Uncomfortable

You've addressed the issue with the ellipses properly, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Starting with your arrows, you've done a good job of drawing these with a lot of confidence, and I can see that you're mindful of the impacts of foreshortening on both the positive and negative space as you lay these structures out. Just one quick point to note - when applying line weight, try to reduce just how much of the existing linework you're applying it to. It really only needs to be applied to where overlaps between specific lines occur, with the rest being used to blend it back into the existing linework. Cases like this definitely apply it to far more of the existing linework than is necessary, which in turn can cause you to execute it more hesitantly and uncertainly than if it were a more appropriately limited scope.

Looking at your sausages with contour lines, nice work sticking with the characteristics of simple sausages with minimal discrepancies. You've also generally approached drawing your contour liens with a lot of confidence, which helps to maintain even shapes and appropriate curvatures, even as you manage to keep them snug within the silhouettes of the sausage forms. That said, note that if you do make mistakes and mess things up, you should not attempt to correct or redraw them - doing so can trick the brain into thinking that the issue that caused the mistake has been addressed, making it no more likely that we'd invest additional time when engaging with a similar problem in the future. Instead, allowing such mistakes to stand for themselves will ultimately provide for more educational value.

Lastly, I can see that your choice in your contour lines' degrees clearly shows an understanding of how they shift as we move along the length of a given sausage form, and how the orientation of each cross-section also influences the degree with which it is defined on the page. Well done.

Continuing onto the texture section, one thing to keep in mind is that the concepts we introduce relating to texture rely on skills our students generally don't have right now - because they're the skills this entire course is designed to develop. That is, spatial reasoning. Understanding how the textural forms sit on a given surface, and how they relate to the surfaces around them (which is necessary to design the shadow they would cast) is a matter of understanding 3D spatial relationships. The reason we introduce it here is to provide context and direction for what we'll explore later - similarly to the rotated boxes/organic perspective boxes in Lesson 1 introducing a problem we engage with more thoroughly in the box challenge. Ultimately my concern right now is just how closely you're adhering to the underlying steps and procedure we prescribe (especially those in these reminders).

I'm very pleased to see that not only have you made extensive use of this two step methodology of first outlining/designing your intended shadow shapes before filling them in, you've also done a great job of really leaning into the fact that the textural marks we put down on the page represent cast shadows in your texture analyses. In your dissections you're more prone to drawing directly from observation without putting as much time/focus towards the "understanding" step as defined in the reminders linked above, resulting in more drawing directly from observation, but that is pretty normal for students at this stage - but it is notable that you've engaged as much as you have with the cast shadows in the first exercise.

Just be sure that as you continue to engage with textural problems throughout this course, that you strive to stick to this two step methodology to the exclusion of all others, helping to think about the marks you put down on the page as cast shadows, rather than merely a matter of copying over the dark areas you see in your references. While it's true that there are certainly going to be shadows that are cast that are so small they can't reasonably be executed using our two step methodology, in such cases it's better to actually leave them out, for the following reasons:

• A designed shape, despite not being something we can create quite as small as a one-off stroke, tapers in a more nuanced, delicate fashion, whereas a one-off stroke is more likely to end in a manner that feels more sudden. Thus, the shapes lean better into our goal of creating a gradient that transitions from black to white (and ultimately we have to pick a point for the shadows to drop off altogether anyway, so pushing a little farther with singular strokes isn't strictly necessary).

• Drawing in one-off strokes allows us to lean more into drawing directly from observation (as opposed to observing, understanding the forms that we see as they exist in 3D space, then creating shadows based on that understanding), which can be very tempting as it can allow us to create more visually pleasing things without all of the extra baggage of thinking in 3D. But of course, 3D spatial reasoning is the purpose of this course.

Anyway, as it stands your work here is coming along quite well, and you're demonstrating well developing observational skills throughout.

