Starting with your form intersections, the intersections themselves are by and large looking quite good. I'm clearly seeing that your understanding of the relationships between these forms in 3D space are coming along quite well. There are a few little hiccups but by and large they're very minor - things like how the intersection between this sphere and cylinder ends up with more of a rounded, gradual transition between the two separate parts of the intersection, when there should be a sharp corner where we transition from one surface to an entirely different one. This is an issue that comes up here and there (for example here on this cylinder-box intersection), but I can also see a number of places where you've done this correctly. Just be sure to always remember - intersections run along the surfaces of these 3D forms, so when we jump from a surface oriented one way to a surface oriented very differently, there's going to be a sharp change in the intersection line's trajectory - in other words, a sharp corner.

The only other kind of issue I noticed in your intersections were cases where you might invert the curvature of a given intersection line - for example, here where the curves you drew would be sinking into the volume of the sphere rather than running along the curvature of its surface.

My bigger concern with your form intersection really falls back to the linework itself, and the approach you appear to be employing. I can definitely see signs that you're applying aspects of the ghosting method, like the little points present in various places, but I tend to see these more floating in arbitrary locations and specifically not as much where actual lines start and end. This suggests to me that you may be using the tool in some ways, but not expressly as part of the ghosting method - perhaps to plan out your boxes. Furthermore, I'm also seeing a lot of places where you go back over the same line multiple times, often without signs of planning/preparing between them, and more like you're doing so out of reflex.

Given that you often talk about what you feel or think students are supposed to be able to do by certain milestones throughout the course, it makes me suspect that this could be the result of that desire to see or even force that improvement. In this case that might manifest as purposely trying to draw more through reflex, and letting things flow out of you more naturally, rather than the kind of hyper-intentional planning-preparation-execution process that we employ here for every single mark we freehand. I can't of course know that for sure, but I'm attempting to come up with a reason. Regardless of the specific cause, it is causing you to deviate from the specific instructions of the course.

The way this course works is that by being extremely attentive to every action and choice we make, and giving ourselves as much time as we require to do that - setting aside any and every other personal goal or target - we gradually rewire the way in which our brains behave when performing actions automatically. A beginner left to their own devices will put down a ton of marks without really thinking it through. A beginner who's gone through the training of making each and every mark as intentionally and mindfully as they can however - when similarly drawing in an automatic fashion - will put down marks that work towards a purpose. Longer strokes rather than a series of short ones, and fewer strokes overall with each carrying considerably more weight/importance to work towards the goal of what it is they wish to produce. As a result, what they draw comes out more solid and cohesive than it would if the marks they were making were all over the place.

Drawabox does not train your conscious brain - it trains the automatic actions we take. Just as the ghosting method serves to rewire the way in which we make marks without thinking, constructional drawing is an exercise that forces our brains through solving countless 3D spatial puzzles, considering the relationships between them in space, and helping us to capture those kinds of 3D relationships even when drawing on a flat page. We learn to do this automatically, so that our conscious thought and cognitive resources can be focused entirely on what it is we wish to draw, rather than how.

But that is only achieved by following the process as it is prescribed, and every time you deviate from it you are making it considerably more difficult on yourself. Unfortunately that appears to be the theme of your work here.

Before we get to the meat of the lesson, your cylinders in boxes are generally okay, but with two important things to keep in mind:

• I'd recommend pursuing a little more convergence for those boxes - right now they appear to be drawn as though the goal is to keep the lines as parallel on the page as possible, which would be incorrect as explained here.

• Secondly - and this is only really relevant to number 2. When your boxes start getting stretched out in one dimension, it becomes very easy to miss out on pretty significant discrepancies with the minor axis lines, as shown here. Generally you want to try and keep your boxes as close to having ends with square proportions (so don't actively try and go in with boxes that are more stretched in the dimensions in which the ellipses would be placed), and then be sure to be extra attentive when identifying the minor axis lines.

Back to the material specific to this lesson, the first big point that jumped out at me was that you made the decision to freehand a lot of your linework here. The instructions from this section state the following:

This lesson, however, is going to be a little different. I am allowing, and in fact encouraging the use of the following:

• Ballpoint pen for your linework (don't switch pens to do any sort of "clean-up" pass - use the same pen through all your lines, including construction/box subdivision/etc)

• Brush pens for filling in large areas with solid black

• Rulers/straight edges for drawing precise construction lines

• Ellipse guides for constructing and aligning your ellipses

• French curves for any complex, curving lines

Whenever drawing freehand, I still want you to apply the methodology I've outlined in the past - the ghosting method, drawing through ellipses, and so on. That said, in this case it is inevitable that with all of the necessary construction lines, and the significance placed on precision, it's important for you to be able to use tools that will allow you to focus more on the meat of the lesson, which is really about the manipulation and construction of complex compound forms.

These are more or less the same instructions that are provided in Lesson 6. Looking back on the feedback I gave you there, I actually raised this issue back then.

