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

There's 2 quick things I need to address before starting:

• While the intent at organization is appreciated, in the future please just submit all your work in a single album. There's often things we're looking for across multiple exercises (easy example is the quality of your ellipses), and having to change windows and flip through tabs is a lot more tedious than just scrolling up and down a single page. The easier the process is for us the better and faster we can help people. If of course it's a submission with a lot of pages and your album host can't hold all of the images in a single album, then it's fine to split it as needed but ideally 1 page is the easiest to work with.

• I'm glad you enjoyed lettering your arrows but similarly I have to ask that you not doodle/letter/use your 50% time on your homework. It may seem a bit strict, but it distracts students from what they should be focused on in the exercise and that is effort better suited to the time you should be drawing for yourself. Apologies if it comes off super strict, it's just ultimately better if you focus on the task and then use that creativity for fun things on the side. Rather than getting half as much from the exercise and half the enjoyment you could be from doing something for yourself, you could be getting the best of both if they were separated.

With that out of the way let's get started.

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 with the arrows section you want to be making sure you're drawing confidently to keep your arrows as smooth as possible, accuracy will come with mileage. There are spots where your arrows bulge/narrow suddenly, this is an issue because it gives the impression that your arrows are stretching which hurts their solidity. Remember that as our arrows move closer to the viewer we want them to widen consistently. It's good to see that you're trying to implement line weight, just remember that you want to keep your applications subtle and you'll become consistent with mileage. here are some things to look out for when applying it. 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 your forms are getting a bit too complex or too simple to the point they're nearly ellipses. 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. Some of your line work here shows a lack of confidence as well, remember that our first priority is that we want all of our linework/ellipses/contours to be drawn confidently and mileage will improve our accuracy. Speaking of contours you're doing a good job trying to shift the degree of your contours so far, be sure to keep experimenting. 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. Quick reminder before moving on, remember that you should be drawing through all of your ellipses. This includes the small contour ellipses on the ends of your forms.

• 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. You also show that you're drawing from memory at times rather than giving yourself enough time to focus on your reference. Most of our time when doing exercises like this will be spent observing our reference and looking away for a quick second to add something to our page. 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.

• Moving into the Form Intersections section your forms are looking solid and like they belong in a single cohesive space, good work. In regards to the intersections themselves it seems like you're on the right track, but if you (like most people) feel like you may not fully grasp how to apply them just yet don't 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. I will quickly point out that you did make a mistake by creating multiple groups per page when you were asked to do a single large group as discussed here, but this is an easy thing to fix in your future attempts.

• While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you do a great job demonstrating that your sense of 3D space is developing as your forms begin to wrap around each other believably. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. When it comes to your shadows you're pushing them enough so that they cast rather than just hugging the form that creates them which is a great start. Your shadows appear to be following a consistent light source, be sure to experiment with different angles and intensities when trying this exercise again in the future. 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 move you on to the next lesson.

Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3!