Moving onto the form intersections, this exercise serves two main purposes:

• Similarly to the textures, it introduces the problem of the intersection lines themselves, which students are not expected to understand how to apply successfully, but rather just make an attempt at - this will continue to be developed from lessons 3-7, and this exercise will return in the homework in lessons 6 and 7 for additional analysis, and advice where it is deemed to be necessary). Insofar as this is concerned, the way in which you're drawing your intersection lines generally shows that you're thinking about how these forms relate to one another in 3D space. That said, I'd advise you to avoid drawing your intersections with any more line weight than the rest of your linework (and if you do add line weight, stick to what's explained here in Lesson 1, to avoid overdoing it or applying it in an inconsistent manner, and aside from cases where the intersection itself would be an ellipse (in which case drawing the whole ellipse can help us to maintain the appropriate curvature), only draw the visible portion of the intersection as shown in the demonstrations. Though we do encourage students to "draw through" their forms, this provides a considerable benefit to their understanding of how those forms sit in space, while only minimally increasing the complexity of the task. Drawing through your intersections however provides minimal benefit while greatly increasing the complexity of the task, often to the point of distraction, so it is not particularly helpful.

• The other, far more important use of this exercise (at least in the context of this stage in the course) is that it is essentially a combination of everything we've introduced thus far. The principles of linework, the use of the ghosting method, the concepts surrounding ellipses along with their axes/degrees, perspective, foreshortening, convergence, the Y method, and so forth - all of it is present in this exercise. Where we've already confirmed your general grasp of these concepts in isolation in previous exercises, it is in presenting it all together that can really challenge a student's patience and discipline, and so it allows us to catch any issues that might interfere with their ability to continue forward as meaningfully as we intend.

As to this latter point, your work is... not great. It's not at all that you don't have the clear capacity to do it well, but rather it seems that in the face of an exercise that presents a complicated, confusing, and potentially somewhat overwhelming problem (the intersections themselves), you largely threw aside all of the strategies and techniques we've introduced in terms of how to execute individual marks, how to construct forms, and so forth. As such, your work here has been quite sloppy and haphazard.

In effect, what you've shown here is that though you certainly know how to use those strategies, you ended up relying more on your subconscious autopilot to take care of the execution of your lines and the construction of your forms. Instead, throughout this entire course, you need to be making conscious and active decisions that drive every action you take. The goal of what we're doing in this course is to develop that subconscious autopilot so it can perform more reliably for you when drawing outside of this course, freeing your conscious mind's more limited cognitive resources to be focused on the creative decisions of composition, narrative, design, and so forth - but in all the work you do throughout this course, you must be as intentional as you can be, as that is how we achieve the goal of a more reliable autopilot. If on the other hand we attempt to train our autopilot by relying on that autopilot, things tend to get messy.

In the revisions that are assigned for this exercise, take care to:

• Apply the ghosting method in its entirety for all of your linework - I can see elements of it used here and there, frequently in an incomplete manner (so not necessarily applying every aspect of each individual stage of the approach), but you need to be much more strict in requiring yourself to apply it in its entirety.

• Apply the Y method's negotiation of corners, as introduced at the end of Lesson 1 and practiced throughout the box challenge, to ensure that you are doing your best to construct solid boxes with appropriate convergences.

• Construct your cylinders and cones around central minor axis lines as introduced here in the instructions.

• Do not redraw or correct mistakes. Mistakes should be allowed to stand for themselves. When we correct them, we trick the brain into thinking that the issue that caused the mistake has been addressed, making it no more likely that we'll invest more time when engaging with similar problems in the future.

Lastly, your organic intersections are off to a good start, and the way you're drawing them shows that you're considering how they drape over one another under the influence of gravity. That said, I do have a few points to call to your attention:

• Don't attempt to sneak forms in underneath the pile - always add new forms on top. Reason being, you can't alter the forms above to account for the sudden inclusion of a mass underneath, and so you're walking into a situation that you won't be able to do correctly.

• In a related note to the previous point, do not attempt to cut into your sausages' volumes as we see here and here.

• Do not go back over your linework to add additional line weight as you've done here. As discussed in a few points in this feedback, line weight should be applied according to the considerations introduced here in Lesson 1. In this exercise, sometimes students feel that because the cast shadows get quite heavy that they want to "blend" that aesthetic quality in with the rest of the line weight, and use line weight to achieve that - but this manner of driving the choices and the way in which we use certain tools based on a desired aesthetic outcome inherently will result in the specific considerations of how and where those tools should be employed being ignored in favour of the desired result. Instead, you need to allow those tools - line weight, cast shadows, etc. - to serve their own individual purposes, so they can do that most effectively.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I do want to give you another opportunity to tackle the form intersections bringing to bear all of the tools and strategies that have been introduced to you, so you'll find some additional pages of that exercise assigned below.

