Uncomfortable

Everything appears to be in order! And the same feedback I provided for your texture section does still apply here. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Edit: I just saw that you submitted your lesson 2 work again, before I got around to addressing your revisions. That was not necessary, and so you'll want to cancel that submission so you can get your credit back.

Normally if the issue was as you described it, I'd recommend continuing forward from where you left off - but there are more issues than what you pointed out. Most notably, you are only extending one line per set (resulting in 3 lines per box) - every line on each box should be extended, giving you 4 extensions per set, totalling to 12 per box. You will definitely want to review the instructions for this exercise.

Additionally, when applying the ghosting method, you are still allowing yourself to hesitate on the execution phase, resulting in wobbly lines. This doesn't seem to have been present in your Lesson 1 work, suggesting that your approach has changed, and that you will definitely want to review the material explaining how the Ghosting Method works - particularly focusing on the fact that when you hit the execution phase, you must choose to execute the marks confidently, setting aside your fears of the mark being inaccurate. Per our principles of markmaking, accuracy is a secondary priority (and is also something that improves with practice). Confidence - maintaining a consistent trajectory in your stroke - is our first priority, takes precedence over accuracy, and is the result of the choice of committing to the stroke we've prepared, which also means accepting that your mark may not go where you want it to.

You also appear to be going back over some marks multiple times, perhaps to correct them. Mistakes should be allowed to stand for themselves, as this will have a greater impact on what you learn from it, whereas correcting mistakes can trick the brain into feeling as though the issue has been resolved and addressed, making it less likely that you'll actually adjust your approach when facing the same problem in the future.

As a whole, because there are numerous issues beyond the one you pointed out, I do think that starting over will be best, especially since you're still fairly early on in the challenge. You will also want to take much more care in how you're engaging with the instructions, and ensure that when you are practicing the exercises from preceding lessons/challenges going forward as part of your warmups, that you aren't misrememebring their instructions (meaning, review those instructions periodically).

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, while your linework is coming along reasonably well, I did immediately notice that the vast majority of your cylinders appear to all fall within a fairly shallow range of foreshortening, with some (like those on this page) even going as far as to appear as though the intent was to keep their side edges parallel on the page (though this, in the case of 102, resulted in edges that diverged as we move back along the cylinder's length). This suggests to me that you may have missed, or not taken entirely to heart, the reminders highlighted here in the lesson material which stress the importance of varying your rates of foreshortening from shallow/gradual to dramatic/rapid, and further goes to explain why having your cylinders' side edges parallel on the page would be incorrect for this exercise.

Aside from that - though it is a notable lapse that will have to be addressed - you're doing a good job of being fastidious in checking the alignment of your ellipses, and catching both more obvious discrepancies, as well as those that can be easily missed.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, there are unfortunately some notable issues here as well. I'll point out what they are, but first I'd like to give you some additional context in regards to this exercise. 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.

Ultimately the issues I'm noticing have to do with your line extensions, which as explained above, play a deeply important role in this exercise. To start, I noticed that in the earlier part of this exercise, you frequently had cases where some of your sets of lines appeared to be extended in the wrong direction. For example, on this page the purple lines for 172, 173, 174, and 175 are all pointed in the wrong direction. Note that as discussed in the box challenge, you can identify the correct direction for a box's line extensions by working off the initial Y used to construct the box.

This admittedly would be a pretty significant concern however, given how far into the course we are, but you do appear to have caught onto the issue and corrected it yourself, with the last instances that I can find being on this page in the 180s, so rather than there being an underlying misunderstanding, it's more likely that you may simply not have given yourself as much time to think through these problems as you could have.

The other critical issue in how the line extensions were applied is that when it comes to the lengthwise direction of our cylinders, where the minor axis lines of both ellipses should be extended back along with the box's lines, you appear to have gone about this differently. Instead of extending your ellipses' minor axes, you appear to have extended the cylinders' side edges, which is not included in the instructions. As a result, though you had the correct number of line extensions (6 in each direction), two were unfortunately not relevant to the exercise.

Ultimately the minor axis lines, though not the stars of the show (the stars would the contact point lines, whose convergences with the boxes' edges tell us how far off the planes enclosing the ellipses' proportions are from being square in 3D space), they do still play an important role. Specifically, they allow us to understand when the contact point lines should be trusted, and how much weight to give them in assessing those proportions.

