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

Before getting started I'd like to quickly address something. It's great that you're taking the time to reflect on your work and I definitely encourage you to do so in the future but I would like to ask you to not include it in your submissions if you don't mind. We won't read it until after we finish our critique so it doesn't influence our thoughts on your work and if it takes an extra 2-3 minutes to read through it may not seem like much but when multiple people do it it really begins to add up over time. In no way is it anthing personal against you, if you're passionate enough to self critique and share something you're interested in that's great! It's just a matter of keeping things running as smoothly as we can so we can get to everyone at a reasonable pace. All that being said if you have any questions then feel free to ask them, we of course want to help you if you feel you don't understand something it's just a bit of hassle if we have to read through multiple paragraphs to get to them.

With that out of the way:

• Your notes are for yourself so don't worry about your hand writing for us.

• Scanners actually tend to ramp up the contrast and blow out some lighter lines so don't feel obligated to get one, these images are totally fine.

• The Pentel Arts Pocket Brush is a really nice brush pen and it's refillable with cartridges which is pretty convenient. It may be on the pricier side and cheaper alternatives are totally fine, especially when doing exercises like this which aren't expected to be pretty.

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. You're doing a good job maintaining a consistent width as your arrows widen while moving closer to the viewer and with more mileage you'll become more consistent. This is a good exercise to experiment with line weight but when applying it we want to make sure we do subtly to key areas like overlaps to give clarity to our forms. Here are some things to look out for when applying line weight, and here are some reminders on how to apply it subtly. 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 some of your forms are getting a bit too complex. We want to create our forms with both ends being the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. You're keeping your line work confident here which is great, if you feel uncomfortable working with contours still don't stress with more mileage it'll become more natural. 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.

• In the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines and negative space 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.

• 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. For the most part your forms are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, there is the occasional line wobbling occurring so be mindful that your lines should be confident.

• While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you show that you need a bit more time becoming comfortable with thinking of how these forms interact in 3D space and how they'd wrap around one another. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. When drawing your shadows you don't push them far enough to cast, instead they mostly hug the form creating them, try pushing them further. It appears like your shadows aren't following a consistent light source, 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!