Starting with your arrows, you're doing a pretty good job of maintaining the confidence of your linework while also taking into consideration how foreshortening impacts both the positive and negative space of these structures. I'm quite pleased to see that you're playing a great deal with cases that lead to a lot of overlap. That said, when you do this, you also have a greater tendency to maintain similar sized gaps between the zigzagging sections, or even to have the farther ends increase the size of their gaps - so keep reminding yourself to let them compress more and more as we look farther back in space.

Looking at your sausages with contour lines, I can see that you're generally keeping the characteristics of simple sausages in mind, although be sure to keep striving for these when practicing this exercise in the future to continue help reducing the discrepancies that come up, like this case where both ends are more stretched out, and the midsection widens, resulting in more of a cigar shape.

Your contour lines are generally drawn quite well, maintaining confidence so as to achieve smooth, consistent shapes and curvatures. The degrees you're choosing also reflect an awareness of how they shift according to the orientation of each ellipse in space relative to the direction the viewer is looking, but I did notice some cases where your contour lines would suddenly get narrower in the midsection, then widen again, as we see in these two. While there are situations where due to a more dramatic bend in the sausage, our contour lines may get narrower, then invert their direction and widen again (this widening is more like the degree becoming negative), this is different from the degree suddenly getting wider again without inverting. Furthermore, those examples feature no significant bend anyway, so they really should just be getting steadily wider as we move away from the viewer as discussed here.

Lastly, in most cases you've neglected to add an ellipse to the ends of your sausages as discussed here. In the couple of places where you did, you did not draw through those ellipses two full times, as is required for all of the ellipses we freehand throughout this course. So, be sure to keep those in mind and apply both considerations when practicing this exercise in the future.

Continuing onto the texture section, one thing to keep in mind is that the concepts we introduce relating to texture rely on skills our students generally don't have right now - because they're the skills this entire course is designed to develop. That is, spatial reasoning. Understanding how the textural forms sit on a given surface, and how they relate to the surfaces around them (which is necessary to design the shadow they would cast) is a matter of understanding 3D spatial relationships. The reason we introduce it here is to provide context and direction for what we'll explore later - similarly to the rotated boxes/organic perspective boxes in Lesson 1 introducing a problem we engage with more thoroughly in the box challenge. Ultimately my concern right now is just how closely you're adhering to the underlying steps and procedure we prescribe (especially those in these reminders).

I'm very pleased to see that you've made extensive use of this two step methodology of first outlining/designing your intended shadow shapes, then filling them in, and I think you did a particularly good job of this with the rattlesnake scale texture in your texture analyses. While it is entirely normal for students to make use of other approaches to markmaking (especially those that provide less precise control over the shape of those resulting marks, and in turn lean harder into drawing directly from observation without also accounting for the "understanding" phase discussed in the reminders linked above), you've honestly done a phenomenal job of holding to this core principle even throughout the dissections exercise.

Although we really don't expect it at all at this stage, you are demonstrating a clear and thorough grasp of the concept of implicit markmaking, while also demonstrating strong observational skills - so as far as this section is concerned, you're doing great.

Moving onto the form intersections, this exercise serves two main purposes:

• Similarly to the textures, it introduces the problem of the intersection lines themselves, which students are not expected to understand how to apply successfully, but rather just make an attempt at - this will continue to be developed from lessons 3-7, and this exercise will return in the homework in lessons 6 and 7 for additional analysis, and advice where it is deemed to be necessary). Insofar as this is concerned, the way in which you're approaching your intersection lines clearly shows that you're thinking about how these forms relate to one another in 3D space. Just be sure not to arbitrarily draw those intersection lines with a heavier weight than everything else - stick to what's discussed here in Lesson 1 when it comes to how and where to employ additional line weight, so as to avoid being inconsistent or overly aggressive in its use.

