Jumping right in with your arrows, you've done a pretty good job of keeping the focus on the confidence and fluidity of those side edges. While there is a bit of room for improvement on that front - there's very slight wavering to those edges - you're still making considerable headway towards avoiding the kind of erratic wobbling that can undermine the illusion that what we're looking at is a cohesive structure.

In addition to that, I can see that you're clearly considering not only how foreshortening applies to the positive space (the structure of the arrows themselves), but also to the negative space to great effect.

Looking at your sausage forms with contour lines, you've done a great job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages. Your contour ellipses and contour curves are also drawn with a great deal of confidence, which helps to maintain a nice even shape and the appropriate curvature to convincingly wrap around the sausage forms' surfaces. There's certainly room to continue improving with your accuracy, but that's normal and will continue to develop with practice. You are however pretty close already, and of course the confidence is what's most important.

There are two points I do want to draw to your attention however:

• When it comes to the degree of your contour lines, remember that barring any more drastic bending, they will get wider the further back away from the viewer we move along the length of a given sausage. So for example, here we've got two examples where they get narrower, and it looks a little off. It's not that this couldn't happen with enough bending, but it does need to be a conscious choice, and there needs to be a fair bit of bending to counteract the natural tendency.

• Keep in mind that the small ellipses on the tips of the sausages are contour curves just like any other, but because those tips are turned towards the viewer, we can see the full ellipse instead of just a partial curve. The key point here however is that the tip does need to be turned towards us for us to see the full contour ellipse, and therefore the contour curves that precede it should also give this impression. So you want to avoid cases like this where the contour curves are telling us that that end is turned away from us, but the ellipse tells us the opposite.

The updated video for this exercise which was released earlier this week goes into more detail about these points.

Continuing onto the texture section, one thing to keep in mind is that the concepts we introduce relating to texture rely on skills our students generally don't have right now - because they're the skills this entire course is designed to develop. That is, spatial reasoning. Understanding how the textural forms sit on a given surface, and how they relate to the surfaces around them (which is necessary to design the shadow they would cast) is a matter of understanding 3D spatial relationships. The reason we introduce it here is to provide context and direction for what we'll explore later - similarly to the rotated boxes/organic perspective boxes in Lesson 1 introducing a problem we engage with more thoroughly in the box challenge. Ultimately my concern right now is just how closely you're adhering to the underlying steps and procedure we prescribe (especially those in these reminders).

Despite all of my preamble about this being challenging, and students not being expected to do this well, you've done a great job. While I don't doubt that the further targeted practice of your spatial reasoning skills that will be coming up will continue to refine how you've approached these, as it stands you've demonstrated both a considerable willingness to lean into the approach explained in the reminders linked above, and in investing tons of time and care into the observation of your reference images.

Now there are certainly lots of areas where you use one-off strokes, so one thing to work on as you continue forwards is to try and stick to the two-step methodology of outlining/designing your shadow shapes, then filling them in. While it's true that there are certainly going to be shadows that are cast that are so small they can't reasonably be executed using our two step methodology, in such cases it's better to actually leave them out, for the following reasons:

• A designed shape, despite not being something we can create quite as small as a one-off stroke, tapers in a more nuanced, delicate fashion, whereas a one-off stroke is more likely to end in a manner that feels more sudden. Thus, the shapes lean better into our goal of creating a gradient that transitions from black to white (and ultimately we have to pick a point for the shadows to drop off altogether anyway, so pushing a little farther with singular strokes isn't strictly necessary).

• Drawing in one-off strokes allows us to lean more into drawing directly from observation (as opposed to observing, understanding the forms that we see as they exist in 3D space, then creating shadows based on that understanding), which can be very tempting as it can allow us to create more visually pleasing things without all of the extra baggage of thinking in 3D. But of course, 3D spatial reasoning is the purpose of this course.

All that said however, great work on this section.

Moving onto the form intersections, this exercise serves two main purposes:

• Similarly to the textures, it introduces the problem of the intersection lines themselves, which students are not expected to understand how to apply successfully, but rather just make an attempt at - this will continue to be developed from lessons 3-7, and this exercise will return in the homework in lessons 6 and 7 for additional analysis, and advice where it is deemed to be necessary). As it stands, you're tackling the intersections as we'd hope to see at this stage, and it seems that while the first page featured the kinds of mistakes that are entirely normal to see, your later pages already demonstrate a well developed understanding of the relationships between these forms.

• The other, far more important use of this exercise (at least in the context of this stage in the course) is that it is essentially a combination of everything we've introduced thus far. The principles of linework, the use of the ghosting method, the concepts surrounding ellipses along with their axes/degrees, perspective, foreshortening, convergence, the Y method, and so forth - all of it is present in this exercise. Where we've already confirmed your general grasp of these concepts in isolation in previous exercises, it is in presenting it all together that can really challenge a student's patience and discipline, and so it allows us to catch any issues that might interfere with their ability to continue forward as meaningfully as we intend.

As to this latter point - well, I'm sounding like a broken record here, but you've done a great job, and have demonstrated a considerable degree of patience and care. Actually I was ready to share one point with you that I have to call out for pretty much all students (which suggests that it's something I'll need to mention when I update the form intersection material), but upon closer inspection, you've largely handled it well. But regardless, I'll tell you anyway.

So the issue is that students tend to draw their cylinders with parallel edges on the page. At first I thought you did this as well, and I can see perhaps one case where you still appear to be doing so here, but in all the others you've added at least a slight amount of visible convergence. This is the correct approach, because our side edges would only be parallel if the cylinder were oriented perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight. If that's not our intent - and in this exercise it wouldn't be, given that we're rotating our forms arbitrarily in space - we'd have to have at least some minimal amount of convergence.

Anyway, lastly, your organic intersections demonstrate that you're clearly thinking about how these forms slump and sag under the influence of gravity, and you're leveraging your cast shadows to emphasize this to great effect. If I had to nitpick, one thing you can continue to work on is ensuring that every form is considered in terms of what kind of shadow it would be casting, and in which direction. As we see here, your light source seems to be coming more from the right side, but there were a number of forms that didn't quite project shadows where they certainly could. Also, for the shadow furthest to the right, I added a little more to follow the curvature of the sausage it was cast upon.

All in all, phenomenal work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.