The biggest thing to address here is your linework. You mentioned it yourself, though I did notice you said "tried my hardest to only make my marks once or twice" - there's a big difference between once and twice. Every single mark you draw needs to be executed individually - without reflexive follow up, or really any action without conscious preparation and forethought.

It's not uncommon for students to feel like they're expected to complete their work in a set amount of time, and so they can sometimes feel a pressure to rush. This rushing can in turn diminish the amount of time you give yourself to draw each and every mark, and that causes you to fall into the same traps over and over again of not putting time into thinking and planning, and just executing everything quickly. And this ultimately causes you to use your instincts, which are rough and untrained. What we're doing here, by taking as much time as we require for each and every mark we draw, is training our instincts so that down the line, we're able to do all that thinking in a smaller time frame.

Looking back into your previous submissions, this is something you've struggled with a lot - but there is proof that you can just draw each mark as a single stroke with no followups. Your first attempt at the rough perspective boxes was visibly rough with way too many marks for every line. Your revisions however for the most part featured only one mark per line. There was definitely more that could be done to keep the marks straighter - specifically drawing from your shoulder, and being sure to ghost through that stroke several times before executing with confidence (and of course practice in general) but that's a different issue. What we can see here is that you demonstrated the self control to draw individual marks instead of attempting to sketch. We are not sketching here.

This is essentially proof that holding yourself back from that urge to draw marks over and over is entirely possible for you. That it is ultimately a choice that you consciously make. You're making an active decision to either hold yourself back, or to just do what feels natural. Do not make the mistake of thinking in terms of "trying my hardest" and "my best". It's just a choice you make at every moment. The quality of the mark that ensues, that's a matter of effort, of practice, of skill, etc. But not this. I really can't say it enough - every mark drawn is a choice.

Now, this matter of linework is a major issue in a number of exercises, and I'll tell you now in advance that I want you to do this lesson over, and submit it anew. This will cost you an additional credit, because it will require a full critique. Your biggest issue is that you are rushing - that much is clear. But the question is why you're rushing. It is not at all uncommon for students to have certain expectations of how much time things are expected to take. Also, there's a huge trend of people seeing sped up videos of artists drawing, and getting the impression that they're doing so entirely by instinct and without thought, and that can build up these expectations that they themselves are expected to draw like this from the beginning. That is not the case. As I explained above, we train our instincts through patience, by doing things with care and ensuring we know exactly what purpose every single mark is meant to do for us. In doing everything the long way, we gradually build up our ability to do things more quickly and fluidly - but if we try to to do it that way from the spot, we effectively attempt to train our instincts by using our instincts, and end up with a mess and not much else.

• Aside from largely being uncontrolled chicken-scratch, the path your arrows follow is solid. They move through space exploring all three dimensions. You just need to work on executing them with a single stroke, from your shoulder, and not attempt to build them up bit by bit with little scratchy marks.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are alright, though you're definitely drawing through your ellipses too much. As mentioned here, you should only be drawing through them 2-3 times max - for you, aim for just 2 full times, no more, no less). Do however keep an eye on how you're drawing those sausage forms, and work to adhere to the characteristics of simple sausages more closely.

• For the organic forms with contour curves, the same issue is present for simple sausages, but more notably you should only be drawing your contour curves with a single stroke each, again from your shoulder. While we draw through ellipses, that is because they are an even, continuous and enclosed shape that maintains the same kind of trajectory throughout. "Drawing through" marks is ONLY applied to ellipses and nothing else.

• For both organic forms with contour curves and contour ellipses, mind the degree of the ellipses - that is, their width. 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. You can also see this demonstrated here. You are varying the degree of your ellipses, but it appears you're making them narrower as they move away from the viewer, which is the opposite.

• Your texture analyses actually are moving in the right direction, but there are two main problems. First of all, work in shadow shapes, not in lines. Even where you've built up what are essentially shadow shapes, you've done so with a lot of separate strokes all concentrated in the same place. Instead, for every textural mark you draw, [employ this two-step process]() of first outlining your intended shadow shape, then filling it in. This will help you avoid the raggedy edges and will make you think more consciously about each shadow shape and how it relates to the form that casts it. Secondly, outside of those big shadows you're drawing, you're doing a lot of scribbling, which shows that you're trying to rely on randomness rather than actually observing your reference as closely as possible and carrying information over bit by bit. If we ignore these random strokes you're putting down, you're actually doing quite well - but you're clearly hitting a point where you want to add more visual information, but you're not taking the time to actually observe and study your reference in order to determine what that information is specifically. This ropes right back into a lack of patience.

• As a minor point, in your first texture you did a good job of creating a smooth transition from dark to light, dense to sparse. In your second and third however, you ignored the goal of getting that black bar along the left side of the gradient to transition smoothly into the texture. We ultimately don't want to be able to identify where the edge of that bar actually is, in the end result, as explained here.

• The same principles largely apply to your dissections as well. Your pinecone was really well done, and there are areas where you focus properly on cast shadows, but you are also still just covering everything with scribbling and hatching for no reason at all. There are also areas, like your corn texture, fish scales texture, and others, where you outline all your textural forms instead of focusing on cast shadows (as explained here). Lastly, a candy cane's colouring isn't a texture - it's a pattern, because it's made up of local colouring. When looking at objects, try and imagine what they'd be like if they were coloured fully white, so you could pay closer attention to the actual three dimensional information along their surfaces.

• While your form intersections are actually reasonably well done in terms of drawing forms that feel roughly cohesive and consistent within the same space, and your actual intersection explorations are moving in the right direction, the chicken scratch lines are again the major issue. I'm also noticing that you're not drawing through your ellipses. There is something that stands out here however, that may be the case everywhere, but may only be truly noticeable here. I can see you drawing some lines with just individual marks, and then creating a scribbly mess when you go back in to add line weight. Line weight should be drawn with the same use of the ghosting method as everything else. Singular, controlled, planned strokes.

• Lastly, your organic intersections are similarly moving in the right direction , and are showing decent interactions between the forms themselves. The primary issue here, as everywhere else, is that you're not respecting the key principles of markmaking stressed in lesson 1.

So, at its core, you have one major problem, and a bunch of smaller issues that are not uncommon at this stage, and would themselves not have required a full redo, nor a 2000 word critique. The principles covered in the first lesson, specifically these are at the core of this course, and you have demonstrated the capacity to apply them in the past. You do indeed need more practice with the use of the ghosting method in general (being sure to execute marks from your shoulder in order to keep them straight, to invest ample time into preparation, etc.), and in order to achieve that, keeping up with those completed exercises as part of [your regular warmusp as mentioned in lesson 0]() is critical.

As a whole, what is holding you back is this: you're rushing. Both in terms of how you approach the exercises, and in a number of ways in actually following the instructions. You need to slow yourself down, and give yourself all the time you need to absorb all the information being given to you. No one is holding a gun to your head, nor a stop watch to time your progress.

One thing that may well help is to check out the recordings on ScyllaStew's YouTube channel. She posts full recordings of all her exercise work, and she's completed up to lesson 2 thus far. They're long, so you don't need to watch them all the way through, but I always recommend them to students who clearly are having trouble understanding how they should be pacing themselves, and that is a group into which you squarely fall.

You are not alone in this - lots of people come in with those expectations of themselves, and those misconceptions, and they end up steered awry by them. Fortunately, you're applying many principles and concepts reasonably well, and so once we get you over this hurdle, you should have a much easier time.

As I mentioned before, you will be expected to redo this lesson in full, and submit it as a separate post.