• The other, far more important use of this exercise (at least in the context of this stage in the course) is that it is essentially a combination of everything we've introduced thus far. The principles of linework, the use of the ghosting method, the concepts surrounding ellipses along with their axes/degrees, perspective, foreshortening, convergence, the Y method, and so forth - all of it is present in this exercise. Where we've already confirmed your general grasp of these concepts in isolation in previous exercises, it is in presenting it all together that can really challenge a student's patience and discipline, and so it allows us to catch any issues that might interfere with their ability to continue forward as meaningfully as we intend.

As to the latter point, by and large I'm quite pleased with how you've approached this work, as I can see that you've taken a great deal of care and exhibited quite a bit of patience in applying the various strategies and techniques we've introduced wherever they might serve to help you better execute upon your intent. The only point of advice I wanted to offer is that when drawing your cylinders, don't default to having the side edges run parallel one the page to one another (which admittedly you only did a couple of times by my count, so it may not even have been intentional - but it's still worth discussing). The edges would only be parallel on the page in the specific circumstance where the intent is to have the cylinder run perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight, as those are the circumstances that would result in the side edges' VP being pushed to infinity (as discussed in Lesson 1). If this is not your intent - and in this exercise, where we're rotating our forms arbitrarily in space, it wouldn't be - be sure to include some minimal amount of visible convergence.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along well, and the way that they've been drawn shows that you're considering how they drape over one another under the influence of gravity. Your use of cast shadows is also progressing nicely.

As a whole your work throughout this set is quite solid. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Jumping right in with your arrows, nice work leaning into executing your linework with confidence, which helps a great deal in pushing the sense of fluidity with which the arrows move through space. I'm pleased to see that you're taking into consideration how foreshortening impacts the positive space of your arrows, in terms of having the structures get larger as they come closer to the viewer, although as you practice this exercise in the future, be sure to emphasize the impact of foreshortening on the negative space, ensuring that the gaps between the zigzagging sections compress more and more as we look farther back.

Looking at your sausages with contour lines, you are demonstrating an awareness of the characteristics of simple sausages, although be sure to keep emphasizing this as you engage with this exercise in the future, so as to continue reducing the discrepancies (like ends being more stretched out, ends of different sizes, and so forth). I'm already seeing improvement between the first and second pages of this exercise though, so you're on the right track.

Your contour lines are drawn well - by emphasizing the confidence with which you draw them, you're leaning into more even shapes and curvatures. That said, you are starting to brush up against drawing through your ellipses a bit too much - aim to reduce them to two full turns of the ellipses. No less than that, of course, but as we start to push past 3 turns we risk losing track of the ellipse we're trying to draw.

Lastly, when it comes to the ellipses placed on the tips of our sausages (which go on the ends of sausages that are intended to be turned towards the viewer as discussed here), I did notice a number of spots where you placed them on tips which the preceding contour curves tell us are intended to be turned away. This issue was present on this sausage, this one, and this one, although it appears to me upon closer inspection that rather than the issue being that the ellipse is on the wrong end, it seems that you may instead have reversed the direction of your contour curves. I say this because if we assume the contour curves' directions are correct, then not only would the ellipse be on the wrong end, but the gradual shift in degree from one contour line to the next would also be inverted, whereas if the direction of the contour curves were flipped, everything would be in order.

Continuing onto the texture section, one thing to keep in mind is that the concepts we introduce relating to texture rely on skills our students generally don't have right now - because they're the skills this entire course is designed to develop. That is, spatial reasoning. Understanding how the textural forms sit on a given surface, and how they relate to the surfaces around them (which is necessary to design the shadow they would cast) is a matter of understanding 3D spatial relationships. The reason we introduce it here is to provide context and direction for what we'll explore later - similarly to the rotated boxes/organic perspective boxes in Lesson 1 introducing a problem we engage with more thoroughly in the box challenge. Ultimately my concern right now is just how closely you're adhering to the underlying steps and procedure we prescribe (especially those in these reminders).

I can see that you have made clear use of this two step methodology of first outlining/designing the intended shape of your cast shadows, before then filling them in - although it is an approach you use in conjunction with others (like drawing your textural marks stroke by stroke), which don't provide as much precise control over the shape of the resulting mark, and tends to lean more into drawing directly from what we see, rather than ensuring that we also invest time into the "understanding" step described in the reminders above. At this stage however, that is pretty normal and largely expected. Particularly in the dissections, students focus much more on the observational side of things, and so that's where they focus the majority of their attention, and as it stands your observational skills are developing nicely. Just be sure that as you engage with textural problems throughout the rest of this course, that you remember to consider how the marks you put down are the shadows being cast by the forms you've identified, and that you employ the two step methodology to the exclusion of all others when drawing them.

