Jumping right in with your arrows, when it comes to the way in which the side edges are drawn, your results are somewhat mixed. The main issue I'm seeing is that when you build up your side edges with separate segments, but the segments don't flow smoothly into one another, as shown here. This undermines the sense that we're looking at a single continuously flowing structure.

While drawing your second edge in segments is something we briefly mentioned was allowed in the previous instructions (which you would have been following when completing your work), albeit with the caveat to "make sure that these flow smoothly and flow directly into one another", this is something we've removed from the instructions since updating the material very recently with the release of new videos for this first section of Lesson 2. We actually do introduce a methodology for building up complex paths in segments in Lesson 3's branches exercise, and but at this point I've found that it's better to have students attempt to execute both side edges in one go, despite the potential inaccuracy that can result.

Aside from that, and cases like this one where you've taken that build-up-in-segments approach and pushed it further towards not drawing through parts of the arrow, your arrows are otherwise well done. You are clearly taking the application of foreshortening to the positive space of the arrows (the arrow structure itself) quite seriously, including a substantial size differential between the closer/farther ends, and I can see signs that you are taking the negative space (the gaps between the zigzagging sections, which also compress the further back we look) into consideration, albeit to a lesser degree. That said, it would be a good idea to watch the new video for the exercise as one of the more notable changes is that it talks about the negative space in greater depth. Similarly, this updated section in the written material also explores the negative space further than before.

Looking at your organic forms with contour lines,

• I can see that you're making an effort to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages. You are encountering varying levels of success on this, but the main issue I want you to be more mindful of is ensuring that you're executing the whole shape in one go. There are lots of cases where you piece them together with at least two separate strokes, as we see here and here, and like in the arrows, this results in marks that do not flow together smoothly, and thus don't create a cohesive enough structure to maintain the illusion of solidity. While this is a normal issue to encounter in one location (where our sausage shape's loop closes), and is something that improves with practice, you should not be breaking it up into more segments as this will further exacerbate the problem.

• Another point worth mentioning in the same vein as the previous point is that you may be prone to executing those marks more from your elbow (and potentially at times your wrist) rather than using your whole arm from the shoulder, and that can make it harder to maintain a consistent trajectory (thus making it harder to get separate segments, or the closing of the loop, to be seamless). This is also something I'm seeing in your contour curves, and to a lesser degree in your contour ellipses - the shoulder serves as an important stabilizer, allowing us to maintain the confidence of a stroke while slowing it down enough to achieve more even shapes for our ellipses, and the appropriate curvature for our contour curves that captures the illusion that the mark is wrapping around a rounded form. Another big factor for this is ensuring that you're using the ghosting method.

Overall, there are a lot of ways in which you're moving in the right direction, but the way in which those sausages are broken down into separate segments, and the contour curves specifically tend to be drawn in a way that suggests more use of your wrist/elbow, does make me think that this exercise may be worth revisiting, so we will be assigning some revisions on that front. Definitely watch the new video on this material however, as there are things covered and demonstrated there that may help - including showing the use of my arm while I draw sausages from multiple angles, and more material talking about how to think about the degree of the contour lines, and so forth.

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).

In your texture analyses, I can see that you appear to be making some concerted use of this methodology outlined in the reminders linked above, although there are spots in the dissections where, as we see here, you're "painting" those shadow shapes on, stroke by stroke, rather than intentionally designing how you want the shadows to be shaped, before filling that in. This being the strongest example of it (and being intended to be hair) does suggest however that this may have been specific to this case.

Moreover, though you do employ the two-step process from the reminders in some cases for sure, it's more as one tool amongst many others, including those one-off strokes as we see here (so in other words, another example of textural marks that haven't been first intentionally designed). 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.

To be clear however, this is all entirely normal. We expect to see issues like this, and simply call them out so students have a better sense of how to engage with texture going forward. As a whole, your texture material is coming along as we expect to see, and you're demonstrating an increasing degree of patience and care with how you observe your reference and apply it, bit by bit, to your page.

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 approaching your intersection lines as we'd hope to see, clearly engaging with thinking through the relationships between the forms as they sit in 3D space, so no worries there.

• 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, I think that overall you're demonstrating a fair bit of patience and care (admittedly more than was necessarily shown in the arrows/contour lines exercises). There are definitely cases where you're struggling with some of your ellipses, but it's not a consistent issue - it's most present in page 3, with the 2nd and 4th pages' ellipses generally being fine. This suggests to me that you may be going back and forth in the use of your whole arm from the shoulder, which aligns with the points I raised earlier in the critique.

Two other points to keep in mind:

• When drawing your cylinders, remember that you should not be defaulting to drawing the side edges as being parallel on the page, as this only occurs when the intention is to orient those edges (and the cylinder as a whole) such that they run perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight, not slanting towards or away from the viewer through the depth of the scene. If this is not your intent - and in this exercise we're rotating our forms arbitrarily so it wouldn't be - be sure to always include some minimal amount of visible convergence to those side edges.

• I did notice some spots where you arbitrarily went back over an edge as we see here. If your intent is to add line weight, then keep in mind that within the bounds of this course, we generally want to stick to using and applying line weight in the manner explained here back in Lesson 1. If however it was an attempt to correct or sure-up a mark that was less successful (for example, the ellipse in that case which didn't come out great), within this course we want you to let your marks stand for themselves - no correcting or adjusting them after the fact. This puts our brain in a position to better learn from those mistakes, whereas correcting them can make our brains feel that the issue has been addressed in some form, making it less likely that we'll be as attentive to the circumstances that caused it in the first place.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along well. You're clearly giving thought to how they slump and sag over one another, under the influence of gravity, and the way in which you've approached your cast shadows shows that you're thinking specifically about the surfaces those shadows are cast upon - complete with having those shadows respond to where they shift from falling onto the rounded surface of one sausage, onto another, or onto the ground plane - although exaggerating these changes will help further emphasize the spatial relationships involved.

As mentioned before, before I mark this lesson as complete, I do want to assign some revisions so we can confirm your understanding of a few points raised in this critique. You'll find them assigned below.