For example, a situation where the contact point lines are way off, but the minor axis line is correct, tells us that the proportions are way off. One where the contact point lines are correct, but the minor axis line is way off, would similarly tell us that the proportions are way off, but wouldn't give us a clear idea of how to address it. And a situation where the contact point lines are way off, and the minor axis line is way off, simply has no valuable information to provide one way or the other, and thus shouldn't be given much credence. Without the minor axis line to tell us how much to trust the other line extensions, we're left assuming that our contact point lines are always entirely truthful - which doesn't ruin the exercise altogether, but it does diminish its effectiveness quite a bit.

All in all, there's a lot here you've done well (your linework in the cylinders in boxes is especially well done), but I do still have to confirm that you understand how to apply these exercises correctly, and so you will find some revisions assigned below.

In regards to the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, your work is considerably improved. You're varying your rates of foreshortening well, and also avoiding cases where the side edges are drawn as parallel on the page. I did notice that for the first half of your cylinders or so, you appeared not to draw your side edges with the ghosting method, which was unwise to say the least (and technically falls short of delivering the best of which you are currently capable), but I see that you did catch this on your own and corrected it in many of those in the latter half. Still, do take care to consider what techniques and strategies we've introduced throughout the course, as you are expected to continue to apply them going forward, and that extra mileage (along with practicing these things in your warmups) is a big part of having it become second nature.

As to the cylinders in boxes, your work here is very well done, and I have no complaints. 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.

In applying your line extensions thoroughly and correctly, you've given yourself ample information to work with in assessing how to adjust the proportions of your next set of boxes, and even with this more limited homework set, I can see that your ability to judge your proportions have improved.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, but be sure to continue including them in your regular warmup rotation.

Jumping right in with your arrows,

• Nice work keeping the focus on executing your side edges with confidence. There's a touch of hesitation, but honestly at the scale at which you're working, I'm not terribly worried, and it's so minimal that it will likely go away as you continue to practice and trust in yourself more.

• You've done a great job of applying foreshortening to the positive space with a healthy size differentail between the end closer to the viewer and the end farther away of each arrow.

• You've also generally shown an awareness of how foreshortening impacts the negative space (the gaps between the zigzagging sections, which compress the further back we look), although I do think this is something you'll benefit from emphasizing more going forward.

Looking at your sausages with contour lines,

• While you are adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages in many cases, there are also other cases like this one and these where you've demonstrated a somewhat tenuous relationship with them, especially when it comes to allowing them to pinch through their midsection (which is one of the things we stress to avoid). Be more mindful of the shape you intend to execute going forward - intent is important, as it drives what we ultimately learn from the exercise.

• You've done a pretty good job of executing your contour lines - both ellipses and curves - with confidence, although it would be a good idea to give yourself a few extra moments in the planning/preparation phases of the ghosting method for each of these.

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, especially in your texture analyses, a strong willingness to apply the methodology described above (outlining/designing your shadow shapes before filling them in), although in combination with other approaches (such as less planned out one-off strokes), and I also noticed that in your pineapple texture, it seemed more as though you were going back over the lines you'd drawn earlier with your brush pen (as opposed to filling intentionally outlined shapes in), although I could be wrong about that.

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.

All in all what you've delivered here is still pretty standard for students, and it does show that your observational skills are developing nicely. Just be sure when engaging with textural problems in this course going forward, that you stick to the methodology that allows you to consciously decide on the shapes of your cast shadows first, as this will provide you with considerably more control over the result.

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 way in which you're drawing your intersections clearly demonstrates that you're thinking about the way in which the forms relate to one another in 3D space, which is exactly what we hope to see at this stage.

• 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.

I'm also quite pleased with this latter point - you're demonstrating a great deal of patience and care, even longside such densely packed pages that must have surely tested your patience. Very nicely done.

Lastly, your organic intersections demonstrate that you're thinking about the manner in which your forms drape over one another under the influence of gravity, and I can see that you are making headway in figuring out how to apply your cast shadows to emphasize these relationships.

All in all, your work is coming along well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, and you can work on any of the points I've called out as you continue forwards through the course.

