Hi there, I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.

You're making progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson, I'll be listing some things below that you can work on to achieve better results in your future attempts.

• In the arrows exercise I have 2 quick notes for you. The first is I'd like you to work on the smoothness of your arrows, at times your lines wobble and the width of your arrows don't transition consistently. Try to avoid pinching and bloating and have the arrows widen/narrow consistently. I'd also like you to experiment more with foreshortening, you try to utilize it in the arrow itself but have a habit of going from quite narrow to extremely wide rather quickly. On the topic of foreshortening you can also try to implement it more in the space between curves of your arrow, by using it in this space along with the arrow you'll sell a stronger illusion of an arrow moving through 3D space as seen here.

• When it comes to organic forms with contours you want to work on keeping your forms simpler. Our goal in this exercise is to create forms where both ends are the same size, and avoid pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form as discussed here. Your contours appear stiff and do wobble quite a bit which shows you aren't drawing them as confidently as you could be. I'd like you to work on trying to shift the degree of your contours as well. 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 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. 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.

• If you feel like you don't fully grasp form intersections just yet don't worry, 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. Your forms here are mostly looking pretty solid, you may find distancing them from each other a bit more makes it a bit less overwhelming as you tend to draw forms deeply intersecting with one another.

• As for your organic perspective exercise I do notice some regression in your habits here, I think this may be due to the fact that you started this lesson in july and it's been such a long time since you've possibly worked on a lot of these concepts. (I'm not sure if you were drawing at all in this time or busy with life, things happen and it's understandable.) Your lines are noticeably less confident, you're redrawing lines, your forms appear flatter and less solid, and they don't wrap around each other as believably as they could showing less comfort working in 3D space. Your shadows are ok, I'm glad that you actually tried to push them so they cast but they could be more consistent. When trying this again I'd suggest making your initial form smaller, right now it's taking up the majority of your page and making it difficult for you to work around, try laying down forms across one another and stacking upwards, push your light source to the upper left or right corner and think of how all these factors interact in 3D space, how and where shadows would be produced.

Overall this wasn't a bad submission but you do have things to work on, I won't be moving you on just yet because I need to make sure you understand the concepts that you've been taught so far as well as make sure you shake any rust off your skills.

I'd like you to re-read and re-submit:

• 2 pages of the organic forms with contours exercise.

• 2 pages of the organic intersections exercise.

Once you've completed these pages reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll go over them and address anything you need to work on and move you on once you're ready.

I know you can do this, I look forward to seeing your work.