This lesson is definitely a challenging one, but ultimately keep in mind that all we're doing here is creating a body of work so that the person providing you with feedback (me) can assess where you understand how to approach these exercises correctly and can continue to apply it yourself in your warmups, and where your understanding of the goals and approaches for certain exercises may not be complete, so that we can better know what advice and recommendations would best serve you going forward.

Jumping in with the organic arrows exercise, there are a few points that I noticed here:

• Firstly, when it comes to drawing the edges of your arrows, it seems that you didn't adhere as closely to the approach shown in the instructions, where we do our best to draw each side edge of the arrow with one continuous stroke, engaging our whole arm from the shoulder. While there are areas where you did try this to varying degrees, there are a lot of cases where you ended up drawing shorter strokes and attempting to construct the whole edge through separate components. Drawing a single continuous edge in this way is not remotely easy, but it's important that when you face something that is difficult, that you do not jump automatically to prioritizing having the end result come out a certain way. The thing about exercises is that they are about the process we employ, because it is through that process, and the actions and decisions they demand of us, that we gain experience with specific kinds of challenges. If however we modify the process - for example, by allowing ourselves to tackle a single zigzagging edge in segments instead of all at once - then we alter the exercise, and don't necessarily work towards its intended goals.

• The point above is the most important, so prioritize that above all else - but one other more minor consideration is that as we draw the edges of our arrow, we want to try and do so in a way that applies foreshortening (that is, the effects of perspective where things farther away from us get smaller, and things closer to us are bigger) to both the positive space (the structure of the arrow itself, to which you are appyling foreshortening reasonably well) and the negative space (the gaps between the zigzagging sections, which also should be getting smaller as we look farther back in space - this part can be improved). This section from the instructions talks about this a bit more.

• Your application of hatching is pretty sloppy. In general, it's really important that students take their time with every single mark they put down - the more things they're inclined to rush or treat as being not necessarily all that important (like hatching lines), the more likely they are to be sloppy in approaching the more significant aspects. So, really take your time, allow yourself to think between the actions you take, and remember that any mark you decide to put down warrants the time and effort you can muster to execute it to the best of your current ability.

I've mentioned this already, but I think it bears mentioning again - really focus on engaging your whole arm from the shoulder, and ensure that your upper arm is moving (that's an easy way to confirm that you are pivoting from the shoulder). It'll help you to lean into a smoother, gentler zig-zag, and will avoid the kind of more sudden, tighter turns and sudden changes in trajectory that we're seeing in your work right now. This is likely the result of drawing more from your wrist or elbow.

Continuing onto your organic forms with contour lines:

• I can see that you are trying to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages, although that you are having some difficulty with it. To my eye, it appears to be a similar issue to what I mentioned above - you're drawing with a more limited range of motion (due to leveraging more the wrist or elbow), and it causes you to end up leaning into the inevitable "curve" that occurs when we hit the limitations of a given pivot. So for example, when you start and end your sausage's shape, you end up doing so at a point that curves inwards (as shown here), when they should be meeting as two relatively straight or at least similar-trajectory strokes. Using a pivot that affords a larger range of motion (ie: the shoulder) would give you more room to have the sausage's silhouette close in a more seamless fashion.

• Your contour ellipses are okay but there's definitely a touch of stiffness to them - though it varies. I believe there are a few factors to this at play: 1) At the risk of beating a dead horse, engaging your whole arm from the shoulder will definitely help 2) Make sure that you're applying the ghosting method in its entirety - if you're not rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach for the given ellipse you want to draw, that would explain why some ellipses come out a little more stiff/irregular than others, and would also speak to the inconsistency in whether or not your ellipses are aligned to that central minor axis line correctly.

• The degree of your ellipses seems to be fairly random, which suggests that you're either having trouble executing a specific degree you desire, or more likely, you may not be thinking much about how wide you want your ellipse to be. Remember that the degree/width of an ellipse corresponds to the orientation of the circle that ellipse is meant to represent (in this case, a cross-sectional slice of our sausage). The wider the degree, the more that circle is turned to face the viewer head-on, and the narrower it is, the more it's turned to face across the viewer's field of view. We talk about this at length in the ellipse section of Lesson 1, including how even if the sausage were perfectly straight (like a cylinder), we would still have some degree shift, with those contour ellipses closest to the viewer being narrower, and getting wider as we slide away from the viewer along the sausage's length. This also applies to the contour curves, which are really just the visible portion of the larger ellipses.

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 am pleased to see that you're thinking about how to approach your textures with a focus on filled, intentional solid black shapes, although there are definitely still cases where you end up drawing the textural forms themselves (rather than just the shadow shapes that they cast on their surroundings), like where you opted to draw circles, or parts of circles, for your tentacle texture. Remember that as noted in the reminders linked above, we want to follow a process where we're always first outlining a shadow shape that we then go on to fill in, rather than simply drawing lines one by one. This is also more prominent in your dissections - although as noted before, our focus here is on introducing a problem, so this will have lots of room to improve as you progress further into the course.

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 - you've handled this pretty well and are demonstrating a well developing grasp of the concept already, and this again 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).

• 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.

By and large the impression that I get from your work here is that while you appear to be applying the steps appropriately (in the sense that I can see the points for the ghosting method's planning phase, which suggests that you're attempting to apply it to every mark you draw), there's two main issues that are likely at play that are keeping you from executing this work to the best of your current ability:

• As noted numerous times before, you're probably engaging your arm from the elbow, and so your lines are more likely to arc a little instead of remaining as straight as they could, and your ellipses might be more prone to irregularity in their shapes

• You may not be giving yourself as much time for every mark as you could - and so while the correct steps may be applied (in terms of the planning, preparation, and execution phases of the ghosting method), you may still be rushing somewhat and undermining how much benefit you get out of that process.

Lastly, your organic intersections are honestly pretty well done. The linework could be better, but as a whole you're cognizant of the volumes of each form and are demonstrating a good grasp of how they interact with one another under the sway of gravity. You're also leveraging your cast shadows to help emphasize those spatial relationships reasonably well.

As a whole, I think what your work is telling me is that there's a lot that you do understand about how to approach the exercises, but there's also a great deal in the principles from Lesson 1 - mainly when it comes to executing your lines and ellipses - that is causing you trouble. Now, where we introduce these concepts and confirm the student's understanding of how to approach them, this does not mean that the student has mastered those skills. Rather, as discussed in Lesson 0, they become part of a regular warmup routine which helps us to practice and continue to hone those skills, having understood the process of the exercise itself in order to get the most out of it.

Now, if you've forgotten about the warmups and haven't been keeping up with them prior to now, that could explain the issues we're seeing. Without continued practice of engaging your whole arm from the shoulder, or of applying the ghosting method, it would make sense that you might not yet be as comfortable with their use as you could be.

And of course, another major factor at play may be a matter of time. It's not uncommon for students to have their own ideas of how long a given task should take - and so how much time they spend on something can end up being completely disconnected from the complexity of the task itself. In this course, there are no deadlines, and no stipulations that you should be completing an exercise, or a page, or an assignment in one sitting. And so, do be sure to give each task as much time as it requires of you (ensuring that you're giving all of the individual marks as much time as they require) so that the work you're submitting is always done to the best of your current ability.

I'm going to assign some revisions below, which will help me assess how much of what I've laid out here is understood, and whether there are additional points that should be addressed (as sometimes certain issues can mask others).

One last thing - when working on the revisions, I would like you to give the videos for the corresponding exercises on ScyllaStew's youtube channel a watch so you can see how another student paces themselves. It's very easy to assume things should be done more quickly, while it can be very normal to take way longer than you might expect to be normal.