I'll be the TA handling your Lesson 2 critique.

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

• Starting off in the arrows section your lines are looking smoothly and confidently drawn. There are spots where your arrows bulge/narrow suddenly, this is an issue because it gives the impression that your arrows are stretching which hurts their solidity. Remember that as our arrows move closer to the viewer we want them to widen consistently. This is a good exercise to experiment with line weight in but when applying it we want to make sure we do subtly to key areas like overlaps to give clarity to our forms. Here are some things to look out for when applying line weight, and here are some reminders on how to apply it subtly. Great use of foreshortening so far, 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 arrow moving through 3D space as you can see demonstrated here. There is one other spot we can utilize foreshortening as well, we can do so in our hatching. On some pages you appear to be knowingly doing so and on others not so much so I figured it was worth pointing out, the closer to the fold of the arrow we can have our hatching lines closer together and as we move away from the fold the space between these lines can widen.

• Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise some of your forms are getting a bit too complex. We want to create our forms with both ends being the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as discussed here, I see that you made note of this and did try try to work on it, you'll become more consistent with more mileage. Some of your line work here shows a lack of confidence, remember that our first priority is that we want all of our linework/ellipses/contours to be drawn confidently and mileage will improve our accuracy (Remember to draw through all of your ellipses as well, this includes the tiny ellipse on the end of your forms). Speaking of contours 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. To answer your question, yes contour curves are more or less half ellipses.

• Your texture exercises are a mix of results, in some spots like the strawberry or corn textures you're focusing more on cast shadows but in your fruit dissections you tend to focus more so on outlines and negative space. 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. For more on the importance of focusing on cast shadows read here. You also show that you're drawing from memory rather than giving yourself enough time to focus on your reference in some of your attempts like the pomegranate . 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. 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.

• If you feel like you don't fully grasp form intersections just yet don't worry, you're on the right track but right now 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. Your forms here get a bit too complex which makes the overall task more difficult, I'd like you to try simplifying your forms a bit more in the future. When it comes to your shadows you're pushing them enough so that they cast rather than just hugging the form that creates them which is a great start. 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. Addressing the issues in the previous organic form section will help you a lot here as will drawing through all of your forms. We do so for the same reasons we did when drawing our boxes, by drawing through the entire form we can develop a better understanding of how our forms rest in 3D space and help them appear more solid overall.

Overall this was a solid submission, while you may have some things to work on I have no doubt you will improve with more mileage. You put in a lot of effort in regards to attempting to self critique your work and check out the critiques of others which is definitely an admirable action, trying to see what can be improved is a great steps towards growth just remember that you don't want to grind for results and burn yourself out. I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to the next lesson.

Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3!