Starting with your arrows, I'm glad to see that you're executing your marks confidently, although with a lot of your longer ones (those with many zigzags back and forth) I can't help but get the impression that the focus here ends up falling more to pushing that back and forth motion vigorously, and as such may not be giving you enough of an opportunity to consider how the gaps between them are being spaced out (per the application of foreshortening to the negative space). I would strongly recommend against approaching it in this way, and instead try to rely as much as you can on your shoulder to serve as a stabilizer, allowing you to perform sweeping motions at a slower pace (at least as long as you're able to maintain the confidence of the stroke). This will help you focus more on making more conscious decisions as to how those gaps are spaced out, whereas right now you will likely find that your control in this area is more limited (and that does show in your results, where I can see some cases of consideration towards those gaps compressing more and more as we look farther back, but for the most part the gaps still remain more similar to one another).

Looking at your sausages with contour lines, I can see that you're generally attempting to stick within the characteristics of simple sausages, although you may still be struggling with some of the specifics - for example, ensuring the ends of a given sausage are the same size, and avoiding having them get stretched out so as to lose their circular shape. This will continue to improve as long as you keep those characteristics in mind going forward, and also as - just as with the previous one - you lean into the use of your whole arm from the shoulder and rely on it as a stabilizer, allowing you to maintain the necessary confidence of the stroke, but at a slower pace. Ultimately while we want students to prioritize the confidence of a stroke, as we get more mileage with this, the pace we need to keep up in order to maintain that confidence drops somewhat, giving us room to regain control by slowing down, so long as it doesn't result in hesitation and wobbling. What I tend to see here, including with your contour ellipses, is that you're doing a very good job of maintaining that confidence, but may be leaning more towards achieving it exclusively by going as fast as you can. That certainly works for us early on, but we as we progress forwards we want to test the bottom limits, so to speak, to see where we can regain control without sacrificing accuracy. Of course, part of that is also going to be the use of the ghosting method to regain control through other means (like investing time into the planning and preparation phases prior to that confident execution), but there's multiple elements at play here as we work towards the goal of confident and controlled markmaking.

While your contour ellipses are generally quite evenly shaped, I can definitely see that you're struggling to control some of those contour curves. Make sure that you're rotating your page to find a comfortable angle of approach, per the ghosting method, and of course if you catch yourself executing these marks from your elbow, be sure to correct yourself by reinforcing the use of the shoulder.

As to the degree of your contour lines, while the issues in controlling your contour curves does get in the way somewhat, I am getting a general impression that you understand how the degree of each contour curve relates to the orientation of the given cross-section in space. That said, the control issue here could be masking an underlying issue (there are some spots where your degree choice seems pretty arbitrary as we see here), so just to cover my bases it wouldn't hurt to review this section and the section beneath it. This concept is also discussed at length in the video for the exercise as well.

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 make some use of this methodology - that is, first outlining and designing your shadow shape, then filling it in, particularly on your second attempt of the texture analyses. To the point of you including a second attempt, with your first being particularly sloppy in comparison I can understand your choice to try it again (despite this being against how this course is meant to be used in terms of only completing the amount of work that was assigned and letting it stand for itself). Ultimately I can't stop you from making that decision, but when you do, do not include more than what was assigned in the submission as it complicates the feedback process.

Anyway, more broadly I do see that even where you do employ this two step methodology quite well, you do employ it in combination with other markmaking techniques, including less precise and controlled one-off strokes. That is pretty normal at this stage, as it helps students lean harder into the observational side of things (which you've done quite well), but do keep in mind that going forward when engaging with any textural problems throughout the rest of the course, you will want to apply this 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). In this regard, the way in which you've been drawing your intersection lines does show that you're thinking about how these forms relate to one another in 3D space, which is very much what we're looking for. That said, do not draw "through" your intersection lines as we see here - stick to the approach that is shown in the demonstrations without any modification. While we do encourage students to draw through their boxes, this provides considerable benefit to our understanding of how these forms sit in 3D space, while only minimally increasing the complexity of the task at hand. Drawing through our intersections has the opposite balance, where it provides minimal benefit while greatly complicating things to the point of distraction.

• 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, your work is admittedly somewhat mixed. While I can see that you're making use of the ghosting method and even the Y method's negotiation of corners when constructing your forms, I'm noticing a tendency to be somewhat less conscientious when drawing your intersection lines (for example, you skip the use of the ghosting method for these at times, or go back over your marks instead of executing a single stroke for each individual line segment). You do this in some of your forms too, as we see here on the right side of the cylinder and one of the back edges of the box - remember that you should not be correcting your mistakes, but rather letting them stand for themselves. When we correct a mistake, we make it seem

I'm also noticing that there are a number of places where you skip on constructing some of your cylinders or cones around a central minor axis line, as well as a strong tendency to draw your cylinders inverted - as we see here, you're drawing one end with a narrower degree and smaller overall scale, and the other with a wider degree with a larger overall scale, which is not correct. The closer end of a cylinder is always going to be narrower on its minor axis and wider on its major axis, while the farther end will be wider on its minor axis and narrower on its major axis. We usually describe the major axis as being the overall scale, so while the side edges of a cylinder will converge as they move farther away from the viewer, they're going to squeeze that overall scale down, while the width along the minor axis direction widens. To this end, it may be worth reviewing the ellipses section of Lesson 1.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along decently. The way you're drawing them shows that you're thinking about how those forms drape over one another under the influence of gravity, and you're making good headway with your cast shadows, in terms of working on thinking about how the shapes being cast are based on the relationship between the form casting them and the surface receiving them.

As a whole, I think the most important thing here is that you're gonna want to slow down and make a point of being much more intentional and conscientious with every action you take. Ultimately throughout all the work we do in this course, the goal is to be as intentional as possible, and to push back against the temptation to let our autopilot take over. Reason being, it is by being hyper-intentional with every choice we make, we gradually rewire our autopilot to be more reliable, so that we can rely on it for what we draw outside of this course and free our conscious mind to focus on the creative decisions of composition, design, narrative, and so forth. Employing that autopilot during this training process however undermines that goal.

Of course, that level of hyperintentionality is time consuming, but that's simply the nature of the game. This course takes a lot of time, both in terms of absorbing the information presented, and in ensuring that we're applying it as completely as we can, to the best of our current ability.

I am going to mark this lesson as complete, as everything I've addressed here can continue to be addressed as part of your regular warmups, but above all else, slow down, and pay more attention to the choices you're making.