This post has been up for about a week now. While I'm not going to address the alternative aspect of what's proposed here (others are welcome to weigh into that, but I don't want to encourage students to get in the habit of taking it upon themselves to modify the exercises - we stress that pretty firmly in Lesson 0, after all), I do think this is a good example of exactly why it's not a good idea to immediately start making changes to the material when you yourself are just starting with it.

There are two main reasons this is not a great idea:

• Generally speaking students tend to do this when they encounter an exercise - meaning, before they've actually really established a strong understanding of how to perform the exercise, what its purpose is, and how exactly the specific ways in which the exercise's instructions ask for it to be done align with that purpose. Without understanding that, the changes you make are likely going to be arbitrary as far as the exercise's purpose goes, and so it's more likely than not that it's going to undermine the exercise, rather than strengthen it. Not a guarantee, but it's not a risk worth taking.

• When your cognitive resources are taken up thinking about how to change the exercise, that means you have fewer such resources to commit towards the wealth of things students need to be thinking about as they work through the exercise. Case in point, in the example included with your post, you seem to have executed your linework in a very sketchy manner, not really in keeping with the principles of markmaking from earlier in the lesson. These principles are very important, but as you set them aside to do your experimentation here, you're going to make it that much more likely that you'll be fairly lax about applying them elsewhere in the course. Given what a big time investment this course is, things like that can result in you putting weeks and months towards the work, only to find that because you got caught up in extracurricular concerns, you forgot to implement many of the critical things the curriculum itself put forth.

That's not to say these exercises can't be improved upon, and that variations upon them can't be developed. Just that it's something for students to think about, if they wish, when they've completed the course, not as they're just beginning.