which is admittedly uncouth.

In your reply you acknowledge everything drawabox has done for you, and I appreciate that - but at the same time you express disdain at the idea of "earning" your feedback. That would make perfect sense in the context of a customer paying for a service - a customer should only be expected to pay for the service they receive, a simple exchange.

But that isn't the case here. Our course is designed such that people who have limited budgets can still receive the same feedback as those with more money to spend - those who can afford to allow credits to expire do so, and those who can't simply spend every credit they receive. It does not cover the full cost of the feedback they receive (by the end of Lesson 5 the total cost of feedback as paid to the TAs is $70 USD, and due to overhead fees we lose about 15% of what the students pay), but that is the nature of the system we've set up and we balance it out in other ways. Our priority is that students, despite financial difficulties, are more able to receive that reliable feedback.

While the large quantity of work associated with our course in general definitely helps make this possible (as it staggers out the homework submissions) just as the strict requirements we impose do, most of the workload throughout this course is still in line with what is beneficial for the student.

The chest challenge is quite different from everything else this course offers, however. It is entirely based on looking specifically at the very unique designs the student produces, and so it is extremely time consuming to critique. Finding those best examples, explaining the concepts in the context of the work, doing draw overs and so forth.

After the TAs get paid, and the processing/overhead fees are taken into consideration, if a student has spent every single credit they received, that leaves about $10 USD left over to cover the time I spend on critiquing everything after Lesson 5. The cylinder challenge, lesson 6, the wheel challenge, lesson 7, the texture challenge, and the chest challenge. Ten dollars to cover what averages to 3 hours of work, the last hour of which is occupied by the chest challenge.

Limiting to just the mandatory parts of the course (1.5hrs worth) we're looking at $6.67/hour. Adding the texture challenge brings us to $5/hour, and adding the treasure chest challenge brings us down to $3.33/hour. Minimum wage where we're based is $11/hour.

Now I absolutely could increase the credit price of the chest challenge, but that doesn't really align with our core principles as a business, which is to reduce the financial barriers necessary to receive reliable feedback, and eliminate them entirely for our learning resources.

The other option is to ensure that those who do decide to pursue the chest challenge are few and far between, which given the fact that it is optional and not actually a part of our core course material, nor directly focused on any of the topics we present as being among the course's goals, seems pretty reasonable to me. And of course, we do that by asking for a ton of work.

Cut the work in half, and the rate of submission increases - and at that point, we'd probably stop offering feedback on it altogether. I'm sure that would be fine for those mainly interested in being able to say they "completed" every part of the course, as the additional assignment would be taken off the table entirely, but it would be a loss for those who genuinely wanted to learn about design.

Besides - I haven't run into any issues with the other students who submitted the challenge. Yeah, it was a lot of work, but they completed it as assigned and I provided their feedback without issue or complaint.

All I ask is that you do the work in the way it was assigned, and that when I am working for below minimum wage for your benefit, upholding my end of the bargain I outlined in Lesson 0, you uphold yours and take all the time that is required of you, regardless of whether you personally feel it is beneficial. I suppose if you really took issue with the assignment but still felt compelled to do the exercise, you could have asked if your modification was acceptable, instead of moving ahead with it of your own volition.

Circling back, you may notice that the examples I chose when providing my feedback were from the first half of the challenge where you were more inclined to prioritize what was asked of you.

I hope my explanation was clear, though if you have any questions on why we operate in this fashion, feel free to ask.

The initial reply was sent to the spam filter (we recently had to also catch anything that could be a phone number, so unfortunately the 145-150 triggered it. Just means it was sent for manual approval.

I've approved the original one.

Before I get to your critique, there's something I wanted to address. Some of what you said in your submission comment suggests to me that you may not completely understand how the official critique program itself works, and that may result in you looking at the assignments themselves, and all that is asked, in an incorrect context.

To put it simply, the quantity of the assignment and the specific ways in which we direct students to perform the tasks (including taking their time and care with every mark and not deciding on their own to deviate from those instructions), while serving to help provide a broad range of students with effective training, also serve to ensure that we are able to provide the service in general. The service being the feedback you receive.

As explained in Lesson 0, where we outline the requirements for receiving official critique, we explain that these strict rules are there to ensure that we can do our work efficiently, so that the limited resources we operate on can ensure that every teaching assistant is paid fairly for their work, while simultaneously offering the service as cheaply as possible. As explained here as well as in the video at the top of that page, and here in the first page of that lesson, we charge students less than what we pay our teaching assistants for the corresponding feedback, and rely on those who allow some of their credits to expire to make up the difference.

