Starting with your arrows,

• Though there's a touch of hesitation to your arrow's side edges (which is understandable), you're still generally doing a pretty good job of focusing on drawing those marks confidently so as to keep the kind of wobbling that might introduce erratic widening/narrowing and undermine the believability that the structure is moving through 3D space at a minimum. Just be sure to always remind yourself that confidence is a higher priority than accuracy, and that while this may cause your exercises to suffer for it, the results of the exercises isn't what matters - it's the process you're applying that will improve your skills. The results are just a record of where you're at right now.

• You're doing a great job when it comes to the application of foreshortening, both to the positive space (the structure of the arrows themselves) and to the negative space (the gaps between the zigzagging sections), and I'm very happy to see that you're leaning into allowing those sections to overlap. Students are often reticent to do that, because it can feel awkward and wrong, but it is the logical conclusion of what happens when those gaps get compressed completely, and is an excellent tool for conveying the sense of depth in the scene, and the impression that the arrows are coming towards the viewer instead of simply gliding across their field of view.

Continuing onto your organic forms with contour lines,

• Nice work sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages - you're at least fairly close most times, and even when you're not it's very clear that your intent is in the right direction, and it's just a matter of execution (which will improve with practice).

• You're doing a good job of drawing your contour lines - both ellipses and curves - confidently to keep most of them snug within the silhouette of your sausage forms. For your ellipses, you do tend to have a bit of a slant to them relative to that central minor axis line, and they are a little loose - so be sure to keep up with your Lesson 1 ellipses exercises in your warmups (along with everything else - basically just make sure you're keeping up with them). Funnels are especially good for alignment, and they're all good for tightening up your ellipses.

• Make sure you draw through the smaller ellipses at the tips, even though they are small

• I'm noticing that the degree you choose for your ellipses does appear to largely be arbitrary, so be sure to review the Lesson 1 ellipses page, which goes quite in depth as to how the mechanics behind the degree operate.

Continuing onto the texture section, one thing to keep in mind is that the concepts we introduce relating to texture rely on skills our students generally don't have right now - because they're the skills this entire course is designed to develop. That is, spatial reasoning. Understanding how the textural forms sit on a given surface, and how they relate to the surfaces around them (which is necessary to design the shadow they would cast) is a matter of understanding 3D spatial relationships. The reason we introduce it here is to provide context and direction for what we'll explore later - similarly to the rotated boxes/organic perspective boxes in Lesson 1 introducing a problem we engage with more thoroughly in the box challenge. Ultimately my concern right now is just how closely you're adhering to the underlying steps and procedure we prescribe (especially those in these reminders).

I can clearly see that you've put a great deal of effort into designing and filling your cast shadow shapes, and by and large that is exactly what we want to see here. You do hit a point at which you switch back to one-off strokes, which is entirely normal for students at this stage, but it's something we want students to avoid for two main reasons:

• It makes it very easy to slip back into only focusing on observation, and then drawing what you see directly, whereas the methodology stipulated in the reminders helps us to focus on thinking about the forms we observe, and thinking about how they relate to the surfaces around them (which brings everything back to spatial reasoning).

• It's also much harder to control the taper of the singular strokes, which can make it seem like the texture ends more abruptly. When we're designing shapes, there's certainly a limit on how small those resulting textural marks can be, but they taper much more smoothly in a way that benefits the gradients we're trying to create. So, when you hit that threshold where you can no longer make a shape small enough, it's often better to simply accept that this is where your texture will hit that full-white portion.

As a whole you are most definitely demonstrating very well developing observational skills, and a great deal of patience.

Moving onto the form intersections, this exercise serves two main purposes:

• Similarly to the textures, it introduces the problem of the intersection lines themselves, which students are not expected to understand how to apply successfully, but rather just make an attempt at - this will continue to be developed from lessons 3-7, and this exercise will return in the homework in lessons 6 and 7 for additional analysis, and advice where it is deemed to be necessary). In terms of these intersection lines, you're most definitely heading in the right direction.

• The other, far more important use of this exercise (at least in the context of this stage in the course) is that it is essentially a combination of everything we've introduced thus far. The principles of linework, the use of the ghosting method, the concepts surrounding ellipses along with their axes/degrees, perspective, foreshortening, convergence, the Y method, and so forth - all of it is present in this exercise. Where we've already confirmed your general grasp of these concepts in isolation in previous exercises, it is in presenting it all together that can really challenge a student's patience and discipline, and so it allows us to catch any issues that might interfere with their ability to continue forward as meaningfully as we intend.

When it comes to this latter point, I think that your choice to draw everything really big did end up shooting you in the foot somewhat, as it made everything considerably more difficult. To a point, we certainly encourage students to draw bigger (as it engages the part of the brain responsible for spatial reasoning and helps us engage the whole arm from the shoulder more consistently), but this is more a matter of not drawing really small and cramped. When you start taking things way too far, you end up adding additional challenges to the task that were never really intended to be part of it, which can distract from the core purpose of the exercise. After all, we only have so much in the way of cognitive resources, and if it's all taken up by trying to execute lines and ellipses that are way longer or larger than they really need to be, this can cause us to put less time and effort into the parts that really matter, and can cause us to forget or miss key instructions. For example,

• You're not drawing through your ellipses

• You aren't constructing your cylinders around a central minor axis as instructed here

• You are very much making use of stretched forms, which we advise against in these notes

• Your linework tends to be more hesitant, because by virtue of drawing longer lines, you're having to slow down and sacrifice confidence just to get close to any accuracy, but that does train your brain to prioritize accuracy over confidence and can result in linework of more reasonable length gradually shifting its focus as well.

As to the last exercise, your organic intersections are coming along well. You're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another, and how they slump under the influence of gravity. Your cast shadows are also being leveraged to emphasize this well. Just keep this point in mind (the form along the top of this page) runs into this issue - not nearly as badly as the example there, but we do want to avoid making the sausage forms so limp that they sag into every crevasse. Focus the sagging towards the ends, and make the form taught enough that it is able to cross small gaps without sinking into them.

Overall you've done well, but I do feel that your form intersections have somewhat missed the mark with the instructions you missed, so I'll go ahead and assign some limited revisions on that front. You'll find them listed below.