Jumping right in with your arrows, very nice work on all fronts:

• You've kept the focus on executing your side edges with confidence, which puts the focus on the fluidity of the structures as they move through space.

• Through the use of a nicely emphasized size differential between the two ends of each arrow, you've captured the application of foreshortening to the positive space of your arrows well.

• And you've also taken into consideration how the foreshortening applies to the negative space, allowing for substantial compression to the gaps between the zigzagging sections as we look further back along each arrow.

Looking at your sausage forms with contour lines,

• Nice work generally sticking quite closely to the characteristics of simple sausages. Just keep an eye on cases like this and this where you end up going for more of a cigar shape.

• You're definitely drawing your contour lines - both ellipses and curves - with a lot of confidence, which helps maintain the appropriate shape and curvature such that they wrap around the rounded surface of the sausages convincingly. Keep working on your accuracy (that'll come with practice - what matters most is that you're nailing the confident execution), and also don't forget to draw through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, as is required for all of the ellipses we freehand throughout this course, including those that are very small.

• I did notice a couple spots on the contour curves page where you forgot to include the central minor axis line. Take a bit more care in ensuring that you're applying all of the steps consistently.

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).

That said, it does seem that your submission is missing a few pages - one page of dissections and one page of texture analyses, so you will need to provide that before I can mark this lesson as complete. That said, I'm seeing a mixture of both uses of the methodology linked above (outlining/designing your shadow shapes before filling them in) and approaching your textural marks in a less controlled manner (drawing them in one-off strokes, essentially painting them on as you go), which is pretty normal for students at this stage. That said, do make an effort to, when using texture in this course, stick to the two-step methodology. 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 manner in which you're drawing your intersections clearly shows that you're thinking about how these forms relate to one another in 3D space, which is exactly what we hope to see at this stage.

• 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, you're generally doing very well, although I am noticing some spots where you go back over lines (sometimes to correct mistakes as we see here - you should be letting your mistakes stand for themselves, as correcting them can trick the brain into feeling the issue was resolved, and not taking it into consideration the next time), and in other spots it's line weight (which is fair) but being applied perhaps a bit too liberally, or perhaps not with enough time to really plan out the marks using the ghosting method as well as you could. It wouldn't hurt to review the material here from Lesson 1 on how line weight is applied in this course - keep in mind that they should be applied to a fairly limited, localized area, and kept quite subtle. You're applying some of that, some of the time, but I wanted to call it out both to ensure you take a little more time in its application, and that you approach it a little more conservatively.

The other quick point I wanted to call out is that when drawing your cylinders, you should not be defaulting to having their side edges run parallel on the page, as this would only occur when they are oriented such that those side edges run perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight. Those are the conditions that would push their VP to infinity, as discussed in Lesson 1. If that is not your specific intent - and in this exercise since we're rotating our forms arbitrarily in space, it would not be - it's important that you always include some minimal amount of visible convergence to those edges.

And lastly, your organic intersections are coming along well - they clearly show that you're thinking about how the forms drape over one another under the influence of gravity. Your cast shadows are coming along in emphasizing these relationships as well, although I am noticing some inconsistencies in how they're applied (I've outlined a few missing cast shadows here), and I would strongly recommend picking up a brush pen or another thicker pen to fill them in more consistently.

All in all, your work is coming along well - though I will need to see those two missing texture pages before I can mark this lesson as complete.

Jumping right in with the structural aspect of the challenge, you're doing a great job. You're making excellent use of your ellipse guides (them being similar in degree isn't a problem here since our wheels are pretty narrow and therefore won't experience that much degree shift - although getting a master ellipse template will still be very useful for Lesson 7, specifically for the "constructing to scale" approach explained there) to build out all of the necessary cross-sectional ellipses to build out the body of each wheel, and have also been quite mindful of establishing the major structures not just as shapes on a page, but also considering the side planes that define their thickness to ensure that the results are solid and believable.

To that end, the only bit of advice I want to offer is fairly minor. When you're dealing with spokes of your wheels that are simply so thin that they seem like they should be captured as singular lines (like we see here in 23), keep in mind that though making them thicker (enough so to be drawn as a shape with two edges rather than a singular line) is going to make them break away from your reference image, but in doing so it will appear more solid and structural for the simple reason that a line doesn't establish a form - at the minimum we need a shape (which itself could represent the silhouette of a 3D form) to establish the kind of solidity we're after. Breaking away from the reference - which in the context of this course is never that big of a deal, since we're using our references as a source of information and not something to reproduce at all costs - is a fair price to pay to ensure that what we're drawing still is clearly three dimensional.

