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

I'm critiquing this now, as you've submitted it - it was unclear whether you were going to redo the last two pages, or take better photos of them, but because I can't actually wait (once submitted, you're in the queue and have to be dealt with), I'm going ahead with the critique. Going forward it's probably best not to create your submission until you're certain you have all the pages/photos you need. While there are times where you may need to wait a few days for someone to see your work there's also the possibility that your work gets looked at in a matter of minutes or hours at which point you're just creating more work than is necessary.

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. Your hatching here gets messy at times, you may find it beneficial to hatch perpendicularly across your arrows rather than following them as seen here. At times you don't overlap your edges when you should, this results in your arrows flattening out as you can see here. 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 a few of your forms are getting a bit too complex or too simple to the point they're nearly ellipses. 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. You're keeping your line mostly work confident here which is great, if you feel uncomfortable working with contours still don't stress with more mileage it'll become more natural (don't redraw/add line weight to contour curves, it just makes them messier). 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.

• In the texture exercises (more so in your dissections) you're focusing largely on outlines, forms shadows 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. In the analysis exercise your gradient from dark to light could be a bit smoother as well. 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 fairly solid here which is good, your hatching could be tidier though. Be sure to take another look at the hatching guide that was included in the exercise here.

• While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you do a good job demonstrating that your sense of 3D space is developing as your forms begin to wrap around each other believably. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. I'd like you to draw through all of your forms when attempting this exercise again in the future, it will help reinforce your understanding of the 3D space you're creating. Three quick things to point out here as well. I can't say for certain that you're doing so but it does look like you may be trying to under draw and then make clean up passes afterwards which was discouraged here. You're applying hatching as shading which was discouraged in the previous exercise's hatching guide and discussed further here. You're either drawing full ellipses or redrawing over contour curves which is adding a lot of visual noise to the exercise overall, remember you shouldn't be redrawing/drawing through/adding weight to your contour curves and I'd recommend sticking to contour curves for this exercise to keep the task simple and allow you to focus on the concepts it's trying to get across. Your shadows are fairly small which in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing but I think you'd benefit from allowing them to cast more and relying less on form shading via hatching. 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, each lesson builds upon each other and I'd like to make sure you understand a few of these concepts a bit more before potentially creating more problems down the road.

With that being said I'd like you to please re-read and complete:

• 1 page of the organic intersections exercise.

Once you've completed the pages mentioned above reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll go over them and address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready for the next lesson I'll move you on.

I look forward to seeing your work.