Starting with your arrows, you're generally doing a good job of executing these with a lot of confidence. Just look out for one thing - in cases like this where you hit a bend close to the arrow head, you tend to fall into the mistake explained here - that is, where the outside of the turn ends up having to stretch, and the inside edge has to compress. Also, looking at your second page, you have a tendency to leave some gaps that should be closed off as shown here.

Continuing onto your organic forms with contour lines, great work sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages. By and large you're doing this quite consistently, and there aren't many cases where you deviate from those characteristics (and when you do, it's in fairly small ways, showing that your intent is still to maintain them).

When it comes to the contour lines themselves however, there are some issues I want to address:

• You appear to be drawing your contour lines with the same degree throughout the length of the sausages, which is incorrect. Instead, as explained in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, the degree actually changes, getting wider as we slide farther away from the viewer along the sausage, and getting narrower as we get closer to the viewer. In that video, I demonstrate this concept with some physical props, so that may help. I also explain it here in this exercise's notes.

• On the contour curves, you're specifically drawing all of your contour curves to be fairly wide. Technically this is not a different issue from the previous one, but I wanted to call it out anyway.

• Also, when doing your contour curves, you're running into the issue explained here - not only do your contour curves not accelerate in their curvature to give the impression that they hook back around the other side, you're actually having the lines themselves shoot right off the sausage altogether, breaking the illusion that we're looking at lines that run along the surface of a 3D form. Try overshooting your curves in the manner demonstrated in that link.

• Lastly, when doing the organic forms with contour curves, it helps to place a full contour ellipse right on the tips of the sausages that face towards the viewer. Technically the contour curves and contour ellipses are the same - it's just that in this version of the exercise, we're drawing only the portion of the curve that would be visible (plus a bit of overshoot to get the curvature right). When we have a tip of the sausage facing the viewer , we're able to see enough of that surface that we'd see the whole contour ellipse all the way around. You can see this in this example from the exercise, as well as in this diagram.

Moving onto your texture analyses, there are some instructions you missed, and some points that I feel I can offer to help you make more sense of this exercise:

As for what you missed, the solid black bar along the left side of the gradiet serves a purpose. The following is from the second paragraph of this section:

The left side of the texture has a thick black bar on it. Imagine that the right side has an equally thick white bar, where no lines may be drawn. In between these two bars, I want you to use your texture to transition from black to white, left to right. I'd recommend starting towards the center, as this is where you're going to get the most detail due to the balance of light and dark. As you move to the left, let your shadows deepen and grow larger, and make sure they blend seamlessly into the black bar. As you move to the right, let your shadows get blasted out as they get closer to the light source, leaving only those in the deepest cracks where textural forms meet.

Unfortunately you appeared to miss the instruction that this black bar is meant to effectively disappear into the texture - or rather, its right-most edge should blend seamlessly into the texture, making it impossible io identify where the bar ends and the texture begins, as shown here.

As for the advice I think will help you make more sense of this exercise - texture as we study it in Drawabox is all about understanding and communicating the presence of specific forms, one at a time. I think one point many students get confused about is that when we talk about cast shadows, they feel that they're supposed to find cast shadows in their reference image, then transfer them to their drawing. This unfortunately is incorrect, because as a process it involves going from 2D (the reference image) directly to 2D (the page you're drawing on) with no understanding of how that texture exists in three dimensions.

In truth, you're not meant to pull shadows from the reference image - instead, you pull forms from the reference, one by one, understand how it is they sit in 3D space and how they relate to their neighbouring surfaces, then imply their presence in your drawing by capturing the shadow they would cast, given your own lighting scenario (in other words, not necessarily the same lighting as the reference image).

So for example if we look at your melted wax texture, what you drew ended up coming off much more as a collection of squiggly lines. Now I've kind of rushed through this demonstration as I have a ton of critiques to get to, but this may help you better understand how to think about this exercise.

Note that only the gradient at the bottom is what we actually draw - the top one is a visualization of the forms we're actually placing on the surface, and the second is how we're thinking about the shadows each form casts. Obviously I'm not transferring anything except for the kinds of forms I'm seeing in my reference - no shading, no shadows, etc. Just the forms, or rather my understanding of them. My understanding of those forms helps me decide what kinds of shadows they'll cast (and so I "design" them by drawing their outlines first, before filling them in).

This approach of first designing the shadows, then filling them in helps us to think about how each shadow's shape is meant to imply the presence of a form - if you aren't thinking about the specific relationship between the shadow being cast, and the form casting it, then it's not going to imply the form correctly.

Now I'm not going to spend much time on your dissections, but I did want to call out that there are a couple cases here where you actually did this better than the rest: the melted wax there does far better to demonstrate each glob of wax's presence (with the only shortcoming being that your use of lines tends to be less dynamic - working with shapes that you have to outline and then fill will help, as shown here). The other is the silk cloth, where you worked heavily with filled shapes, and while there's room for improvement, it's a big step in the right direction in terms of implying the presence of those big folds of cloth.

Continuing onto your form intersections, I noticed that y ou don't appear to be using the ghosting method when drawing your lines here - at least, I'm not seeing you laying down your intended start and end points. The ghosting method is at the core of how we make marks throughout this course - it's not something you're going to be leaving behind, but rather a methodology you're going to take forward with you beyond this course. It's less about specifically putting points down (although there's no reason not to when drawing straight lines), but rather about the three distinct stages:

• Planning, where we identify the nature of the mark we want to make, what purpose it serves, etc. and find a comfortable angle of approach.

• Preparation, where we ghost through the drawing motion to get familiar with it.

• Execution, where we make the mark with a single, confident stroke, free from hesitation.

Right now it looks like the planning phase is not receiving enough attention.

As for the intersections, I certainly don't expect students to be comfortable at all with understanding the way in which these forms relate to one another in space. That's something we develop more comfort with as we progress. That said, I can share a few tips on how to think about approaching your intersections (and what not to do), which you'll find in this diagram.

Currently what you're doing is mostly the second point - just tracing back over the edges that fall within the area in which the two forms' silhouettes overlap on the page. Remember that the intersections are themselves new edges - you're not merely going back over the ones that already exist, but rather introducing a new mark that defines lines that run along the contour of both forms' surfaces simultaneously.

Obviously this exercise is hard, but I think you ended up getting stuck in approaching them all in this way, which blocked you off from considering any other approach to the problem. So hopefully crossing this one out will help give you an opportunity to try something different. I will however say this - the intersection line is like a "seam" or even a weld line that comes from fusing two forms together. So for example, if you fused two boxes together, there would exist a seam that comes from the fact that you're connecting planes at different angles to one another. You can see this demonstrated here where the line AB are created by the meeting of the blue and orange planes, and the line BC is created by the meeting of the blue and green planes.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along decently. There's plenty of room for improvement, and that'll come with practice, but there's two main things I wanted to call out:

• While many more of your contour lines here do hook around, some of them still show that same issue where, as seen here, they fly off the surface of the sausage.

• Also, while you're placing ellipses on the tips, you've got cases like these where the contour curves tell us that end is facing away from the viewer, but the ellipse tells us they're facing towards the viewer, resulting in a contradiction.

Now, I have identified a number of issues that we should address before moving forwards, so I'm going to assign some revisions below.