I think the best way to go through your work here is by looking at each exercise.

Organic Arrows

• I can see that in at least some of these, you made an effort to demonstrate how the gaps between the zigzagging sections get narrower as we look farther back. While this was present on some, like this one, it definitely could stand to be exaggerated in the others. You can also stand to exaggerate the shift in scale, ensuring that the end closer to the viewer becomes much larger and the end farther away gets much narrower. This will help you further demonstrate how these arrows move through the depth of the scene.

• There's definitely a lot of hesitation present in some of your lines - for example, here. This shows me that you're still struggling to choose confidence over accuracy. Ultimately that's what things like the ghosting method do - they force us to choose to focus on executing a smooth, confident stroke, knowing that this will potentially reduce our accuracy, and doing it anyway. So to put it simply, when you hesitate it's because you're making that choice. There are a lot of choices we make in our day to day lives without realizing them - we can't really take control of them though, until we acknowledge the fact that those choices are being made.

• There are a lot of arrows here that seem to get more complicated than they really need to, or otherwise deviate from the gentle zigzagging pattern shown in the lesson instructions. I think that contributes to some of the difficulty you're encountering in this exercise - there's a lot of irregularity, and that simply makes the exercise harder. Instead, always focus on the same gentle, repeating pattern, and avoid having the flow of your arrow change suddenly halfway through its length (as you do here, where the ribbon suddenly has this big arc, entirely different from the pattern preceding it.

Organic Forms with Contour Lines

• One thing that jumps out at me pretty quickly is that you don't really seem to be trying to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages. We want the sausages to feature two circular ends that are equal in size, connected by a tube that maintains a consistent width. This one was pretty close, though your others deviated in various ways. Sometimes it's just a matter of an end being too smushed or stretched and not being circular in shape, and in others (like this one, you appear to have just drawn an entirely random shape without considering those desired characteristics.

• Another point that jumped out at me is that for your organic forms with contour curves, you're placing the contour ellipse on the wrong end. In this exercise, we're drawing the contour lines where they are visible. While generally this will result in us drawing a bunch of curves rather than full ellipses, we do draw a complete ellipse on the end(s) of the sausages that are pointing towards the viewer, since their orientation would make those contour lines visible all the way around. You however, tend to place your contour ellipses on the other end (the one that points away). Here's what I mean. Basically you've got your contour curves telling the viewer that one end is facing the viewer, but then you're placing the full contour ellipse on the opposite end. To help you better understand how this works, here's a diagram with three sausages in different configurations - one with both ends facing the viewer, one with one end facing away and the other facing the viewer, and one with no ends facing the viewer. Note how they all - that is, the contour curves and the contour ellipse - work together to convey the same thing.

• As we slide along the length of a given sausage form, your contour lines all seem to have roughly the same degree. Instead, as we move away from the viewer, their degree should be widening. The reasoning for this was explained back in Lesson 1, specifically in the ellipses video.

• It looks like you've only included the page of organic forms with contour curves - there was also a page of contour ellipses assigned. I'm assuming you did complete it, but that you forgot to include it in your album.

Texture Analysis

• I noticed that you had some difficulty filling in your solid black shapes here. One thing that can help with that is, once you've outlined your intended shadow shape with your usual 0.5mm fineliner, you can go back in to fill it in with a thicker pen, or even a brush pen, to help keep those shapes solid. Just make sure that you're first designing the shapes themselves with the usual required pen.

• One of the big things in this exercise - and in texture in general - is understanding that it all comes down to understanding how specific 3D forms relate to one another in 3D space. Texture is, after all, made up of a bunch of small forms that sit along the surface of a larger object. So, when we actually go about designing the specific shadow shapes, we have to be keenly aware of the specific forms that cast them. Even though in the end the shadow shapes may all kind of merge together in places, as we draw them we need to specifically understand how the shape of this specific shadow relates to the form casting it. Looking at your work here, it does feel more like you are staring at your reference and trying really hard to draw the shadow shapes you see there - but not to actually understand the forms that cast them. What we're doing here isn't about seeing shadows and copying them into our drawing - it's about studying our reference (shadows and all), and using that information to understand the nature of the forms that are present. Then, using that understanding, we create shadows that will suit whatever we need in our drawing.

• The other issue here is that though you've written the words "gradient" and "dense" and "sparse" on your page, you aren't really achieving a clear transition moving from dense to sparse. If we look at this texture gradient for instance, your shadow shapes are just as big and almost as closely packed together on the right side as they are on the left.

• As an extension of the previous point, that solid black bar on the left side of our gradients serves an important purpose, and it's matched by an equal bar of white along the right side. The goal of the exercise is to blend those bars seamlessly (as mentioned here) into one another, completely obscuring the inner edge of each bar so that we are no longer able to identify where the bar ends and where the texture begins. You didn't really attempt to do this, and instead simply drew solid bars with clean, visible edges, and then put down some random shapes in between.

• Another point that made the gradient aspect of this exercise much harder for you to achieve is that you were working with very large shadow shapes through the entire thing, and as a result had very few actual shadow shapes in play. If you look at the examples from the lesson - like this one - you'll notice that there is a ton more going on. There are easily dozens, if not hundreds of different shadow shapes, each cast by separate textural forms, that are all merging together in some places, and visible separately from one another in others. Of course, working with so many shadow shapes, cast by so many textural forms, is very time consuming - but that's what it takes. It takes time, time to observe our references to understand the textural forms that are present, time to wrap around how each individual textural form relates to its surroundings, time to design each individual cast shadow shape one at a time (individual shadow shapes that gradually merge together to create larger groups of shadows, rather than trying to draw each big group all at once). It all takes a lot of time, and what I'm seeing here looks like you were trying to cut down on that and get through the exercise more quickly.