Moving onto the form intersections, this exercise serves two main purposes:

• Similarly to the textures, it introduces the problem of the intersection lines themselves, which students are not expected to understand how to apply successfully, but rather just make an attempt at - this will continue to be developed from lessons 3-7, and this exercise will return in the homework in lessons 6 and 7 for additional analysis, and advice where it is deemed to be necessary). The manner in which you're drawing your intersection lines does show that you're thinking about how these forms relate to one another in 3D space - although given that you tend to draw those intersection lines as being innately heavier in line weight than the rest of your linework, note that you should be continuing to draw them in the same manner you draw any other linework. If you wish to add line weight, be sure to stick to the considerations discussed here in Lesson 1.

• The other, far more important use of this exercise (at least in the context of this stage in the course) is that it is essentially a combination of everything we've introduced thus far. The principles of linework, the use of the ghosting method, the concepts surrounding ellipses along with their axes/degrees, perspective, foreshortening, convergence, the Y method, and so forth - all of it is present in this exercise. Where we've already confirmed your general grasp of these concepts in isolation in previous exercises, it is in presenting it all together that can really challenge a student's patience and discipline, and so it allows us to catch any issues that might interfere with their ability to continue forward as meaningfully as we intend.

As to this latter point, the main shortcoming is that you appear to be skipping over the use of the Y method's negotiation of corners, as introduced in the video here and here in the written material, and as used throughout the box challenge. Going forward, be sure to make use of any and all strategies that may help you better execute upon your intent. Additionally, when drawing your cylinders, don't default to having the side edges run parallel one the page to one another. This would only occur in the specific circumstance where the intent is to have the cylinder run perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight, as those are the circumstances that would result in the side edges' VP being pushed to infinity (as discussed in Lesson 1). If this is not your intent - and in this exercise, where we're rotating our forms arbitrarily in space, it wouldn't be - be sure to include some minimal amount of visible convergence.

Lastly, your organic intersections are off to a good start, and you're demonstrating consideration to how the sausages drape over one another under the influence of gravity. That said, do not cut your forms off where they are overlapped/hidden by others - draw them all in their entirety, being sure to take into consideration how that other end is meant to behave. Factoring it in will help you better consider how the sausage as a whole drapes in its entirety, as shown here, rather than just focusing on the part that is visible in the particular drawing.

You can continue to address the issues I've called out as you integrate these exercises into your regular warmups. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

The factor that is being somewhat overlooked here is the alignment of the contact points, which in the scenario you've laid out should be perpendicular to the horizon line, and parallel with the vertical lines of your box. By virtue of using an ellipse guide, you have guaranteed degrees for your ellipses, but that does not necessarily mean that their scale is ideal for the specific box/planes you've already laid out on your page, such that they'd fit within them snugly. So, as you try and fit them within the plane, you're introducing additional inaccuracies which throw things off - not by margins that are so significant as to undermine our constructions, but enough to throw some wrenches into the mix when scrutinizing these approaches.

Your question here appears to be more than anything, how do you know which degree is appropriate - the answer to that is that it's the alignment of those vertical contact points. If the degree is a bit too wide or a bit too narrow, it'll cause this alignment to slant one way or the other, instead of running perpendicular to the box's verticals. If we were able to use a perfect ellipse that fit snugly into each plane, at the given degrees, and aligned to the appropriate vanishing points, you'll find here that those contact points would not be aligned vertically in such a manner.

Looking at your second example with the 65/25 degree ellipses, if we scale the ellipses to fit the planes more appropriately as shown here, the left plane gets shorter in order to achieve that, and the contact point alignments are off - not by a huge margin, but still a notable one, particularly on the left. This could be accounted for by adjusting your vanishing points, but that's largely the point - the positioning of a vanishing point tells us that the edges it governs are aligned at a certain angle relative to the direction the viewer is looking, and so in order to get an ellipse of a different degree to work in place of another, the positioning of the VP must change to compensate for the new orientation your new ellipse implies.

Please refrain from leaving replies that are not remotely relevant to the post in question.