Continuing onto the textural aspect of the challenge, here we get into something that - by design - ends up being a stumbling block for most students. Being as far removed from Lesson 2 where texture is first introduced, and that being a particularly unpleasant experience for most students, it's pretty normal for them to forget a lot of the concepts that are covered there.

When it comes to texture specifically - at least, how we handle it here, which is very specific to this course and what it seeks to develop in our students - we are ultimately looking at the same kind of problem that the course as a whole explores: spatial reasoning. We imply the marks we draw (you can refer to the implicit vs explicit markmaking section for more specific information on this) by drawing the shadows our textural forms cast on their surroundings, not by drawing the forms themselves (in terms of outlining them, or otherwise drawing anything about the form itself). It's the shape of the shadow itself, which is designed based on our understanding of the relationship in 3D space between the form casting it and the surface receiving it. And so, as stressed in these reminders, in this course we're never just drawing what we see. We're looking at our references, and understanding what they tell us about the forms in question, and then deciding on how to convey the relationships between them in space.

The reason we use implicit markmaking instead of explicit is fairly simple, although it's not always obvious. For example, looking at any of your wheels like number 5 here, it looks excellent floating in the void, all full of detail. But when it becomes part of an existing drawing, all of that packed detail can actually work against you by drawing the viewer's eye to it whether you want it to or not. This interferes with our ability to control composition (which is all about dictating how the viewer experiences a piece, what they look at and in which order), which while outside of the scope of this course, is still something I want to give students the tools to engage with more easily.

Explicit markmaking basically locks us into an agreement with the viewer: whatever is drawn is present, and whatever has not been drawn, is not present. And therefore to convey each textural form, we have to declare its presence explicitly. Implicit markmaking on the other hand gives us more freedom by disconnecting the marks we draw from the specifics of what is present.

By about wheel 10, I can see that you started to pick up on this weakness to your approach, and as a result you ended up trying to arbitrarily leave more and more strokes out where you tried to transition to a sparser area of detail - but this was always a matter of changing the way in which you drew the marks themselves - a change you were making purely on a 2D level - and so the choices you were making were driven by the result you wanted, but had a very tenuous structure or logic to them, because y ou were still employing explicit markmaking - drawing the textural forms themselves, rather than implicit markmaking, which involves drawing the impact (the shadow they cast) upon the surfaces around them, without drawing the forms themselves directly.

Implicit markmaking operates on a simple fact. As shown in this diagram, depending on how far the form is from the light source, the angle of the light rays will hit the object at shallower angles the farther away they are, resulting in the shadow itself being projected farther. This means that even if the textural forms that sit upon a surface do so evenly and consistently across its entirety, if we're not drawing them but rather drawing the shadows they cast, we can alter how they're drawn (making them larger and deeper in some areas, and smaller even to the point of being entirely blasted away in others) to suit our design and compositional needs. It simply gives us the excuse we need to be able to focus our visual detail in certain areas, and leave others more sparse.

The key however is two fold:

• Make sure that what you're drawing are cast shadows. The shape they take will change based on how the surface upon which they're cast sits in space, and so the shadow can describe some of that form, but what the textural marks you put down should always be cast shadows.

• Don't put marks down arbitrarily - they should always be grounded in the 3D forms that you understand to be present along that surface, even though you're not drawing them directly (which is what makes this so very difficult).

Anyway, as this challenge largely serves the purpose of rudely reminding students to consider what aspects of the course they may have allowed to slip through the cracks in the hopes that they'll go back and review those sections before carrying forward, I don't generally assign revisions for a mistake I entirely expect to occur. So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

In terms of looking for a recommendation for what to do next, you are both in the right place, and the wrong place. The wrong place in the sense that I can only give recommendations in areas I'm familiar with (although things are continually changing, and the longer I spend locked away in teacher land, the more separated I become from the industry and what it's focusing on right now), and to be honest I'm not entirely sure what an animation designer is. But the right place in the sense that the reason this challenge exists and can be submitted for official critique despite not really being in the structured vein of the course as a whole, is because it gives me an opportunity to introduce students to the concept of design.

