Your work throughout the lesson is extremely well done. Before I give you my critique, I think it's extremely important that I remind you that the goal here is not to submit work that is specifically well done. While you've done that, and it's great, it's often students who set their standards extremely high for themselves who are most susceptible to hitting a wall with something they don't understand and having no real sense of how to get around it.

Drawabox stresses the idea that your homework submission is just meant to be a body of work that represents the best of your current ability. Reason being, I want to see what you understand, and what you don't understand. This means I am entirely comfortable assigning exercises and tasks that students have never encountered before, and that there's no fair expectation that they'll actually succeed with. All I ask is that they make an attempt and complete the work - even if the work is done incorrectly. Anyone can do that - anyone can read through instructions, not understand a lick, and just draw something. The only thing that stops us is the fear of making a mistake, and it is that fear - an entirely natural one - which holds us back.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with taking a long time - just don't feel that you're required to complete the work perfectly in order to submit it. Perfect work would, after all, defeat the purpose of these critiques. So next time you feel you can't grasp something, don't worry - try it anyway, even if it is all fundamentally incorrect, and we'll address it together. With the texture exercises specifically, since they're just an introduction to the concept, just an opportunity to get students to think about how they approach observing and studying things, and to think about how they can imply information using shadow shapes rather than outlines. Even if they don't do any of that successfully, what matters is that they've started to think about it - a seed has been planted that will continue to develop as they move forwards.

So! Onto the critique. Your arrows are drawn with a strong sense of flow and fluidity, capturing how they move through the scene. One thing to continue thinking about in the future though is the relationship between how foreshortening applies to the positive space - that is, the width of the ribbon itself which gets narrower as it moves away from the viewer - and the negative space, which is the distances between the zigzagging sections. Those distances should be compressing at the same rate as the ribbon itself, although this is something students often forget about or miss.

Your organic forms with contour lines are largely very well done. You've made an excellent effort in sticking to simple sausage forms, have drawn your contour ellipses to be smooth and evenly shaped, and have wrapped your contour curves properly around the rounded surface of the forms.

Just one thing - right now you're maintaining a very consistent degree for all of your contour ellipses and contour curves. 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.

Moving onto your texture analyses, your work here is spot on. You've leveraged clear shadow shapes and thrown aside all use of outlines to create smooth, gradual, and well controlled gradients from dense/dark to sparse/light. You're also demonstrating exceptional observational skills and attention to detail. This carries over quite nicely into your dissections as well, and through most of these you've continued to avoid outlining your forms. There are just a few where you fall back to outlines - the artichoke, snake, and the leaves textures are examples of cases where you outlined each individual textural form in full, and as a result were limited to sticking to a single level of textural density rather than being able to shift more fluidly from dense to sparse as you did in cases like your corn, crocodile and rock textures.

All things considered, you're making excellent headway and are far ahead of what I expect from students at this stage. There are still some small things to keep in mind and work on as you move forwards, but you're doing great.

Lastly, your work on the form intersections and organic intersections is solid. You've drawn forms that feel cohesive and consistent in the form intersections, and have gone off to a great start with the intersections themselves. This is another one of those 'introductions' to challenging concepts, and you've certainly knocked it out of the park. We'll continue exploring the relationships between forms in 3D space and how we can define them throughout the course, although I don't expect this will give you much difficulty. Similarly, the organic intersections do a great job of demonstrating how these forms interact with one another in 3D space, and you capture a strong illusion of gravity in how they slump and sag believably over one another.

All in all, your work is fantastic, and I'm happy to mark this lesson as complete. I do hope that you'll be a bit more patient with yourself moving forwards however. Struggling, mistakes, misunderstandings and all that are par for the course. You're getting feedback here specifically to help keep you on the right track, so as long as you're putting in the effort to present the best of your current ability, we'll work through it together without you having to come to the brink of forfeit.