Starting with your arrows, you've done a good job first and foremost of ensuring that your linework's been executed with confidence, which helps to push the sense of fluidity with which they move through space. I can also see that you're taking into consideration how foreshortening impacts the positive space, and to a lesser degree the negative space, of your arrow structures, but these are both areas that will benefit from more attention when engaging in this exercise in the future, both in emphasizing how quickly the gaps between the zigzagging sections compress as we look farther back, and in ensuring that the size differential across the length of a given arrow is significant. More generally speaking, with these exercises being too subtle can risk that we become less attentive to these characteristics going forward, so by exaggerating them we can ensure that they are front and center in our minds.

As a side note, watch out for where you're placing your hatching - I can see at least a few cases where you've placed the hatching such that the smaller end of the arrow's ribbon is positioned closest to the viewer, and the larger end is positioned farther away, as we see here.

Looking at your sausages with contour lines, I can see you've been fairly mindful of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages. With additional practice, so long as you keep these properties in mind as your goal when engaging in this exercise in the future, the various discrepancies (ends being of different sizes, or stretched out rather than circular in shape, or widening through the midsection) will continue to diminish.

When it comes to the degree of the contour lines themselves, overall it appears that you may be aiming more to keep the degree of your contour lines consistent, rather than defaulting to a natural shift from narrower where closer to the viewer, and wider where the contour lines sit further away along the sausage's length as discussed here, or factoring in the bending of the sausage as discussed here. This could also be a factor of that degree shifting being more subtle in some cases, but more broadly these are concepts you'll want to review (they're also discussed at length in the video for this exercise) so you can lean into them more meaningfully when practicing this exercise again later.

Lastly, don't forget that you are required to draw through all of your freehanded ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, including the smaller ones at the tips.

Continuing onto the texture section, one thing to keep in mind is that the concepts we introduce relating to texture rely on skills our students generally don't have right now - because they're the skills this entire course is designed to develop. That is, spatial reasoning. Understanding how the textural forms sit on a given surface, and how they relate to the surfaces around them (which is necessary to design the shadow they would cast) is a matter of understanding 3D spatial relationships. The reason we introduce it here is to provide context and direction for what we'll explore later - similarly to the rotated boxes/organic perspective boxes in Lesson 1 introducing a problem we engage with more thoroughly in the box challenge. Ultimately my concern right now is just how closely you're adhering to the underlying steps and procedure we prescribe (especially those in these reminders).

I can see that you're making some use of this two step methodology of first outlining/designing, then filling in, your intended shadow shapes, albeit to varying degrees. There are certainly noticeable cases (for example here towards the sparser end of your crumpled paper texture analysis where it's unclear whether you're starting by outlining an intended shape, then perhaps being a bit rushed in filling it in (resulting in that intended shape's edges being broken as you attempt to fill it in), or whether you simply were "painting" in the shape stroke by stroke directly. It is worth keeping in mind that putting strokes down one by one without a clearly defined shape to fill in will provide you with considerably less precise control over the resulting shadow shape.

To that end, cast shadows and the specific shapes they take, are at the heart of the implicit markmaking we're focusing on applying throughout this course, because it's that shape that conveys to the viewer the relationship in 3D space between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it. While shadows cast by different forms will certainly end up merging together with one another to create larger, more complex compound shadow shapes, each individual piece added to the whole is still going to be designed based on our understanding of how each textural form relates to its surroundings. It is for this reason that you'll want to avoid simply looking for darker areas in your references and transferring them over into your drawing. As explained in the reminders linked above, we observe our reference to identify how a given textural form relates to its surroundings, then we use that information to decide how to design an appropriate shadow.

When we simply look for darker areas, we don't necessarily consider what that tells us about the forms that are present, and instead only allows us to focus on the visual end result. A good example of this is this last row in your texture analyses, where instead of the black representing actual cast shadows, it appears to have simply filled in the void space in between them.