Though we try to mention this when possible in the course material, many go under the impression that we operate as any other school would, in the sense of charging the student a set amount for the service they receive, taking some of that for profit, some of that for paying those who provide the service, and some for the overhead of transaction fees and so forth. It's understandable to an extent, because that's how most services work - but it's also why you don't generally get personalized feedback for anywhere near our prices.

This misunderstanding of how we operate can certainly result in some students feeling inclined to modify the process to better suit how they feel about the work - similarly to your choice not to prioritize your linework for the second half of the challenge. And in turn, that can make the process of providing feedback more complicated and time consuming - demanding more of our limited resources. Each lesson and challenge is designed to limit the kind of issues and mistakes that may need to be discussed, and to allow the focus of the feedback to be on certain things. For example, when it comes to this challenge, which gives us the opportunity to discuss considerations relating to design not covered in the course itself (as a sort of spring board to what they can explore next), having clean linework helps to ensure that I can see the student's intent, and more accurately interpret what they were thinking about, and what they may not have been thinking about, when making their design decisions.

Furthermore, with the optional challenges - this one especially, which does not exist within the general flow of the course but rather as something one can opt to do after completing it - while the considerable volume of work ensures that I am spoiled for choice in terms of which specific design concerns I want to discuss and how many examples I can have to point at, it also serves to give the student to earn their feedback of what is again, an entirely optional exercise.

To put it simply, the less the student is concerned with following our instructions and more on following their own personal compass as they complete the work, the more it demands of us. And of course, we set things up so that we can should we choose to reject homework on that basis, but generally we don't if we can help it. We accept that these misunderstandings come not from a place of malice or entitlement, but from forgetting that our course is unique in what it offers, and how it does so, but I'd be lying if I said expressions of that misunderstanding did not constitute a bitter pill to swallow.

Anyway, getting to your critique, I've picked out a few of your designs to discuss in regards to how one might think about the objects themselves and the context in which they were produced to help inform what kinds of details you might add to further flesh them out. Detail is one of those areas where students often feel uncertain about, because they don't necessarily have a clear idea of how to choose which details to add, and why. This is fortunately something that can be explored in a more systematic fashion by finding questions for ourselves to ask about the objects themselves, the purpose they serve, the way their various components fit together, and the world in which they exist.

One thing I did quite like about many of your designs is that you tend to be mindful of the thickness of the individual components you include in your designs. So for example, if you add a metal plate or a bracket, it's generally not drawn as a single flat shape. You give them just a little bit of thickness on the side, which is something many students neglect. I also found your use of joinery techniques to be quite interesting.

Looking at this one first, I thought the hinge mechanism was very neat, but when asking myself questions about how it was put together, and how it might be maintained (for example, applying oil/lubrication to the hinge when it inevitably starts squeaking), we might consider... well, where does the hinge pin go? How does it actually get inserted into the mechanism in the first place? It's not a problem we have to solve in this design, but if we were looking for additional areas to add detail, adding an exposed hole on the side for the pin to enter, and for oil to be applied, would be an option.

Similarly, if we look at the way in which the sides of the box are secured, we could say that it simply uses an adhesive - as long as the civilization that produced this box is one that would reasonably have access to adhesives, and wouldn't be stuck using rivets and bolts for everything. Alternatively, a little ornate bracket could be used to secure two perpendicular sides together.

None of these things are mandatory, but as we think about these objects less as pretty things to draw, and more as objects that exist inside a world, things that were made and used, it unlocks all kinds of questions we can ask ourselves in order to identify what kind of details would suit the object.

Continuing on, here I noticed that you'd approached the wood grain texture of the slats that make up the box in a fairly random, haphazard fashion. This suggests to me that you weren't using your reference for this aspect. Whether that wood is meant to be rough with little bits sticking out all over, or if it's meant to be a smoother wood grain, adding details randomly will only ever make something look messy. Instead, be sure to pay attention to your reference in order to think about how you might go about simplifying it in order to convey the impression you're after. If there are little bits sticking out, like a real splinter hazard, then those sections would cast shadows - specific shadow shapes, as we discussed in the texture challenge. If it's more of a wood grain, then they tend to be made up of continuous, flowing lines - not short broken ones.

Another point I noticed here, is the missing hinges, leaving a question of how the lid actually opens and closes. Of course, again - you don't have to include them, as the viewer will assume that they're meant to be implied. But hinges are a fairly common element to something like this. I imagine your hinges could be secured to the opposite side of the box as well, although that approach is less common.