Not only does freehanding your linework in this kind of task set you up at a steep disadvantage (in that a chunk of the mental resources you would have had to throw into all of the other extremely complex work involved in breaking down these complex structures and building them back up), there are also other extremely useful advantages that working with a ruler provides, which you are leaving on the table.

For example, a ruler can function as a physical extension of the trajectory of whichever line we're looking to draw. Without having to commit to a particular stroke first, we can assess how the line we're looking to draw converges with other lines within the construction, helping us to avoid critical issues that can make the remainder of a construction a lot more difficult than it needs to be. For example, it would help you to avoid the issue with this construction's bounding box having virtually no convergence (which given its orientation in space would be incorrect, for the same reason I noted in regards to your cylinders in boxes).

The last thing I wanted to call out is a matter of time. It's undeniable that you have invested a lot of time into this lesson in total, but what this lesson demands is a lot. You've already had a taste of it in Lesson 6 - this one is like that, but with structures that are considerably more complex, and therefore demand a lot more time. While I don't find it terribly useful to compare the results of any two different students, I do find there to be value in comparing how much time they invest in a given task - not to compare speed/proficiency, but rather the opposite.

Here's a time sheet breakdown from a student who completed Lesson 7 a couple years back. Her work was undeniably well done, but it was no small feat and required her to spend an average of six hours per subject, combining the time spent studying the object and putting together orthographic studies, and the time spent actually constructing the object in three dimensions.

This sounds like a lot, but it's more the upper end of average - I've had students who have at least on some vehicle constructions spent upwards of ten hours, although they may have spent much less on others. Again - this lesson is very demanding, being a considerably more challenging and complex version of Lesson 6.

You are not averse to putting a lot of time in - in fact, if we look at the revision you did for your Lesson 6 work, you spent upwards of three hours on a bottle of mouthwash - and that was fantastic to see. It demonstrated a level of patience and fastidiousness, a willingness to break things up across multiple sessions and simply whittle away at the work bit by bit.

That is not what we see here. Your orthographic plans do not follow the same level of detail and breakdown, you leave many landmarks unidentified and end up having to estimate/guess at them while building them in 3D (which just like opting to freehand your linework requires you to deal with even more complex problems at the same time, which is inevitably going to make the task as a whole way harder than it needs to be).

Now certainly, the lesson material has a long way to go in terms of having the demonstrations updated to line up with all of the points I call out in my homework feedback. As explained in Lesson 6, the demos largely don't feature this kind of dense and specific use of orthographic plans - but it is those students who do not receive official critique who are left at a disadvantage in that regard, at least as we continue to work through the overhaul. Those who work with us through the feedback get that information in the critiques they receive, so that they can continue forwards with those points in mind. And like them, you too have been given that information. It is up to you to apply it.

While I'm sure this will be a very unfortunate outcome, what you've submitted here is demonstrably not the best of which you are capable. You have done better in the past, you've adhered to the points raised in feedback to you much better than this, and you have shown that you can use that feedback to achieve far more than you believe yourself capable.

That means I'm going to hold you to that standard that I have seen you meet before - and so, as you have not given yourself as much time as you required to work through this lesson to the best of your current ability and have neglected numerous key instructions both in this lesson and from earlier in the course, I am going to ask you to redo this lesson in its entirety.

To that point, I have a question I would like you to answer. This question is not chastisement, nor is it intended to shame you. Rather, it is to better understand how you're approaching the work, and more importantly to give you the opportunity to reflect upon it:

How is it that you decide when an orthographic plan is finished? What factors or specific goals are you looking to meet when doing the orthographic plans, and at what point do you find those goals to be met? And as an extension of that question, Why does your approach here differ so dramatically from what we saw with the mouthwash bottle?

It's okay not to have an answer to these, although I would like to hear it if you have one. If you don't, it's not a huge problem - it simply means that it may not be something you really considered or thought about, and therefore were basing things off less tangible feelings of completion. This is very, very common in students, but it is exactly the thing we want to avoid. Any action we take should be the result of a conscious intent, or reasoning. The reasoning can be totally wrong - for example, "I drew a box with edges that diverge as they move farther away from the viewer because perspective states that lines diverge as they move farther from the viewer". A student who said that would of course be completely wrong, but it would explain why they approached something they way they did, and provide a concrete, identifiable misunderstanding to be corrected. That is much more useful than a student who simply wasn't really thinking about how their lines should behave.

Anyway, if you have questions, you can feel free to ask them in return - but I think what I've identified here is that you simply did not approach the lesson material as you should have, and made the task as a whole way harder than it needed to be. I can imagine that would have been more frustrating to deal with, which could in turn have made the situation that much harder, leading into a self-feeding cycle which could have made you feel like drawing simply isn't for you - when it was never about your drawing skills, but rather about the instructions you either were, or were not, following.