In truth, I'm planning on eventually increasing the credit cost (right now at 2 credits it's still very much in keeping with the fact that we offer official critique far more cheaply than it costs to provide, but this really does fall outside of that structure) while also formalizing how I approach critiquing it, but ultimately the way I handle it right now is largely using what you've drawn here to talk about the kind of thinking that influences the choices we make when creating our own things. While ultimately one's next steps is going to depend on what their overarching goals are, I think design is one of those things people don't entirely recognize exists as a field of study, and so opening their eyes to it in this way can help them move forward with greater awareness of what they might explore going forward.

The first point I wanted to talk about is the importance of thinking not only of the object as a whole that you're creating, but rather about the individual components that come together to make the whole - most specifically, their thicknesses, as shown here. It's normal to think of the object you're creating as one cohesive thing, and thus to focus on the goal you have for the general vibe it carries, but a common mistake beginners make (and personally I made this mistake for a good ten years before I started to understand) is that we can't just think about what we're creating in one way, or engage with it from one direction. We have to think about the big picture we're aiming for, as well as thinking about how the thing is built up from individual pieces, and considering the nature of those pieces themselves (which leads into the next point, which we'll get to in a moment).

I did notice that there were a lot of places where you did include thickness, so this isn't something you were outright overlooking, but it was inconsistent. Additionally, you had a tendency to fill those side planes in with solid black, which is not a good idea when working with strict black and white, as generally the viewer will start assuming that filled black areas are meant to represent cast shadows, and so they'll start from a point where they're seeing a paper-thin structure and the shadow it casts, and it'll take a few moments - milliseconds, really - to register that this interpretation doesn't make sense, and then they'll realize that what they're looking at is the side plane being shaded in. While it doesn't take long for them to make that switch, you really do want your drawing to read clearly at a first glance, and so even that much will impede how easily the viewer can understand what you've drawn.

So getting back to the point about considering the nature of the object you're constructing gets into the meat of design - that is, understanding who this thing is for, who made it, the circumstances in which it was made, what the various parties are able to afford, and so forth. The designs beginners make tend to be boring because they're made entirely based on creating a pretty end result, but everything we design - whether it's props as we're engaging with here, characters, vehicles, environments, etc. - play a role in a larger narrative, and it is that narrative that makes them real. We can't simply design an object without considering how it fits into a larger context.

So for example if we look at this chest, we might ask ourselves questions about how the lid was put together. Is it a single slab of wood that has been painstakingly bent into a curve (I believe it's possible to achieve this, though it would definitely be a pretty involved and time consuming process, and therefore expensive), or is it a more standard lid made of separate boards or slats of wood that are then held together through iron or leather bands and secured with metal rivets? The design itself leaves this unclear - you've got bands with very loosely implied rivets (although their placement seems somewhat careless and uncommitted - you don't have to draw every single one, but it'll go a long way to consciously decide where your rivets will generally fall, and imply the presence of a few of them by drawing the shadow they cast similarly to how we approach textural detail in this course) but the lid itself doesn't show any sign of being made up of separate pieces. Arguably the bands could still serve to hold the lid's curve, but ultimately the more unique of a direction you take a given design (in the sense of not being what the viewer will be likely to expect), the more supporting information you have to provide within the rendition of the design.

We would also take into consideration the person crafting this chest (what kind of technology do they have access to - the era/civilization would also play a role here in determining what they might be able to bring to bear), as well as what kind of client it's being made for (in terms of whether or not they could afford something that was made in a particular way to elevate its appearance (a single board for the whole lid would be much cleaner looking, and would generally be fancier), or if their intent or budget might result in the cheaper, more function-focused approach making more sense.

These kinds of considerations can be taken pretty far, and for anything of consequence, they really should be. Ask yourself all kinds of questions - from the big stuff like what kind of world, civilization, etc. this object exists within, to the kind of species and physical limitations of the people and creatures that might use it. This is the bedrock of what I call the "What If" method of taking a very simple, rudimentary idea, and really developing it into a cohesive design through iteration, which is fueled by the questions we ask. You'll find this discussed in more detail in this video - it's a preview for a larger course I sell through Proko.com, though the entire concept of the "What If" process is covered in that video. The rest of the course is more explaining what concept art and design are (in contrast to illustration), and the way in which I've had to think about a wide variety of problems I've faced in my career as a concept artist, and while it's generally relevant, what's covered in that linked video is all you really need in terms of what I'm explaining here.

