I was going to leave this for tomorrow (Tofu asked me to do the critique for your submission, and I try to do my critiques M/W/F so I can have full days dedicated to handling other non-critique Drawabox work), but I saw that you mentioned tomorrow was going to be your birthday, and I did not want not want to risk messing around with what should be a good day. I'm also going to try and keep this critique as succinct/brief as I can, given that a lot of feedback has already been provided through informal means (like our lengthy conversation on discord).

Organic Arrows

The core of this exercise is being handled well. While it's not entirely consistent, I can see elements of correct foreshortening, and clear chunks where your linework is confident and smooth. There are also plenty of areas wherhe things get a little more hesitant, where you correct mistakes, and you tend to draw the arrow heads themselves quite sloppily, but all in all the pieces are there, and what's left is to improve with practice.

Organic Forms with Contour Ellipses

• The first thing that stands out to me are the sausage shapes themselves. You are definitely still struggling with achieving the characteristics of simple sausages (as outlined here). You may well be aiming for it, but you frequently end up with the same kind of pattern, where one end is much smaller, there's a bit of a pinch through the midsection, and then it swells out to the other end being much larger.

• The ellipses themselves are also at times inconsistent. Often times you draw through them a ton (try to limit this to 2 full turns of the ellipse, when you go around the ellipse too many times, you end up losing track of the ellipse you're trying to draw (as explained here).

• Your contour ellipses all appear to maintain the same degree. As explained in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, the degree should be shifting wider as we slide along the sausage form moving away from the viewer.

Organic Forms with Contour Curves

• Sausage shape issues, and degree-shift issues from the contour ellipses are present here as well.

• There are a few places where you've drawn some of your contour curves as ellipses. I'm not referring to those on the tips (where we can see the contour line all the way around in the case that the tip faces the viewer), but rather ones like the middle of this sausage and the far left side of this sausage. You're definitely aware of the fact that you're doing something different (since you're not drawing through those ellipses), and therefore drawing the full ellipse all the way around is either the result of a conscious choice to do so, or a lack of conscious choices being made, to control the actions you take. To put it simply - if you mean to draw a partial curve in those instances, that's what you'd draw. It may not be correct, it may have other problems, but if you go to draw a partial curve and draw a full ellipse, it's a good sign that you're not paying attention to what you're doing.

Texture Analyses

The purely observational analysis (the square on the right side of each row) is decently done. The first one at the top ofo the page shows a clear focus on the use of more purposeful shadow shapes, which you've filled in. The second one down however has a lot of arbitrary lines, and I'm not sure what that's meant to achieve.

• One thought is that it could be hatching (which is usually what students use when they slip back into form shading, but I don't think that's the case here.

• I suspect that you might be trying to capture the little nicks and scratches along the surface of those scales. If that's the case, then what you're drawing is entirely from recollection, not from direct observation. I can say that with confidence because you're effectively repeating the same pattern over and over, not showing the kind of variety that would be present in reality.

Getting into the actual gradients however, I'm seeing some questionable decision-making on your part, especially when we go back and look at the specific issues I called out in our little Discord conversation:

• I pointed out that you were not remotely creating a seamless transition from the black bar on the left side, into the texture itself. I also pointed out in the instructions where it stated that the black bar's purpose is to push students to create a smooth gradient from dense/dark to sparse/light, rather than jumping suddenly from one to the other.

• I called out the way in which you were approaching allowing your scale textures to transition gradually from dense to sparse. I pointed you to these notes from the exercise instructions which explain how the shadows that remain the longest are those that sit where the scales themselves touch one another, and explained this further in our conversation.

Unfortunately, these two issues are still very present. On the black bar front, you honestly don't really do much at all with filled areas of solid black, which is odd given that this exercise's entire focus is on creating clearly designed, intentional shadow shapes. I can see on the first one where you outlined what appear to be your shadow shapes - that's heading in the right direction, but for some reason you decided not to fill them in at all. That begs the question, why did you think it was finished?

As to the scales, looking at your work here, it's very clear that you did not look at the diagram from the notes I linked you to, where there exists an example of pretty much exactly what you were trying to achieve.

