Hi there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.

You're making good progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson, below I'll be listing some things that will hopefully help you in your future attempts at these exercises.

• This is a solid attempt at the arrows exercise but there are a few quick things I can point out for you to work on here. You have moments where your arrows widen/narrow a bit suddenly, remember that we want our arrows to flow smoothly and widen consistently as they get closer to the viewer. I'd also like you to experiment with foreshortening more, you could push it more in the arrows themselves at times and you don't always make use of it in the negative space between the arrow's curves. By utilizing it in both of these areas we can create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space as you can see demonstrated here.

• In the organic forms with contours exercise your forms are becoming a bit too complex. Our goal when creating these forms is to have both ends be the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. Your line confidence also suffers here and your ellipses as well as your contour curves end up quite wobbly. Remember that confidence is our first priority, if you need to break the boundaries you've established to guarantee a smooth line the do so, accuracy will come with mileage. I'd like you to work on shifting the degree of your contours as well. The degree of a contour line basically represents the orientation of that cross-section in space, relative to the viewer, and as we slide along the sausage form, the cross section is either going to open up (allowing us to see more of it) or turn away from the viewer (allowing us to see less), as shown here.

• In the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines and negative space rather than cast shadows created by forms along the texture itself. This makes it difficult to create gradients with implied information which we could then use to create focal points in more complex pieces, by doing so we can prevent our viewers from being visually overwhelmed with too much detail. For more on the importance of focusing on cast shadows read here. I'd also like to quickly direct you to this image which shows that when we're working with thin line like textures if we outline and fill the shadow we will create a much more dynamic texture than simply drawing lines.

• If you feel like you don't fully grasp form intersections just yet don't worry, you're on the right track but right now this exercise is just meant to get students to start thinking about how their forms relate to one another in 3D space, and how to define those relationships on the page. We'll be going over them more in the upcoming lessons. your forms here are looking mostly solid and like they belong in a single cohesive 3D space, good work.

• In the organic intersections exercise you demonstrated that your understanding of the 3D space you're trying to construct is growing as your forms begin to wrap around one another believably. Addressing issues mentioned in the previous organic form exercise will help you here as well, but on top of those issues something you can work on is pushing your shadows furhter. Currently they mostly just hug the form creating them rather than being cast on to the forms/ground beneath. Try pushing your light source to the top left or right corner of the page and experiment with shadows, this is a great exercise for becoming more comfortable with them before moving on to more complex tasks.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, I'd like to make sure your comfortable working with organic forms.

Please re-read and complete:

• 2 pages of the organic forms with contours exercise.

Once you've completed your pages reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll look over them and address anything that needs to be worked on and move you on to the next lesson once you've shown you're ready.