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

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 in the arrows section your lines are looking smoothly and confidently drawn. 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 you're doing a good job keeping your forms simple, plenty of people tend to over-complicate them. That being said I encourage you to draw them a bit longer going forward, leaving them this short tends to make it difficult when trying to wrap them around one another. You're keeping your line work confident here which is great, if you feel uncomfortable working with contours still don't stress with more mileage it'll become more natural. 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. Last thing for this section, don't forget to draw through all your ellipses including the small contour ellipse on the end of your forms.

• In the texture section you're demonstrating good observational skills by being able to separate and clearly focus on the cast shadows formed along your reference. There's room to push your gradient more which you noted. Try to think of the forms composing your texture as an array of triangles (if the form is rounded then the highest point would be the highest point of our triangle). Then imagine that your light source is a vanishing point, a light ray will extend from it's source though the highest point of your triangle until it collides with another surface. The space in between the highest point and where that light ray collided will be shadow. You'll notice that as a form moves further from the light source or becomes taller the larger the shadow will become.Here's a demo demonstrating the idea. Before moving on to the next section I'd like to quickly point you to this image which shows that when working with thin line like textures we benefit from outlining and filling the shadow's shape rather than just drawing a line. We get much more dynamic and interesting results this way. Remember that each texture is it's own challenge so be sure to experiment with different types when practicing this exercise in the future.

• It's quite common for people to feel like they don't fully grasp the form intersections exercise, if you feel like you may fall into this category try not to 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.Your forms are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, good work.

• 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. Draw larger, throughout your submission you have the tendency to draw quite small. In this case it prevents you from stacking more forms because you have no room to work.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!