Your last gradient is something of a non-starter - it looks like you weren't really sure of what forms were present, and more or less gave up before you got started.

One suggestion I do have is that where you appear to be trying to make all of these marks one at a time, almost as though you're painting your shadows onto the page. In our conversation, I pointed you to the lecture I gave that's pinned up in the #lesson2 channel. In that lecture, I stated the following:

The second stage is to take that understanding of these little forms in space, and to effectively decide what kind of shadow it will cast. You can think of these shadows as being inventions - based on where you place your light source, and your understanding of where the textural form is, and where its surrounding surfaces are, you design a cast shadow shape, outline it and fill it in.

I described a two step process - where every shadow shape (and therefore every textural mark since they are all cast shadows) should first be outlined, then filled in. You seemed to be heading in that direction with your first gradient, but then, as I've already mentioned, neglected to fill them in then abandoned the approach altogether, slipping back to the use of simple individual lines when you got into your scale texture.

Long story short, that's three distinct, important pieces of advice that were offered that you consciously or otherwise, did not follow.

Dissections

I'm not gonna get into this one too much, since it's really just an extension of the texture exercise. The instructions for this exercise are admittedly outdated as well - so while I hope students would follow the texture analysis principles here, I do not hold it against students if they do not.

Form Intersections

These are coming along decently, although my bigger concern here is with your linework. It is primarily the addition of line weight that gets pretty rough - remember that as with every other mark, you are expected to employ the ghosting method when executing any structural mark - be it a straight line, a curving line, an ellipse (I have a strong feeling that you are forgetting to apply the ghosting method for ellipses), as well as when adding line weight. The ghosting method produces a single purposeful stroke, and so your line weight should not look like a sudden pileup of a bunch of different strokes. Each one should be planned and intentional.

I did notice on this page however, for some reason you specifically added more line weight to all the lines that existed in the overlap between two forms' silhouettes. In other words, it is specifically what the second part of this diagram I provided to you in our discord conversation tells you not to do. Fortunately you only seemed to do this for one page, but once again I am puzzled by the choices you make, and what actually drives them. Where are these ideas coming from?

Organic Intersections

• Here are some corrections/notes on your second page.

• As to the cast shadows, I'm glad to see that you're being bold with them, but there are two main concerns that I have here. Firstly, your cast shadows do not actually follow the surface they're cast upon. If a shadow from one sausage falls onto another sausage, the shadow is going to end up curving away from the viewer, following the rounded surface. You tend to draw your shadows as though they all fall on a flat surface close to the object casting it. Here's some corrections where I've added logical cast shadows (though I may have misinterpreted the 2nd sausage from the left as being underneath the pile - I decided to interpret it this way because it made the whole pile feel more stable). Note how the shadow being cast by the sausage running from left to right flows over those beneath it, and extends further when it reaches the actual ground, due to how much farther the floor plane is from the sausage. I've also added some touches of line weight to help further clarify those overlaps.

Conclusion

There is improvement, but I am definitely seeing - and I'm choosing to be generous in my interpretation here - that you are having trouble processing the large amounts of information that is being thrown at you. There are a lot of specific diagrams, suggestions, things to pay attention to, etc. that you're given but you seem to pick up on just a small portion of it at a time. Unfortunately I'm not equipped to understand or really help with that, especially not to this extent. I can only provide you with the information, leaving it to you how you choose to use it. I would however recommend doing something differently. Maybe going back over every piece of feedback/information/lecture/critique/etc. you've been offered and taking specific notes to try and summarize it down to something you can understand a little more clearly for each specific exercise, giving yourself a more manageable list of things to "keep in mind" - but that's for you to figure out.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm going to leave the texture alone, and focus only on the issue that'll cause you the most problems in the more immediate lessons - and that's your sausage forms/organic structures and use of contour lines. In both the shape of the sausages and the execution of the contour lines, your linework tends to be fairly sloppy, so we'll try to address that.

You'll find your revisions assigned below. I guess this didn't end up being brief at all.