I'll be the TA handling your Lesson 2 critique.

You're making progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson and hopefully this critique will help you in your future attempts.

• Starting off in the arrows section your lines are looking smoothly and confidently drawn. There are spots where your arrows bulge/narrow suddenly, this is an issue because it gives the impression that your arrows are stretching which hurts their solidity. Remember that as our arrows move closer to the viewer we want them to widen consistently. It's good to see that you're trying to implement line weight, just remember that you want to keep your applications subtle and you'll become consistent with mileage. here are some things to look out for when applying it. I'd like you to experiment more with foreshortening in your future attempts, by utilizing it in both the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between their curves we can create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space as demonstrated here.

• Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise you're doing a good job keeping your forms simple, plenty of people tend to over-complicate them. Some of your line work here shows a lack of confidence, remember that our first priority is that we want all of our linework/ellipses/contours to be drawn confidently and mileage will improve our accuracy, don't redraw lines if you make a mistake. Speaking of contours I'd like you to try and shift the degree of your contours more. 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.

I'm going to address your texture work as I typically would here and then go into your question and add some more afterwards, this allows me to give you some useful resources and will hopefully prevent me from writing thousands of words going in circles trying to explain texture as it's quite complicated.

• In the texture exercises you're focusing on outlines, form shading and negative space at times rather than cast shadows created by forms along the texture itself. This makes it difficult to create gradients with implied information which we could then use to create focal points in more complex pieces, by doing so we can prevent our viewers from being visually overwhelmed with too much detail. For more on the importance of focusing on cast shadows read here. I'd also like to quickly direct you to this image which shows that when we're working with thin line like textures if we outline and fill the shadow we will create a much more dynamic texture than simply drawing lines.

Alright so, I can tell you're on the right track in some of your examples like your leaf dissection. But there are a few issues as well as the texture section in general being quite overwhelming for the majority of people. Don't stress about it too much as it's just meant to be an introduction to the concepts and we do go over them more in upcoming material, but I'll try to clarify some of the goals of the exercise the best I can.

For starters you mention textures blending with colours, ignore colour as it doesn't effect texture in this case. While you shouldn't convert every image as it can be a bit of crutch you may find converting some to start out with into black and white can be helpful.

If you open up this leaf texture I'll try to talk you through the process quickly. Basically when dealing with texture in the way the exercises are structured you can think of each texture as a bunch of form/organic intersections. If we focused on just drawing the veins of the leave we'd be focusing on outlines, if we focused on the space in between these veins we'd be focusing on negative space.

Instead what we want to do is imagine how this leaf is constructed and rests in 3D space. All of the veins are cylinder-like organic forms much like we did in the organic intersections, while the rest of the leaf is much like a plane or thin box that is most likely curved a bit due to gravity weight down on it.

With these forms in mind, it becomes much like the organic form intersections exercise, we determine where our light source is and create/capture cast shadows based on the size of the forms/gaps where light is trapped and intensity of the light. if you look at the large main vein of the leaf you can see that there's shadow being cast downwards, and the main branching vein on the far left has shadows on the right side of it, from this we can estimate that the strongest light source must be to the upper left of this particular leaf. In lesson 3 we begin to tackle plants and Uncomfortable uses a leaf as a demo, here's an example from it. You can see that he's not drawing the veins of the leaf but instead just capturing shadows, the light in this case being fairly flat so it doesn't create as much of a gradient as we're aiming for in the texture exercises themselves.

Every texture in itself is a challenge, and some aren't as great as others for this exercise, your leopard spots as an example are more of a change in colour when in reality what we'd want to be aiming for is capturing the shadows between the hairs themselves making this particular one quite difficult. Watermelon is also quite difficult because we'd want to be capturing all the bumps along the watermelon rather than the stripes.

Hopefully that helps, I will also point out that you don't want to be making sketchy/hatchy lines, instead you want to be picking shadows and simplifying them to imply information, this means you can choose to ignore or combine certain shadows as needed.

If this wasn't clear enough let me know and I'll try to expand on it more or bring in Uncomfortable, this section is quite difficult but it does make sense as it gets built upon.

• It's quite common for people to feel like they don't fully grasp the form intersections exercise, if you feel like you may fall into this category try not to stress too much. This exercise is just meant 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. We'll be going over them more in the upcoming lessons. Your forms are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, good work you're on the right track.

• While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you do a great job demonstrating that your sense of 3D space is developing as your forms begin to wrap around each other believably. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. When it comes to your shadows you're pushing them enough so that they cast rather than just hugging the form that creates them which is a great start. Your shadows appear to be following a consistent light source, be sure to experiment with different angles and intensities when trying this exercise again in the future. I recommend pushing your light source to the top left or right corner of the page to start with, it's easier than working with a light directly above your form pile.

Overall this was a solid submission, while you may have some things to work on I have no doubt you will improve with more mileage. I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to the next lesson.

Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3!