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

Welcome back to the course, I'm glad you're giving it another try. Before getting into your critique I want to quickly address one thing you mentioned:

"If I feel like I'm not getting the lesson, then I just keep redoing it until I feel like I do."

While it's great that you understand pretty pictures aren't your goal, this is also a bit of a dangerous mind set to slip into. I'd like to direct you back to this section from lesson 0 quickly that goes over the negative aspects of grinding. Give it a read over and then let's continue on with your 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.

• Your arrows are off to a pretty good start, the biggest thing to work on is the consistency of their flow. Remember that we want them to widen/narrow consistently as they get closer/further from the viewer, sudden shifts in size creates the illusion of stretching rather than movement. When it comes to foreshortening you could push your use of it a bit more as well, by utilizing it in both the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between their curves you'll create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space as seen here.

• Moving on to the organic forms with contours exercise you're pretty close to keeping your forms simple but not fully there yet. Our goal in this exercise is to create forms where both ends are the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. When it comes to your contours you want to try to push the ends of your lines a bit further so they hook back into the form more as seen here, also remember to draw through all of your ellipses (you neglect doing this later on as well). As a final note just be sure to keep experimenting with shifting the degree of your contours. 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 largely looking solid, just a few quick notes. As mentioned earlier make sure you draw through all of your ellipses, and some of your forms are stretched which makes the point of this exercise more difficult to focus on as pointed out here.

• As for your organic intersections they're looking well done but I do have a few quick suggestions. The first one that everyone gets is to experiment a with lighting positions, this is a great exercise to build up your understanding of organic forms as well as lighting/shadow in 3D space before moving on to more complex pieces. The other suggestion is that I'd like you to draw through all of your forms when doing this exercise again in the future. In some spots your forms flatten out (the highest point on the second page is an example) and drawing through your forms will help build up a better understanding of the 3D space you're creating, it's the same idea as when we drew through our boxes basically.

Overall this was a well done submission, you have some things to work on and a few rusty spots from taking as long a break as you did but these can all be fixed with mileage in your warm ups.

I'll be moving you on to the next lesson, be sure to keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3.

Nice snakes by the way.