Starting with your form intersections, this is an exercise that basically grows with us as we move through the course - which is why, though it's introduced in Lesson 2, we don't actually start worrying about critiquing the intersection lines themselves until we assign it as part of Lessons 6 and 7. At this stage, we still don't expect students to be able to do things anywhere near perfectly - what we generally hope to see though is that students are fairly comfortable with intersections invoving flat surfaces (so boxes/pyramids), but to still have issues when curving surfaces are added to the mix.

Looking at your work, you're not far from that mark, but there are some concerns I have that are actually making this exercise harder for you than it needs to be. In regards to this exercise, it basically falls to two main points:

• Most notably, you're drawing "through" your intersections (in the sense of drawing through forms, where we draw both the structures facing the viewer and those facing away from the viewer, like we have x-ray vision. We ask students to do this for their forms because, while it does add complexity and difficulty, it is an amount that we deem reasonable and provides a benefit that makes that exchange well worth it. In the instructions for the form intersections exercise, if you look at the actual demos for this from Lesson 2 however, we do not want students drawing through their intersection lines, as this provides a minimal benefit while also making the exercise much more difficult and confusing - and in a lot of situations this can actually take away from the value of the exercise.

• To a much lesser extent, I am seeing little signs that when going through your linework, you may not be adhering to the separation of steps of the ghosting method as closely as you should be - and as closely as you perhaps feel you are. This is actually a fairly common issue, and in your case it's not as dire as others - but I am seeing signs that instead of investing all of your time into the planning and preparation phases (where we identify the nature of the mark we wish to make, and then go through the motion it requires of us to familiarize our arm), and then executing what was practiced confidently so as to achieve a smooth stroke, you have likely steadily shifted to spending less time in the planning/preparation phases, and compensated by taking more time in the execution phase - resulting in more hesitation. I really mean it when I say this is only manifesting to a fairly minor degree - so don't think of it as a big correction, just a reminder to be extra aware of every step you're applying, and what its purpose is meant to be. It's very easy to slip away from the ghosting method without realizing it, because it takes so much time, going through 3 distinct phases per line. Of course, it's still necessary - we want to be hyper intentional with every choice and decision we make throughout this course so that we can most effectively rewire our underlying habits and instincts. The goal is that outside of the course, we can leave those things to our subconscious, freeing us up to focusing more on what it is we wish to draw, rather than how - but that requires things to be quite tedious and time consuming here.

Now in terms of helping you push forward on the exercise itself, I've made a couple notes on one of your pages, here, but I think this diagram might be more useful. It basically demonstrates how you take one of the surfaces involved in an intersection, and think of it as though it were the blade of a knife - meaning it dictates the direction of the cut. So with the pyramid/box intersection I focused on with your page, the orientation of the cut was following the axis/orientation of the pyramid. Admittedly that intersection was really hard to draw - partially because of the orientation of the forms, but also because you opted to draw through the intersection, as discussed above.

For the sphere-box intersection on your page, the main issue there is just that the curvature of the intersection was much more dramatic than it should have been, resulting in it not following the surface of the sphere. It helps a lot to analyze each individual surface and how it's curving/moving through space. As shown in the diagram linked in the previous paragraph, we can look at each individual cross-sectional slice of the sphere (again, dictated by the planes of the box working as a knife blade), and then use these to establish the components of our intersection line, which are then simply stitched together. Additionally, it helps to remember that whenever we cross an edge, we're moving from one surface being relevant to another, giving us a dramatic change in our intersection line's trajectory. We can see something similar with the cylinder-sphere intersection at the bottom right of your page - same idea, but intersections between two curving surfaces are definitely among the hardest we run into, and I don't expect students to be more comfortable with that until Lesson 7.

Continuing onto your object constructions, I'll be upfront - your work here is pretty rough, and there are a lot of tools that the lesson itself provides - in terms of techniques and methodologies for solving certain kinds of problems that you are not using, or that you are using to a minimal extent at best.

So for example,

• When dealing with the curves of your hourglass, you didn't opt to use this technique for building up specific curves using chains of straight edges.

• Your use of subdivision was at times very minimal, resulting in orthographic plans that did not identify key landmarks (so for example, on your measuring tape you had to estimate by eye just how much the lip at the bottom right of the orthographic plan would occupy of the overall bounding box), and despite the section that discusses orthographic plans using a bottle of mouthwash as an example, you didn't opt to follow that approach.

This leaves me with a fairly strong suspicion that you may not have taken as much care or time in going through the lesson material that was available, and as such, were not in a position to do the homework of this lesson to the best of your current ability - since you neglected to give yourself key information that was available. It's important to remember that we're only able to provide the official critique program (in which we pay our TAs more than what students pay us to receive the same feedback, something that is only balanced out by those who allow credits to expire) by requiring students to instead take on the burden of having to do everything in their power to make use of the resources that are available. Normally when we feel students have not met their responsibilities in this exchange, we cancel homework submissions - but in this case, I opted not to. I'm not saying this to be cruel, just to give you a clear idea of how critical it is that you do everything you can to absorb and apply what is present. Everything beyond that, we will help you with - but we need that as a basis.

Now, as that standard was not met, I will be asking for you to redo this lesson in full - mainly because I think that it'll make enough of a difference if you take your time and apply orthographic plans as thoroughly as you can (as shown in the mouthwash bottle demo) to specifically identify all of your major landmarks before transferring them to 3D space. Before calling this critique finished however, I wanted to address your question about the soldering iron station.

I wouldn't handle it as branches, because that lacks the structure to help us keep the segments of the spring spaced out. Basically, we want to work from big overall structures to small ones - the spring itself isn't as important as the structure the spring creates, which is the cone.

Here's how I would tackle it:

• First draw the cone and place little marks for where each spring segment will be, so they're spaced out as evenly as we can manage

• Then draw a series of ellipses for each mark

• Connect each ellipse with a curve on one side, giving us a continuous line that goes from the top to the bottom, winding around the cone. Now we basically have one edge of the silhouette of our spring

• Draw the remaining edge.

Note, this is not remotely easy. It is an extremely difficult challenge to tackle - and that brings me to an important point. What you choose for your constructions, the objects themselves, do not need to be complicated. In fact, it's much, much better that they're not complicated. All we want to see is that you understand and can apply the principles the lesson covers, so that the tools themselves - the techniques, methodologies, etc. - are things you understand. Often times opting for more complex objects to draw will make it that much harder to demonstrate your understanding, as much of your cognitive resources will be taken up by handling that extra complexity.

Conversely, opting for a simpler object to draw will both help you benefit more from the exercise, and will help you demonstrate your understanding much better.

So, as mentioned above, I will be asking for a full redo of this lesson, which when completed you will have to submit anew - and which will cost you an additional 2 credits.