A minor point here in regards to the closed bench-style chest you've got beneath it, the keyhole looked somewhat out of place because the rest of it was so ornate, but the keyhole was left as a bare void. This seemed incongruent with the rest of the object, didn't really match the general level of ornamentation, so adding edging around it and securing it with rivets is one option of many.

Lastly, the barrel you drew for number 15 had some basic elements in play, but it definitely left a lot of questions. Firstly, the main body of the barrel, is it made up of a single continuous piece, or is it made up of many individual slats like traditional barrels? If it's a single continuous piece, that's another technological consideration - warping wood in such a fashion isn't easy, and one might consider whether the civilization producing it is capable of that sort of thing.

Of course, the barrel could be made of plastic, with industrial rubber bands or o-rings wrapping around it for... some purpose. Maybe to reduce impact if it falls over? But my assumption was that your intent was to draw a more standard barrel, in which case separating out the slats, adding rivets for each to secure the bands, and even adding some wood grain might not go amiss, as shown here.

I think you're making a lot of good headway with your designs, and most of what I've called out here are suggestions. With design there are many paths we can take, but ultimately what we want to achieve is a cohesive story. Whether it's limited to the object itself (where we would consider whether the whole object was approached similarly, with the keyhole example being one where some parts were fancier than others), or to the greater context in which the object was produced and used. Everything can tell a story about itself. Not everything needs to in every situation, but the more we think about what that story might be, the more tools we have at our disposal.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Jumping right into the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, overall you show a great deal of growth over the course of the set. Your work starts out quite weak to be honest, but through its second half (so 90 to 150) these issues become significantly less prevalent.

The first issue is that for your first two or three pages, you draw cylinders with vanishing points forced to infinity, resulting in side edges that are parallel on the page. This is specifically addressed in these reminders as something to avoid, so that suggests you may not have gone through the instructions as carefully as you could have before starting. You did address this after those few pages though, and I didn't really see the issue come up again.

The second issue is that for a lot of cylinders between 18 and 90, you've got cylinders where the degree shift is inverted, resulting in the ellipse closer to the viewer being wider when it should be narrower as stressed here in the lesson material. This is also explained back in Lesson 1's ellipses section, which is linked from there.

So for example, if we look at 80 on the top right corner of this page, there are two ellipses. The top one is wider, the bottom one is narrower, proportionally speaking. But the top one is also larger in overall scale, and the bottom one is smaller in its overall scale. Compare this to the cylinder below it, number 81. Here the left side ellipse is bigger in its overall scale, but proportionally narrower, and the right side ellipse is proportionally wider, but smaller in its scale.

81 gives us a very clear idea of which end is closer to the viewer, and which end is farther away, because both representations of foreshortening (the shift in scale and the shift in degree) agree with one another. To go back over those briefly, narrower degree is closer, wider degree is farther, larger overall scale is closer, smaller overall scale is farther away. 80 however mixes these up, with each end having an argument for being both closer, and farther away.

Now, if the last third or so was consistently correct throughout, I'd chalk this up to a misunderstanding that was cleared up through practice, but unfortunately while the issue is less common later in the set, it does still come up. Even on the last page here, we can see that 146 and 145 are both incorrect. This means that we will require some revisions in order to confirm your understanding of the concept.

Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, this exercise is really all about helping develop students' understanding of how to construct boxes which feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square, regardless of how the form is oriented in space. We do this not by memorizing every possible configuration, but rather by continuing to develop your subconscious understanding of space through repetition, and through analysis (by way of the line extensions).

Where the box challenge's line extensions helped to develop a stronger sense of how to achieve more consistent convergences in our lines, here we add three more lines for each ellipse: the minor axis, and the two contact point lines. In checking how far off these are from converging towards the box's own vanishing points, we can see how far off we were from having the ellipse represent a circle in 3D space, and in turn how far off we were from having the plane that encloses it from representing a square.

Unfortunately, looking at your work for this section I noticed one critical piece missing. Alongside the 12 line extensions from the box itself (3 sets of lines x 4 lines each), each ellipse would feature 3 of its own extensions. Two "contact point line extensions" which you have consistently included, and which generally seem to be correct, and one minor axis line (per ellipse), which unfortunately are missing.

Without checking all three, you're essentially leaving a large blind spot where mistakes can hide. In other words, the box's proportions can be quite skinny in one dimension (for example, number 229 on this page), and you would never know to correct it, because you wouldn't have seen that the minor axes were not aligning to the box's own edges as shown here. That does sadly mean that you didn't get nearly as much out of the exercise as you could have. Instead of relying on a complete and reliable analysis, you were left with more guesswork (which must have been frustrating and a bit confusing).