While common objects don't necessarily have a lot of wiggle room for design (not to say they have none - you should absolutely get used to this way of thinking, even when it comes to simple objects that have been done a million times before - eventually it'll be second nature to think of everything you create in this way), when we start getting into much more extravagant, specific, and unique designs - like those on this page, it's very easy for things to just not make a lot of sense, to really feel like they're unique and extravagant for no particular reason. The best way to keep those kinds of feature in check, and avoid things getting out of hand, is to place them in a larger context that can provide you with clear logical reasoning that can be followed to explain why, say, a chest has chicken feet, or why it might be covered in spikes.

And of course when it comes to adding textures to these things, you should not be relying on any sort of scribbling or randomness (as is discussed in our own texture material). Eventually your instincts will be developed well enough so when you think to apply a particular texture you won't need to think very hard about what kinds of forms make up that texture, but you get there by taking your time now in considering what textural forms are present, and getting used to conveying them not by drawing them directly, but by drawing the shadows they cast. And so, if you have a veiny sort of texture as we see here, considering the way in which those veiny bumps actually connect to one another as they spread across the surface, and not simply trying to get marks down quickly, will have a much stronger impact overall.

Anyway! I hope I've given you a fair bit to think about. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

While you may be applying aspects of the ghosting method and the Y method, I am not seeing the usual signs that come along with them being applied in their entirety. In the case of the ghosting method, the planning phase involves placing start/end points for any marks that have a clear beginning and ending, and in the case of the Y method, the "negotiating corners" aspect involves placing multiple points and compromising between them. The absence of these points throughout your work suggests quite strongly that these methodologies are not being used as they're prescribed, and it is important that you go through them in their entirety in order to receive their full benefit and drill them into becoming second nature. I strongly recommend reviewing the instructions associated with them, which you'll find here for the ghosting method and here for the Y method.

Your organic forms with contour curves are coming along decently, but in regards to your form intersections, there are numerous points that I raised in my feedback that your revisions do not address, including:

• Not drawing through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, as is required for all of the ellipses we freehand throughout this course.

• Not constructing your cylinders or cones around minor axis lines.

• Not applying the ghosting method in its entirety (your line quality is generally okay but I'm not seeing any of the points we place during the planning phase to identify the intended start/end points of the mark we wish to make - at most what I'm seeing are areas where the start/ends of your marks get thicker, but this seems more likely to simply be the result of holding your pen in that position for a moment longer when starting/ending, causing the ink to pool, rather than you perfectly nailing your use of the ghosting method every single time).

• Not applying the Y method (specifically the negotiating of corners which helps considerably in our estimation of our convergences as we construct the box.

I am really not seeing any attempt to actually address the points that I raised, which was that you are not applying the concepts and strategies introduced in earlier lessons. If there were aspects of my original feedback that were unclear, you are of course allowed to ask questions - but if you charge forwards and submit the work, I can only assume that my feedback was clear to you.

If you have questions, ask them - otherwise you'll have one more opportunity to complete the same revisions for the form intersections that I assigned previously. If the same issues continue to come up, I will have to assume that there is an issue (perhaps a language barrier concern, for example) that is hindering your ability to apply the feedback you receive from us. Ultimately because we provide official critique at a base price that does not fully cover the cost of having our TAs provide you with feedback, we operate on very limited resources compared to other courses and programs, and so we have hard limits on how much we can provide to students. If students are not able to adhere to the requirements of official critique, and run into major issues in following the instructions they're given, then that can certainly result in us simply no longer being able to provide official critique.

So, give the 4 pages of form intersections one more shot, after going through the feedback I provided previously carefully to ensure you're in a good position to apply it (and ask questions if anything is unclear). Hopefully you simply rushed without giving it a fair shake - which is its own problem, given that we are covering part of the cost of providing you with feedback - but at least it's something that can be avoided going forward, if that is the case.