Hey there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.

Overall you're off to a good start at grasping the concepts introduced in this lesson, I'll be listing off a few thing that I think you can do to improve your future attempts.

• Your arrows are looking confident and smooth, my only suggestion here would be to keep in mind how beneficial foreshortening the negative space between the curves of your arrows can be in terms of helping them look 3D. You definitely use this concept in some places but I feel like experimenting with it more will help your understanding. For a reminder of the concept you can look here. Another quick note is when you use hatching make sure you ghost and confidently draw each line, your later hatching is much tidier than it is with these arrows.

• Your organic forms with contours are mostly looking great, you do have the occasional sausage that is a bit too complicated or suffers from bloating or pinching but for the most part you kept them nice and simple. I can see that you tried to shift the contour's degree along the sausages length which is great, your ellipses are a bit rough as you mention in your submission. I get the impression the reason for this is that you're worrying about the boundaries you're creating and slowing down to ensure the ellipse fits inside of it (in this case trying to keep it fitting in the sausage form) remember that just like in lesson 1 it's best to break the boundaries you've established to keep your ellipse smooth, with proper technique your accuracy will improve over time. Lastly a quick note in regards to your contour lines, you want to have them overshoot and hook back a bit rather than just stopping at the edge of the form, it feels a little odd at first but I found thinking of them as half ellipses helped me grasp the idea easier, more on that idea here.

• In the textures exercises you're demonstrating good observational skills and paying attention to your reference rather than working from memory in the majority of cases but you're focusing largely on the shapes and outlines you see rather than on the cast shadows that would be created by forms along the texture. As a result because you're focused on these outlines and the negative space it makes it difficult to apply a gradient to the overall image, this occurs because you're attempting to explicitly draw everything you see and then once it's time to remove detail it feels like something is logically missing. By focusing on the shadows we are able to imply detail and as a result when we move towards an area with more light that removes some of the shadows our brain can still fill in the gap because of the implied information we were lead to believe earlier rather than having something suddenly disappearing and being jarring.

• These exercises in particular are quite difficult to wrap your mind around in the beginning and it takes a lot of mileage to re-wire your brain to work the way we want it too, it will be hugely beneficial to do so in the long run however because if we try to explicitly draw every detail on a larger piece it will become visually cluttered and lack focal points. There are definitely spots where you show that your brain is wrestling with these ideas and trying to break it's instinct of just worrying about outlines, your scale texture analysis and blackberry dissection are good examples of this. With a bit more mileage and experimentation I'm sure you'll start to grow more comfortable observing shadows rather than relying on outlines. You can read more on these concepts here.

• Your forms in the forms intersections exercises are well constructed and you attempted to draw the intersections which is great to see, intersections are another difficult concept to deal with and this just serves as an introduction. We will be going over them more in upcoming material and this exercise is merely 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.

• I only have 2 suggestions for your organic intersections and those are that you should make sure to practice your line confidence when drawing sausages because there's a bit of hesitation resulting in wobbly forms, and that you should experiment with your shadows more. Using simple forms like this is a great way to push shadows and learn how they would behave under a variety of lighting scenarios, just make sure to keep the lighting consistent in each picture. Overall though this exercise was well done and you kept your forms solid, didn't make them overly complicated and showed that you are grasping the idea of working in 3D space by having your forms wrap around each other in a way that makes sense.

• While writing the above paragraph I actually thought of one final suggestion that may be beneficial for your organic intersections. While it can create a bit of a visual mess if done poorly you may find it beneficial to draw through your forms entirely when doing this exercise, not only does it help build a stronger understanding of where things sit in 3D space but it would also likely help you in regards to your line confidence because you won't be worrying about trying to make things fit into certain spots.

Overall you did a good job through this lesson, you do need to work on your understanding of the textures exercises more so I would recommend reading through that section again and practicing them in your free time but I think you've shown an understanding of the important concepts taught here so I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you to lesson 3. Be sure to keep doing previous exercises as warm ups to build up your mileage and understanding of these tools, good luck.