All told it is entirely normal for students to focus much more on the observational side of things at this stage however, and throughout your dissections I do see that there are numerous examples of where you're trying to consider the shadows the textural forms would cast. So as far as this is concerned, you're progressing fine - just be sure that as you continue to engage with textural problems throughout this course, that you keep the focus on drawing the shadows being cast, not simply what it is you observe, and that you do so using the two step methodology to the exclusion of all others. While it's true that there are certainly going to be shadows that are cast that are so small they can't reasonably be executed using our two step methodology, in such cases it's better to actually leave them out, for the following reasons:

• A designed shape, despite not being something we can create quite as small as a one-off stroke, tapers in a more nuanced, delicate fashion, whereas a one-off stroke is more likely to end in a manner that feels more sudden. Thus, the shapes lean better into our goal of creating a gradient that transitions from black to white (and ultimately we have to pick a point for the shadows to drop off altogether anyway, so pushing a little farther with singular strokes isn't strictly necessary).

• Drawing in one-off strokes allows us to lean more into drawing directly from observation (as opposed to observing, understanding the forms that we see as they exist in 3D space, then creating shadows based on that understanding), which can be very tempting as it can allow us to create more visually pleasing things without all of the extra baggage of thinking in 3D. But of course, 3D spatial reasoning is the purpose of this course.

Moving onto the form intersections, this exercise serves two main purposes:

• Similarly to the textures, it introduces the problem of the intersection lines themselves, which students are not expected to understand how to apply successfully, but rather just make an attempt at - this will continue to be developed from lessons 3-7, and this exercise will return in the homework in lessons 6 and 7 for additional analysis, and advice where it is deemed to be necessary). As it stands, the way in which you're drawing your intersections shows that you're considering how the forms relate to one another in 3D space, which is all we're looking for at this stage. That said, don't draw these in a different colour, as this can create the erroneous impression that they are more of an analysis after-the-fact, like the line extensions from the box challenge. Instead, these intersection lines define real edges that exist between the forms, where we go from following one surface to a surface oriented in a different direction.

• The other, far more important use of this exercise (at least in the context of this stage in the course) is that it is essentially a combination of everything we've introduced thus far. The principles of linework, the use of the ghosting method, the concepts surrounding ellipses along with their axes/degrees, perspective, foreshortening, convergence, the Y method, and so forth - all of it is present in this exercise. Where we've already confirmed your general grasp of these concepts in isolation in previous exercises, it is in presenting it all together that can really challenge a student's patience and discipline, and so it allows us to catch any issues that might interfere with their ability to continue forward as meaningfully as we intend.

As to the latter point, there are a couple points I want to call to your attention:

• If you make a mistake, do not attempt to correct or redraw it. Allow your mistakes to stand for themselves. When we correct them, we can end up tricking our brains into thinking that the cause of the issue was addressed, making it no more likely that we'll take additional time to consider how to approach a similar problem in the future. So in situations like this, this, and this, we should only see one attempt at executing the given mark. Similarly, if you realize after the fact that the intersection you drew was incorrect, do not scratch them out as you did here.

• The use of line weight within the scope of this course should stick to what's described here in Lesson 1 - specifically, it should be applied only to the limited localized area where an overlap between specific lines needs to be clarified, and it should be kept very subtle, like a whisper to the viewer's subconscious.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along well - the way in which you're drawing the sausages shows that you're thinking about how these forms drape over one another under the influence of gravity. Just be careful not to conflate cast shadow with line weight, and remember that they each abide by their own separate rules and purposes. When you start to blend them together because they seem visually similar (for example, deciding to be really heavy with your line weight and apply it in places that don't stick subtly clarifying specific line overlaps, so as to better aesthetically match with the more substantial weight of your cast shadows), you end up making decisions based on the visual result you're after - and when it's the desired result that makes the shots, all other rules (including those necessary to make our drawings feel solid and three dimensional) become that much easier to ignore.

Instead, don't worry about the result you're creating - especially not when engaging in exercises. Rather, focus on how you're applying each tool and strategy based on its own individual considerations, and build your way up to the result that seeks to create.

Anyway, all in all your work throughout this lesson is coming along well, and the points I've called to your attention can continue to be addressed as you incorporate these exercises into your regular warmup rotation. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Your work here is looking quite a bit improved, and largely addresses the concerns I'd pointed out before. Just one thing - remember that you are required to draw through all of your freehanded ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, even the small ones, throughout this course.