Now I fully understand that you are putting a lot of effort into your work here, and as you well know, texture is not meant to be something students are capable of grasping fully right now. I do however feel that you are deviating quite drastically from the instructions here.

Your dissections are similar, although they perhaps show a little more active observation of your reference image. Still, there is a lot of oversimplification (which isn't entirely abnormal for a student at this stage) that comes from relying on your memory quite a bit. This, as explained here, is basically something we improve upon by forcing ourselves to observe our reference more and more - fighting against the temptation of spending long periods of time drawing, and ensuring that we look back at our reference almost constantly, so whatever marks we're putting down are directly informed by what we see in our reference.

Since the dissections' issues don't differ too much from the texture analyses, I'm going to jump ahead to the next exercise.

Form Intersections

• Throughout these pages, your boxes are coming along decently - more or less holding the same level of quality from the box challenge, which is a good start. I am noticing a lot of other random marks on your page - a lot of arbitrary points, for example. If these are points you're actively using as you build out your boxes, then that's fine. I do feel however that there are a lot, and it makes me wonder if all of them were really serving a purpose. There are also random marks like these which seem out of place - though perhaps you were running into some issues with your pen hitting the page as you were ghosting your lines.

• Getting into the territory of marks that definitely aren't artifacts from ghosting however, I did notice a number of examples of marks like this where you seem to have had false starts, and ultimately drew multiple strokes where only one should exist. If you're using the ghosting method correctly, then you should only be drawing one stroke for the "execution" phase. You shouldn't have the opportunity to stumble, and start over. Sure, the mark you do make might come out wrong, but it should be committed to, and seen all the way through.

• I'm assuming that you saw the instructions on constructing cylinders (from this page) after your second page of form intersections (since the 2nd page didn't include the use of any minor axis lines). Once you did start using the minor axes however, I noticed some issues. I'll address these in separate points.

• Firstly, your minor axis line should go right through where you intend your ellipses to be. When you have the minor axis barely touch the ellipse, or penetrate it only slightly, it's that much harder to actually use the minor axis to help align your ellipses. So avoid things like this.

• Secondly, this cylinder appears to have one ellipse drawn way too big. If you're struggling in drawing your ellipses in a specific location, then you may want to reverse the steps - drawing the ellipses first, then the side edges. Still, having your ellipses fall that far off the mark suggests to me that there's an issue with your process. Make sure that you're using the ghosting method and investing plenty of time into it, and that you're drawing your ellipses from your shoulder.

When it comes to the intersection lines themselves, it's not abnormal for students to struggle with these. Mostly this improves as one moves through the course, developing their spatial reasoning skills as they go, but in your case there are a few points I can call out that may help:

• Here are some quick pointers I drew up for another student. What applies most to you here is the first point - your intersection lines go where the silhouettes of the two forms overlap. There are a ton of cases where you've been drawing your intersection lines where they only actually sit on one of the two forms.

• There's also a significant tendency to hesitate with your marks. Those on this page of box-only intersections for example shows pretty clearly that you hadn't really decided on where your intersections would go prior to putting your pen down on the page. Instead, you likely tried to figure it out while you were drawing. Think first, decide on a course of action, then commit to it.

Organic Intersections

• One of the issues I called out for your organic forms with contour curves does appear to be mostly fixed here. That is, the one about you drawing your contour ellipses on the wrong end. I can see one instance of that in this page, but for most of the sausages here you're putting the contour ellipse on the correct end.

• What stands out most about your work in this exercise is that where the exercise should be treated as though you're building up a pile of sausages on the ground, adding one at a time, and focusing on how gravity causes them all to pile upon one another, you don't really seem to be thinking about it in those terms. Instead, it feels more like you're drawing random sausage shapes, pasting them on top of the existing set in the two dimensions of the page - rather than thinking about how they actually interact in 3D space.

• One thing that can help with this is that when you start the exercise, don't imagine that you're working in an empty void. Imagine that there is a ground plane there, and that the first sausage you're placing in the world actually falls on this floor. Think about how gravity is pushing down on it, and when you add the next sausage, continue to think about how gravity is trying to push this new sausage down, but the first one is getting in the way.

• I'm also noticing a tendency to treat your cast shadows more like line weight - specifically in the way that they're clinging to the silhouette of the form casting them, and not being allowed to actually be cast upon the surfaces below them.

• Another sign that you're not really thinking about this as a three dimensional arrangement of forms are all the gaps you've left between your sausages (as highlighted here. These kinds of gaps severely contradict the impression that gravity is acting upon these forms - since gravity should force the forms to fall down into these gaps. Some small gaps can be possible, since the sausages themselves are solid forms, and not liquid (so they won't perfectly fill any spaces beneath them), but when you've got a lot of significant gaps, it usually shows that the student isn't actively thinking about the scene as though it exists in 3D.

Conclusion

I know how hard you're working at this, and I know that for anyone it is difficult to bear being held back in the face of so much work - but it is my responsibility to be direct and frank with you. Your work here does not demonstrate to me a clear understanding of the material conveyed in the lesson, and I feel that the number of issues I've called out (and the amount of time that has gone into this critique - over two hours now), that I am going to have to ask you to complete this lesson again in full.

While I'm sure this has come up in the past, I'm not sure if you've been using this resource currently - ScyllaStew has full recordings of all her work throughout Lessons 1 and 2, and I strongly recommend that you watch them while working. You'll be able to see how she thinks through each activity, how she approaches each stroke, and also how long she takes for every last little thing. Following along with her should also highlight cases where your interpretation of the instructions may have been off base. This of course isn't about comparing your work to hers - just emphasizing an important tool that can help you apply the instructions more effectively.

When you're done, you will have to send in your homework as a fresh submission, which will cost you 1 additional credit.