Hey there, welcome back to the course I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.

You're making good progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson, below I'll be listing some things that will hopefully help you in your future attempts at these exercises.

• Starting in the arrows section I notice the start of a trend that occurs through the majority of your exercises where you demonstrate that you're demonstrating you understand what the concepts of the exercise are trying to teach you, but you are rusty/have potentially forgotten some of the earlier concepts from lesson 1 which makes your work rougher than it could be. You maintain a consistent width through your arrows for the most part, and prevent them from being flat looking by overlapping your edges which is great but your line quality is wobbly and lacking confidence in places. When it comes to your hatching and line weight it also gets quite messy and doesn't look appear like you spent as much time planning your lines with the ghosting method as you could have. One thing you can experiment more with in the future is foreshortening, you're off to a good start implementing it here but by utilizing it in both the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between their curves you can create a stronger illusion of your arrow moving through 3D space as seen here.

• You're close to keeping your organic forms with contours simple but do get a bit too complex with some of them. Remember our goal in this exercise is to create simple forms where both ends are the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. When it comes to the contours themselves you draw through your ellipses a few too many times, remember 2 or 3 times max is the sweet spot, and in the contour curves page you end up redrawing some of your lines which is a bad habit we try to discourage as much as possible. Part of the reason we work with ink is so we have to work around our mistakes and trying to redraw lines just makes things look messy, ghost and plan your line and then execute it confidently. You may not always hit your target but accuracy will come with mileage, confidence is our primary goal. It does appear like you're trying to shift the degree of your contours a bit which is good, but don't be afraid to push it 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 textures exercises you show that you have quite strong observational skills and that you're focusing more on shadows than outlines and negative space. This is something that people often struggle with but you're tackling the exercises with very small details and appear to be using a scratchy lines rather than outlining shadows and filling them in as instructed. This leads to a situation where as mentioned you're showing that you can learn the concepts here but you're kind of neglecting what has been taught to you earlier. 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. By choosing which shadows we group together and simplify we not only save time but can imply information which prevents the viewer from being overwhelmed by too much detail, take a look here to get a better idea of what we are aiming for in these exercises.

• If you feel like you don't fully grasp form intersections just yet don't worry, you're on the right track but right now 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. Overall this is a pretty good start but there are a few issues we can work on. Your lines get very messy here, especially in your line weight application. Remember that our goal with line weight is to be subtly add clarity to confusing areas with an extra line drawn confidently, a little goes a long way as you can see here. Your forms are a bit of a mix of results, some appear quite solid and in some your convergences aren't always consistent, overall though they appear to be in the same cohesive 3D space which is a sign that you're building up an understanding of the 3D space you're attempting to create.

• When we get to the organic intersections exercise it's a bit of a case of all the bad habits kind of culminate into one exercise. Your lines aren't always confident, you're redrawing a decent amount of them, your shadows are quite messy as well and don't appear like you outlined them first before filling them in which gives them rough edges. Some of your forms get a bit too complex here and without pushing your contours far enough it ends up flattening the forms out. I'm not sure which order you actually drew these pages in, but in terms of the submission order the first page bottom attempt is probably your strongest and tidiest. Don't be afraid of pushing your shadows further as well, currently they're mostly hugging the form creating them rather than being cast on to the form/ground below them.

I do apologize if this critique came off as a bit harsh, I know that I pointed out quite a few things that need to be worked on but know that I do so because I want you to see where you can work to improve. As I mentioned at the start of this critique a lot of these issues aren't actually with concepts that were taught in this lesson but issues that would have been worked on in earlier course content. Every lesson in this course builds upon each other and this is a pretty good example of why we stress to keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups, if your understanding of a previous lesson is weak then it serves as a weak foundation when you go to build more concepts on top of it.

I won't be moving you on just yet, we can address some issues here and and also get rid of some of that rust from being away for 10 months to get you back up to speed. We definitely encourage people to take their time, and of course life can get in the way of things at times (especially within this past year, it's totally understandable), but 10 months is quite a bit of time so it's normal to not be as comfortable with these concepts as you once were.

I'd encourage you to read through lesson 1 again just to re-familiarize yourself with some of the previous concepts, your line work is probably what held your submission back the most.

With that being said I'd like you to re-read and re-complete:

• 1 page of the organic forms with contours exercise

• 2 pages of the form intersections exercise

• 1 page of the organic intersections exercise

Once you've completed these pages reply to this critique, I'll go over them and address any issues that need to be worked on and move you on to lesson 3 once you've shown you're ready.

I know you can do this, and look forward to seeing your work. Don't stress too much, like riding a bike you'll find that you pick up everything again much quicker this time.