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

You're off to a good start with the exercises in this lesson, I do notice a few spots that you can aim to improve and I'll be listing how to do so below.

• Your arrows are looking confident and smooth which is great. The thing I'd like for you to focus on when attempting this exercise again is how you apply foreshortening. You're applying it to the positive space (in this case the arrow itself) as the arrow gets closer it gets larger as it should, however you're not applying foreshortening to the negative space (the space between each curve in the arrow) this results in the arrow looking less like it's moving through space and rather stretching or growing in size. You can read more about these concepts [here.] (https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/4/step2)

• You filled the pages of your organic forms with contours nicely, there are a few things I feel I need to make note of here however. You're over complicating your forms which is a very common error that people end up making, you want to try to keep the ends of your form the same size and as round as you can without pinching, bloating, or stretching occurring along the form. You can read more about simple sausages here.

• When it comes to your contour ellipses and lines there's 2 quick notes I'd like to make, the first being that you want to make sure you're drawing through every ellipse you create, you only had one pass through in yours and the second note relates to how you should be shifting the degree of your contour ellipses wider/narrower as we slide along the length of a sausage.

-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.

Both sections of your textures exercises have the same issues so I'll be going over them together.

• You're focusing much more on outlining shapes you see rather than focusing on shadows created by the forms of the texture. This also results in you having difficulty with your gradients and implying texture because you're trying to explicitly draw every detail which in a larger piece of work would lead to it being visually overwhelming. You can read more about these concepts here.

• Another thing worth noting is that when drawing thin line like textures, you should still be aiming to draw the outline of the shadow shapes you see and filling them in rather than just drawing with lines. This helps make the shadows more dynamic much in the way we use line weight. You can see an example of what I'm referring to here.

I believe you may have misunderstood the instructions of or have been hasty with the forms intersections exercises so I'll be going over a couple of things here quickly.

• While you did fill your page with lots of forms, the majority of them are orientated in the same way and you didn't attempt to draw any intersections between them.

• You're not drawing through your ellipses. Reminder of the concept here.

• I get the impression this was done hastily because the construction of your forms in this exercise is quite weak, to double check that this wasn't just a case of needing more mileage I looked back at your 250 box challenge because I found your boxes weaker than what we'd expect. What I found was that by the end of your box challenge you were actually drawing boxes that looked quite solid, so I can only imagine that you didn't give each form here the time it deserved in terms of planning. You may find it helpful to read this section which goes over the mindset you should be taking when approaching more complex challenges.

-I can not stress enough the fact that this isn't a race, please make sure you ghost and plan each mark you intend to make. Intentional practice is what will lead to growth faster than trying to rush through content without building an understanding of what you're doing.

While your form intersections could be better, your organic intersections came out really well done. You will benefit from simplifying your forms more but this shows you are building an understanding of 3D space.

-When tackling this exercise again in the future you want to make sure you have a consistent light source, you have shadows headed in opposite directions in a few spots which wouldn't occur. Simple forms will help you in this regard as well, with simpler forms you can clearly see how shadows should behave which will help when attempting more complicated things later on.

While you are making progress and taking steps in the right direction in a lot of these exercises, I won't be moving you on just yet. I need to make sure you're not neglecting earlier lesson material and habits as well as make sure you put in proper effort into the intersections exercise. Form intersections are important 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, and we'll be using them quite a bit in later material.

With that being said I'll be asking you to redo:

-a page of organic forms with contour ellipses, make sure you draw through your ellipses and do your best to shift the degree of contours along the form.

-2 pages of form intersections, re-read and follow all the instructions. Take your time.

When you've completed the pages requested please put them in an album and reply to this critique and I'll go over them, offer any needed advice, redos or move you on to the next lesson once you're ready.

Just remember that while we don't enjoy it, we will sit here and slap your wrists if you try and rush to the cookie jar without doing your chores. Everything in these lessons build off each other, so if you are rushing through exercises it's all going to start falling down when you try to build on the concepts later.