Questions are absolutely fine, but in the future, please stick to bullet points. Reading through your 1500 word response is no small task. Keeping your questions concise would help me save a great deal of time. I totally get that a good bit of this is reiteration and self-reflection, and that's great - but you really should do that on your own, rather than having me spend half an hour to hunt down each bit that actually pertains to me.

Arrows

From what you are telling me, it seems that it would be okay to go through the motion of ghosting original lines to add weight, even though it means that I will inevitably draw new lines next to the original ones, in which case it wouldn't add weight to them at all...

Every single drawing in this course is an exercise, and the process itself and what it helps us learn and develop in our skills is infinitely more important than the end result. If you end up with two lines sitting next to one another with a gap between them, instead of a single line that reads as being a bit thicker, that's perfectly fine because it is one stroke of thousands you'll be drawing.

Conversely, if you focus on what gets you accuracy now (tracing slowly, using your wrist, etc.) that wobbling won't decrease nearly as reliably, given practice and time, in the way that accuracy does improve with practice.

Would I still have to use my entire arm or would it suffice to just use my wrist and trace over that little portion?

Use your entire arm.

Contour Lines

I'm confused as to how you would be able to see confidence either way in lines that are not committed

I don't really know what you're referring to here, in regards to "committed" marks. If a mark exists on the page, and is visible, then we can assess whether or not it maintains a purely consistent trajectory, or if it wobbles with a lack of confidence.

What if I did so, only then for me to be told that I have to work yet again on line weight? Which one do you want? – Motion? Weight that commits to original or "local area" lines?

Again, I'm kind of confused - this exercise has nothing to do with line weight. At no point in the instructions are you requested to add line weight. It is only about drawing simple sausage forms and wrapping contour lines around their surfaces.

Is it just a matter of letting my accuracy improve over time and that I simply can't do anything about having both confident motion and good line weight for the time being?

As explained in the production-line analogy you've since read, the ghosting method exists to split the process of mark making into three distinct phases. The first two are where we invest our time, and how we can effectively do our best to improve our chances of accuracy. That doesn't guarantee perfect accuracy, but it makes a difference. Beyond that, yes - we have to accept that our mechanical skill, which will improve with practice, will only allow for a certain degree of accuracy and control right now.

Texture Analyses

How could I make wood fibers pop if they do not even protrude?

Here it comes down to a matter of resolution - or you could think of it as how closely you are zoomed into the surface. Wood is an exceptionally smooth surface, and only when we look at it REALLY closely does the magnitude of its unevenness become more apparent. If you want to capture it as anything other than smooth, you'll need to do your study from that close up.

would you say it would be better for me to think of 3D gradients as solid shadow shapes created by the bigger bumps on the surface? Since I was looking at a wood plank, there was not much difference on the surface at all—only the numerous fibers that didn't protrude seemed to qualify as "texture"—, so it may have been a bad choice of reference.

Correct!

Still, were it not for the words you've attached next to them, I wouldn't be able to identify some of them (like the hairy arm, bark or concrete). Perhaps even this is not something that I should focus on.

I'm actually planning on doing a pretty heavy revision as soon as I have the time of a lot of the video material throughout all the lessons (they're getting kind of old at this point), and I do want to try to re-explore how to communicate certain matters regarding this exercise. So your uncertainty and confusion here is understandable.

This exercise really is, again, just about thinking about forms on surfaces. Recognizability isn't actually all that important, and you'll find that even when dealing with actual illustrations and finished works, there will be so much information providing context to a given texture. The texture itself will never be alone in conveying the identity of an object or surface, and in circumstances where it might, you'll find that were you to take a picture of a surface without any other context, you may find it equally difficult to identify.

These lessons will, time and time again, demand that you focus only on the narrow scope of information presented to you and not to introduce your own concerns to it. That is where a lot of your issues seem to be arising:

• We stress the use of the ghosting method, executing our marks with confidence to maintain our first priority of smooth strokes (remember that this priority was stated back in Lesson 1 - flow is always more important than accuracy). But because you're concerned with your accuracy now, you distract yourself from that goal and deviate from the instructions.

• In the organic forms with contour lines, you worry about the use of line weight, when this exercise never asks for line weight to be applied at all. It addresses a limited set of problems in order to provide a more refined focus, and to be more effective as an exercise.

Long story short, don't treat every exercise as being intended to help you with develop every skill. Each exercise has its purpose, and it should only be concerned with that limited purpose. Nothing more.

Form Intersections

what the third step accomplishes is out of my control, except for the fact that I choose to be either hesitant or confident

Yes.

turn out to be a mistake and that this is the type of mistake that you want to see instead of having students try to cover them up by choosing to be "hesitant"

Correct!

Thus, accuracy is left up to the previous two steps, but the third one—the actual markmaking—only serves to deliver something "confident".

Exactly!

I guess I would just have to redo every exercice that demands ghosting lines until, somehow, I happen to get it "right" by pure luck, and I use the word "luck" because that's how it feels regardless of the first two steps.

As discussed back in Lesson 0:

Yes, I know - you will not likely feel satisfied with your results on this first-ever attempt at the exercises. You will feel inclined to try them again. Don't. The focus here is not on impressing someone - not me, not the community, not even yourself. There is no expectation that you will be able to do these exercises perfectly, and some of them are specifically designed to be an introduction to a concept where you will fall flat on your face. Accept this now, and it will save you a lot of grief in the future.

You appear to be under the impression that you are expected to demonstrate your ability to do the exercises perfectly (or even correctly) in order to have the lesson marked as complete. This is incorrect. You will not be able to do the work perfectly, which is precisely why you are expected to continue to practice those exercises as part of a regular warmup routine.

The homework you are assigned is simply to create a body of work that helps us assess whether you do or do not understand the concepts conveyed in the lesson (understanding something is entirely different from being able to apply it in practice), and whether you understand the goals you should be aiming for.

By the very instructions, you are not allowed to keep redoing the work over and over until you're satisfied, because your own satisfaction is irrelevant. All that is asked of you is that you follow the instructions to the best of your ability (they are dense, one can certainly forget things, and I understand this happens even with the best of intentions), and that you invest the time necessary to execute the marks to the best of your ability. If your capacity for accuracy and control (while maintaining appropriate confidence) simply isn't there yet, that's entirely normal. You have your limits, and all I ask is that you not rush through the work so I can see what they are.

I read all the written instructions and watch the videos linked to them at least once before doing the exercices—that is, until I have a pretty good idea of what I should do. They are quite lengthy, so I do happen to forget some details as time goes on.

As I mentioned before, I totally understand this. Students make mistakes, they miss things, even when they're trying their best. Reading through the instructions multiple times is often necessary, because it is dense. It's dense because the material is complicated, and it's dense because frankly I'm a very wordy person and am continually trying to find ways to be more concise (which is why I rewrite the material periodically - we're likely on the third or fourth version of the course at this point).

Just to reiterate, and I'm not saying this to be mean - in the future, if you have questions, keep them short and keep them to the point. You apparently share in my own weakness for long, drawn out explanations, and unfortunately I only have so much time.

At the end of the day, you've expressed, to a point, that you understand the material, but words aren't worth much. We'll see that understanding reflected in your revisions, where my past six years of critiquing thousands of homework submissions will come to bear. One's lines speak volumes of their own, and they often speak truths of which the student themselves may be unaware.