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

Overall your work here is moving in the right direction, but there are a couple points I want to call to your attention:

For your sausages with contour curves, I noted in my previous feedback that you were at times placing ellipses on ends of your sausages which the preceding contour curves told us were turned away from the viewer. This issue is still present in your work, specifically in the cases where you arrange your contour curves so as to describe the sausage in question as having both of its ends turned away from the viewer, as we see here here, and here. In both of these cases, no ellipse should be drawn - so it seems to me that you may be assuming that an ellipse should be present on every sausage, and when there's no obvious end that's turned towards the viewer, you place it on a random one.

As noted in this section from the lesson material:

By adding such ellipses on any tips we intend to turn towards the viewer (which can be either end, both, or neither depending on our intent for how that sausage is sitting in space), we can provide the viewer with a cue that helps them better understand what they're looking at.

It is important that when you take any action, that you do so based on a clear choice or decision being made - something that you can explain if questioned on it, rather than a choice made randomly. In this case, if there was a logical reason that caused you to choose those spots for the ellipse, then explaining why that is would help me identify what the source of the misunderstanding is, but if it's simply random or added based on a gut feeling, then that doesn't provide a thread for us to follow to ultimately resolve the issue.

The other point I noticed - although this is more minor - is that throughout the form intersections, which were largely done pretty decently, I noticed that sometimes you execute your linework with a lot of confidence, resulting in a pretty smooth, consistent stroke (as we see here), and sometimes your linework wobbles - not significantly, but with a high frequency within a very small margin of error as we see here, and sometimes it wobbles even more noticeably as we see here.

Ultimately a smooth, confident execution is prioritized in our principles of markmaking from Lesson 1 because rather than being a question of skill (in the sense that it'll improve with practice), that smoothness comes from the choice in the moment to commit to that motion, and to set aside concerns about accuracy. In other words, if we truly don't care about making an accurate stroke that meets certain criteria, we can simply make a slash across a page as quickly as possible, and it'll come out smoothly every time. Not necessarily straight, not necessarily between any specific points that you'd intended, but it will be smooth - or at least it should be.

As such, there's a couple reasons that the linework may be wobbling:

• The most common and most obvious reason is that you're prioritizing accuracy over confidence, and allowing the worries about not having your line fall between your two plotted points to influence how you execute the mark. We've talked about this already, but it's important to keep it in mind as being the most likely cause. But there are other causes to consider as well.

• Another common reason comes up when students aren't rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach, which is a key part of the "planning" phase of the ghosting method. As a result, a mark in one direction may come out confident and smooth, due to it being more closely aligned with what you find comfortable, whereas a line in another direction may come out more wobbly due to the motion it requires of your arm. Always rotate your page to find a comfortable angle of approach throughout this course.

• There is however a third factor which can occur, which has nothing to do with how you're approaching making your marks, and can create those "high frequency" wobbles in an otherwise smooth, consistent mark. If you're drawing with just a single sheet of paper directly on the tabletop, that tabletop's own texture, or even just its hard, unyielding nature, can cause the marks we draw in such a situation to wobble in very small but frequent ways. The solution is to always draw on a small stack of pages, which provides a softer texture and can be much more pleasant. The extra pages works as a cushion, eliminating any texture from the tabletop, and allowing your pen to glide more easily.

Anyway! Insofar as the form intersections are concerned, I wanted to provide that advice so you could keep it in mind going forward, but I am concerned about the issue I called out regarding your sausages with contour curves, and would like to see one more page of those.

Your work here is definitely more in line with what we're looking for at this stage, and shows that you're thinking about how these forms relate to one another in 3D space. That said, in terms of what you said about playing around with 3D models - doing so is fine (as long as you don't attempt to draw the intersections as you see them there, which would shift the focus from this being a spatial exercise to one engaging your observational skills instead). That said, keep in mind that as I noted in my previous feedback, the goal here (right now) isn't for you to get the intersections right, it's to actually think about how those forms relate to one another as they sit in 3D space.

This in turn pushes students to continue to think about such spatial relationships when engaging in the constructional drawing exercises we do from lessons 3-7, which in turn develops their spatial reasoning skills and is what helps you identify the intersections more correctly. So in effect, doing the form intersections here and as part of your regular warmup rotation will help keep what you do in the constructional drawing exercises that follow in line with the course's goals, which in turn will help improve the results you achieve with this exercise in particular.

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