Jumping right in with your arrows, great work! Your arrows flow smoothly with confident linework, and you've done a great job of taking into consideration the impact of foreshortening on both the positive and negative space of these structures, which goes a long way towards conveying the sense of the depth of the scene in which they exist.

Looking at your sausages with contour lines, I can see that you're generally making an effort to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages. There are some discrepancies (ends being larger than they should or different sizes, pinching through the midsections) but mainly what we're looking for right now is that you're demonstrating a clear awareness of what you should be aiming for, which you certainly are. The rest will continue to improve with practice, especially as you continue to get more comfortable engaging your whole arm from the shoulder (which can help to maintain the confidence of one's stroke at slightly slower paces, which in turn helps to regain some more control, essentially functioning as a stabilizer).

When executing your contour ellipses, be sure to always apply the ghosting method to each, including rotating your page to find a comfortable angle of approach. It's easy to lock into the same orientation when executing a bunch of these ellipses, but forgetting to adjust that rotation can cause your ellipses to get a little more uneven. And, as with the previous point, leaning into executing your marks using your whole arm from the shoulder helps with this as well. The video for this exercise shows how my shoulder is moving from multiple camera angles, so it can be worth taking a look at that and making any adjustments to your own approach if you notice any differences.

For your contour curves, there are unfortunately some issues in how these are being applied.

• Firstly, here you've got the contour curves getting narrower as they move away from the viewer (so going from left to right, since the ellipse on the left tip tells us that this end is turned towards the viewer) - which on its own is fine, given that the sausage's silhouette tells us that this sausage is bending, which can account for the contour curves getting narrower - but they suddenly start getting wider again with the last two curves. This is a complete reversal of course, where I suspect your intent may have been to invert that curvature as shown here, continuing the implied bend and bringing the right side of the sausage around to face towards the viewer as well. We also see a similar issue here where the contour lines get narrower, then wider, but never actually invert - and so they're not maintaining a single consistent trend, but rather suddenly and arbitrarily reversing course.

• In a number of other cases, such as here, these two, and this one you are either drawing all of your contour curves backwards, or placing the ellipses on the incorrect end (since your contour curves are oriented such that they tell us the ends with the ellipses are turned away from the viewer).

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'm very pleased t o see the extent to which you've held to the two step methodology of outlining/designing, then filling in, your shadow shapes, particularly in the texture analyses. In your dissections you definitely drift more towards focusing on capturing the information directly as you observe it, skipping over the intermediary "understanding" step as discussed in the reminders linked above, but that is largely expected and is the case for most students at this stage.

As you continue to engage with textural problems throughout the rest of this course, be sure to apply the two step methodology to the exclusion of all other approaches (since other approaches to making your textural marks, such as direct one-off strokes, provides far less precise control over the shapes that result), and be sure to consider the marks you put down as being only the shadows cast by the textural forms you've observed to be present, rather than simply looking for dark areas to transfer directly to your drawing. As noted in the reminders, it's a process of understanding how the forms sit in space relative to their surroundings, and determining what kind of shadow they would cast, rather than looking for shadows directly in your reference.

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). As it stands, the way in which you're drawing your intersections shows that you are thinking about how these forms relate to one another in 3D space, which is what we're looking for at this point. That said, I have two suggestions for you. Firstly, avoid drawing "through" your intersections as though you have x-ray vision. While we do encourage students to draw through their forms, as it provides a substantial benefit to our grasp of how these forms sit in 3D space, while only minimally increasing the complexity of the task, drawing through intersections has the opposite balance. It greatly increases the complexity of the task, even to the point of distraction, and provides minimal benefit. So, it's best to stick to drawing it as demonstrated in the instructions, which involves only drawing the visible portion. Secondly, when an intersection line crosses an edge on either of the intersecting forms, note that this is where your intersection is going to end up with a sharp corner, at which point it turns to follow a new surface that is oriented differently. So when you find yourself tempted to draw a line that goes right across an edge as we see here, consider how the edge itself denotes the border between two surfaces that are oriented differently in space.

• 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, you're doing quite well, particularly in the use of strategies like the ghosting method, the Y method (including the negotiation of corners) and so forth. Just a couple things to keep in mind g oing forward:

• When drawing your cylinders, don't default to having the side edges run parallel one the page to one another. This would only occur in the specific circumstance where the intent is to have the cylinder run perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight, as those are the circumstances that would result in the side edges' VP being pushed to infinity (as discussed in Lesson 1). If this is not your intent - and in this exercise, where we're rotating our forms arbitrarily in space, it wouldn't be - be sure to include some minimal amount of visible convergence.

• You'll want to review this section from Lesson 1 in regards to how we use line weight in this course. Following the specific restrictions and use cases discussed there will help you ensure that you're using line weight in a manner that avoids being overdone or inconsistent.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along well. The way in which you're drawing the forms shows that you're taking into consideration how they drape over one another under the influence of gravity. Your cast shadows are also largely coming along well, although there are definitely some areas here where you apply extremely heavy line weight (particularly on this page), which should be avoided in the future. If you felt inclined to push your line weight this far in order to achieve a more seamless blending between cast shadow and line weight, keep in mind that though they can feel superficially similar, they are fundamentally different tools and visual elements that serve different purposes, and are restricted in different ways.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I will be assigning limited revisions in regards to the issues I called out for your contour curves. You'll find that assigned below.