Hello again.

You're making progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson and hopefully this critique will help you in your future attempts.

I'll be upfront and say that line confidence and quality are probably the most notable issues in your submission but due to your condition they're likely not the results you wish you could achieve. That being said I do have some ideas that may help you and I'll go into them a bit more at the end of your critique. Until then I just ask that you be patient with me while I address the rest of your work.

• Starting off with the arrows section you're doing a good job maintaining a consistent width as your arrows widen while moving closer to the viewer and with more mileage you'll become more consistent. I'd like you to experiment more with foreshortening in your future attempts, by utilizing it in both the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between their curves we can create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space as demonstrated here.

• Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise you're doing a good job keeping your forms simple, plenty of people tend to over-complicate them. I'd like you to try and shift the degree of your contours more. 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. You also show that you're drawing from memory rather than giving yourself enough time to focus on your reference. Most of our time when doing exercises like this will be spent observing our reference and looking away for a quick second to add something to our page. 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.

• It's quite common for people to feel like they don't fully grasp the form intersections exercise, if you feel like you may fall into this category try not to stress too much. 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 are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, good work.

• While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you show that you need a bit more time becoming comfortable with thinking of how these forms interact in 3D space and how they'd wrap around one another. I recommend trying to stack your forms perpendicularly rather than trying to keep them headed in the same direction to help make wrapping them around one another a smoother task. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. When drawing your shadows you don't push them far enough to cast, instead they mostly hug the form creating them, try pushing them further. It appears like your shadows aren't following a consistent light source, I recommend pushing your light source to the top left or right corner of the page to start with, it's easier than working with a light directly above your form pile.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, there are a few concepts in this lesson I want to make sure you understand first, but even before that I'd like to see if we can possibly improve your mark making ability in general.

This will potentially require a bit more time in the beginning but if it helps it'll pay off in the long run and make your overall experience an easier one hopefully.

Looking through your previously completed course material as well as your promptathon submissions I do see that you're definitely capable of drawing confidently at times.

I complimented your confidence in your box submission and it appears like you struggle less with straight lines than curved ones. That being said in your Tea Time At Worlds End submission (your barrel one) you do manage to achieve some pretty confident looking curved lines as well. While there may be a bit of digital assistance here I'd like to ask if you do use any notable software or settings that would make a significant impact here? If so that's totally fine, if however you did this yourself then it helps show that you're definitely capable of more than you probably expect.

We've dealt with a few students that have suffered from hand tremors in the past and while they definitely have their own challenges to face we often find that when it comes to line confidence they tend to think that they can't help but achieve wobbly lines so they end up hesitating... which is what actually causes their lines to wobble.

The reason I said that this may take a bit more time up front is because I want you to try an experiment before we actually get to your revisions. I want you to take a piece of paper and draw a bunch of large curving lines as fast as you can, they don't need to be arrows, you're not worrying about foreshortening, accuracy, line weight or anything else, just the curved lines. I'd also like you to take another page and draw a bunch of ellipses on it, again not worrying about boundaries or accuracy, just draw a bunch of ellipses as fast as you can. Try to not go too wild and make it so it's impossible to follow what's going on but overall there's not much to worry about.

After you've completed these pages reply to this critique and I'll take a look.

I'm hopeful that you'll surprise yourself and you'll find that both your lines and ellipses are less wobbly and we can use that knowledge to tidy up your work. If however unlike previous students with tremors you still end up dealing with lots of uncontrollable wobble then we can adjust expectations and do our best to work with your situation. Either way I'm glad that you're attempting to learn what interests you, it's just a matter of figuring out how to help you get the most out of the course.

Once you've handed in the pages we can figure out what revisions are necessary, which fights are ones worth fighting and potentially which ones may not be worth as much time.

I look forward to seeing your work!