In addition to this, I did notice some spots where you mistakenly extended your lines incorrectly. 228 on that same page, as well as 223 on this one.

Ultimately I will need to assign revisions for this exercise as well, to confirm that you understand how to employ it correctly going forwards. You will find your revisions assigned below.

Starting with your form intersections, for the most part you're progressing well. At this stage, we basically expect that students are fairly comfortable with intersections involving flat-surfaced objects, but still run into some issues when dealing with those forms with curved surfaces. That's more or less what we see here. As I've called out here on your first page, there were some spots where you got confused with the intersections involving your spheres.

As shown here, a lot of it comes down to understanding how each individual form's surfaces sit in and are oriented in space, and then identifying the pairs of surfaces that are intersecting at any given point along our intersection line. Of the arrows I drew, the curving ones define the relevant curve of the sphere, whereas the straight lines define the orientation of the corresponding surface of the box. Where we transition from one set of surfaces to another (which here was occurring at the edges of the box - that's essentially what the edge is, a transition from one surface to another), we hit a sharp corner from which we change the trajectory of our intersection. You were doing this correctly in other cases, but it definitely did get less certain when dealing with those curving surfaces. Again - this is pretty normal, and this exercise will come up once more in Lesson 7.

There are three other things I'd recommend:

• Fewer forms, but draw them bigger - this will help reduce the visual complexity of the problem (which you mentioned was especially challenging in the context of the object constructions, so I imagine it's impacting you here as well). Giving each form more space on the page also helps engage your brain's spatial reasoning skills more fully.

• Only draw the side of the intersection that is visible. I know we draw through our forms as it helps us better grasp the way in which these forms relate to one another in 3D space (so that's a case where it's more difficult, but that yields a beneficial result that is worth the additional cognitive resources that are required), but when it comes to the intersections themselves, the trade-off is not as favourable. Focusing only on what's visible will help keep your mind on the task at hand. The one exception to this are cases where the intersection as a whole is an ellipse - there, drawing the full ellipse will help you maintain the correct curvature.

• I noticed that when you were drawing your elliptical intersections, you did not draw through them two full times, as is required for all the ellipses we freehand throughout this course.

Continuing onto your object constructions, these are extremely well done. I get that dealing with all of those subdivisions is extremely taxing, and it takes vastly more time to keep track of all of the different lines (that's all it is - time, and it's a difficulty we've steadily ramped up throughout the course ever since the plotted perspective exercise, which similarly receives complaints of it being hard to keep track of what's what), but you are entirely capable of it, and what you've learned thus far has armed you with the ability to tackle that difficulty. Not happily, not easily, but this course has never been about doing things that are easy. It's been about doing difficult things because of the benefits they impart, and how they reinforce the lessons being taught.

That said, I unfortunately do have to contradict the advice you received, for the simple reason that drawing your subdivisions with different colours would break the point mentioned here about not going back over your linework with a different pen for a "clean-up pass". I want students to constantly be focusing on how the marks they're drawing represent things in 3D space, and when we rely on clean-up passes, it shifts the focus to simply tracing the lines in three dimensions, which can cause its own issues in how you're processing what you're learning.

When it comes time to make your object stand out from the construction, leveraging line weight as explained here aligns better with what we're doing in the course. That is, using it in localized areas to clarify how different forms overlap one another.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Starting with the first 50 of your revisions, you've handled these quite well. For the most part you're focusing on how your lines are meant to converge - there are a few small hiccups, like in number 2 where you've got one of your blue edges going way off from its intended vanishing point (suggesting you lost focus), but that being early in the set is much, much less of a concern.

When you move onto the second half of the set, one impression I'm getting is that you may be intending to keep your sets of edges parallel on the page itself (rather than having them converge towards a far off point, which would still result in some convergence). As you progress through the set, I feel that your intent here shifts more towards pushing and exaggerating the convergence a little more, which is more in line with the instructions (which for this particular issue you can review here in these reminders, specifically the first bullet point).

I'm going to mark this challenge as complete, but do be sure to keep in mind that our vanishing points are only ever forced to infinity (resulting in fully parallel lines on the page) when the set of edges runs perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight, which given the random rotation of our boxes here is not something you can rely on for this challenge.

I would review this video from Lesson 0, as well as the section below it on grinding. We take a very firm stance in this course that students should not be deciding whether or not they ought to redo their work themselves, and instead rely on third party feedback to make that decision for them.

Based on the tip, which matches the example provided in Lesson 0, it's a fineliner, so it's the current type of pen. Can't speak to the size though, based on your photos.