Unfortunately the only way we can reasonably take a break is, as stated in the announcements and other messaging for the promptathon, is if students take a break as well. Submissions come in every day, so delaying any one particular submission, "taking our time" and so on is not a viable solution. The critiques need to be handled, and if the work is being done, then it's just a matter of kicking the can further down the road, and having a mountain of work later rather than now. As to your suggestion, that would contradict the core tenets of Drawabox, which focus on expanding accessibility to resources and feedback, rather than limiting it. Furthermore, given how we are only able to provide feedback as cheaply as we do because the larger portion of paying students don't submit homework for critique each month, effectively subsidizing those who do, allowing us to pay our teaching assistants fairly for their work and time, while charging the individual student who is submitting far less. Placing a limit on students who can participate in the official critique route would fundamentally change that model, and would force us to charge many times more for the feedback (which again would contradict our core principles).

Ultimately, what's best for the community and for our staff, is for students to take a break as requested during the promptathons.

Jumping right into the critique, your form intersections are generally coming along quite well. You're demonstrating a solid grasp of most of your intersections involving flat-on-flat surfaces, and you're making good headway with your intersections involving rounded surfaces. I do have a few little corrections to offer here, as well as this diagram that may help solidify what you're already demonstrating a well developing grasp of.

Continuing onto your object constructions, there's a lot you've done quite well here, although there are some ways in which your approach can be further improved. As a whole, this lesson focuses above all else on the concept of precision. Where our previous lessons have been more reactive in terms of the approach they employed - that is to say, you might draw a cranial ball for an animal that is too big, and so we simply push forwards with a head that's bigger than we intended, and everything else fits to that, we effectively worked in an inside-out approach, where the boundaries of our structure could always be pushed further outward. Here, we work outside-in, laying out our initial bounding volume and then breaking up the space within it.

Precision is often conflated with accuracy, but they're actually two different things (at least insofar as I use the terms here). Where accuracy speaks to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, precision actually has nothing to do with putting the mark down on the page. It's about the steps you take beforehand to declare those intentions.

So for example, if we look at the ghosting method, when going through the planning phase of a straight line, we can place a start/end point down. This increases the precision of our drawing, by declaring what we intend to do. From there the mark may miss those points, or it may nail them, it may overshoot, or whatever else - but prior to any of that, we have declared our intent, explaining our thought process, and in so doing, ensuring that we ourselves are acting on that clearly defined intent, rather than just putting marks down and then figuring things out as we go.

In our constructions here, we build up precision primarily through the use of the subdivisions. These allow us to meaningfully study the proportions of our intended object in two dimensions with an orthographic study, then apply those same proportions to the object in three dimensions.

Now, there are certainly ways in which your precision can be improved, and pushed farther. For example, if we look at how you've handled the proportional/orthographic studies for this construction, you've definitely employed some meaningful subdivision there, but the way you employed it gave you some loose landmarks (1/4, 1/2, 3/4) and you still eyeballed the relationship of each feature relative to these landmarks. To take that precision farther however, we can decide on the actual, specific position of each feature as a proportion along each dimension of space. So for example, relative to the height of the object, here we're pinning down more specific fractions for each specific element.

The important part to keep in mind here is that none of these are accurate - it's not like these things fall at such specific locations as to fit perfectly with 1/6th, or 5/24ths. These are approximations, but what matters most is that we are deciding, and we will stick to these decisions going forward. It's the act of making the decision that adds precision to our construction, and gives us something to specifically hold to as we move into 3D space.

Similarly, I did notice that on this staple gun, you ended up jumping right into the smooth curves. As explained here in the notes, it's better to first establish those curves as a chain of straight edges, or those curving surfaces as a chain of flat surfaces, which are then rounded out in the last step. And of course, the start and end points for each of those straight edges would be determined in the orthographic study, as clear decisions being made ahead of time.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that you appear to have used a different colour to lay down your subdivisions/scaffolding, then drew your actual object with a black pen. While this isn't a huge problem (my bigger concern is when students trace back over existing lines), it is something I advised against in the section where I give permission to use ballpoint pens. Stick to the same pen throughout the process, and avoid any situations where you may feel tempted to fully redraw lines that are already present from earlier stages of construction. Instead, leverage your line weight only to clarify the overlaps between different established forms, as explained here.

Anyway, these are all things you can certainly continue to work on, and which you will be able to demonstrate your understanding of in the last lesson. So, I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.