While I'll address this more in the critique, I think your frustration with the form intersections exercise was more a matter of perhaps missing, or not putting enough weight, on what's stated in the introduction to that exercise:

Similar to the rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes exercises, this one is challenging, and is meant to be. While the name suggests that we're focusing on your ability to handle the intersections between the forms, that's icing on the cake, and I expect that you will struggle with it.

What I'm interested in most of all is your ability to draw these forms as being solid, within the same space, in a way that feels cohesive and consistent.

As discussed in Lesson 0 (specifically the video at the top of this page), the way in which students are to go through this course relies heavily on relying not on your own judgment in terms of when and where you should be redoing work, but rather on the judgment of a third party. Reason being, you simply aren't in a position where you can be expected to differentiate between the kinds of issues or shortcomings that are completely normal and expected at this stage, and those that need to be addressed before moving on. When you decided to repeat the exercise many times, you went against the way in which the course is designed to be completed. I get it - it can be frustrating to put effort in something and not be satisfied with it, but you're not taking this course to be satisfied. You're taking this course to develop your spatial reasoning skills, and you're putting your trust in our methodology to get there. While I can't guarantee that we get everything right, and that our approach (which itself has evolved over years) is the best path to get there, but I can tell you that your satisfaction is not going to be a reliable compass to follow.

So please, when the material states that you are going to struggle with something, and that it is not the main focus of the task as it is assigned right now, take it at face value.

Now, jumping into the critique with your organic arrows,

• You're doing a great job of drawing the paired side edges of the ribbon structures with confidence, avoiding hesitation that might result in the kind of wobbling that adds arbitrary and sporadic widening and narrowing to the structure. This helps maintain the illusion that the arrow itself is moving through 3D space.

• I only noticed this once, but the way in which you handle the bend of this arrow immediately preceding the arrow head falls into this mistake. Essentially in order for it to work, it would require the material the arrow is made of to be stretchy (allowing the outer edge of that turn to become longer, and the inner curve to be shorter, where they're actually meant to be the same length). This additional complexity can undermine the illusion we're after.

• You're doing a good job of applying foreshortening to the positive space of the arrow structures, ensuring that as they get closer to the viewer, they get bigger.

• When it comes to the negative space (the gaps between the zigzagging sections), and how foreshortening compresses it the further back we look, there aren't a lot of instances here that follow a more complete zigzagging path, so that's somewhat harder to gauge. I was able to find a couple instances that fit the bill - this one and this one, and in both the gaps seem to be roughly the same size, even as we move further back, suggesting that this is an area you can continue to focus on. You'll find more information on it here, but the gist is that as we move farther back, the gaps themselves do compress, even leading to the zigzagging sections overlapping on the page. Many students will hesitate and avoid those overlaps, feeling that they're incorrect or just don't feel right, but overlaps are actually a very useful tool to convey that things are coming out straight at the viewer, so it's worth practicing.

Continuing onto your organic forms with contour lines,

• In terms of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, while you've got cases where you're doing this well, I think in general you lean more towards trying to make your sausages very long, and as a result end up with a tendency to pinch through the midsection. This often makes it seem like those characteristics are a secondary priority - although you may simply be trying to practice achieving those characteristics with longer sausages. Still, I would strongly recommend first focusing on getting them down consistently with shorter sausages before trying to extend to longer ones.

• Both your contour lines and contour curves are generally drawn with a fair bit of confidence, which helps to keep them evenly shaped and convincingly wrapped around the sausage's rounded surface.

• When it comes to the degree of your contour lines, here your work seems to be somewhat mixed. There are cases like these where you're clearly attempting to shift the degree along a consistent pattern (it is unfortunately incorrect - the degree should be shifting wider the further away along the sausage we move, and there are multiple visual cues including the ellipse at the right tip of both that tells us the right side is closer to the viewer and the left side is farther away), and cases like this one where the degree seem to be fairly consistent (aside from the bottom end where it suddenly inverts, then inverts again, with no visible reason for the inversions and with both of these last two being significantly narrower despite this end being the far end). I strongly recommend reviewing the lesson 1 ellipses section, which goes over the way in which the degree corresponds to the orientation of the given circle in 3D space, relative to the position of the viewer.

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).

You've done an exceptional job of applying the methodology of outlining shadow shapes, then filling them in, and while doing so you've demonstrated solid observational skills, and all around a clear capacity for patience and care in your work. While your dissections do adhere to these processes less strictly (and you should strive to employ that methodology for all of your textural marks, rather than deciding in some cases to allow yourself to work with individual, one-off strokes), you have definitely demonstrated a willingness to do so that exceeds most others. Basically the reason I advise against one-off strokes is that we're more likely to transfer them directly from our reference image based on observation alone, skipping that step of "understanding" where we actually consider the forms that are present in the scene. But regardless - very solid work here.

Moving onto the form intersections - and here's where we get into explaining the role it plays at this moment in the course - 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 - this 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). Overall your work here is coming along fine, with a few caveats: firstly, ease up on your line weight - it's meant to be subtle, and localized only to the specific areas where the linework defining one form's silhouette overlaps another's, to help clarify which is in front of which, as discussed here in Lesson 1). Secondly, stick to only drawing the visible portion of the intersections as shown in the demonstrations. I know we encourage students to draw through their forms, and we do so because it helps develop our understanding of how these forms sit in three dimensions, as opposed to just the two dimensions of the page itself, while only minimally increasing the complexity of the task. Drawing through intersections has the opposite dynamic - it greatly increases the complexity, to a distracting level at times, but also doesn't give us that much of a benefit.

• 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.

In regards to this latter point, I think you very much allowed yourself to be distracted by the apparent challenge of the intersections themselves, and in so doing, forgot about the methodologies introduced earlier in the course. I'm not seeing much in the way of signs that you're applying the ghosting method consistently, nor signs that you're applying the Y method to your boxes (specifically the negotiating of corners). You're also not consistently drawing through your ellipses. These are all things we know you're capable of doing quite well (your box challenge work is representative of that), but you have to take the patience and care you exhibited with the texture analyses, and leverage it to ensure that you are thinking through every single choice you're making throughout this entire course.

Yes, it's time consuming and tedious, but the reason we approach everything in this course in such a hyper-intentional manner, is because the underlying goal is to develop your instincts so that when you draw your own stuff outside of this course, you'll be able to rely on your subconscious to deal with the "how" of drawing things correctly, freeing up your conscious brain's resources to focus on the what it is you actually want to draw.

Lastly, your organic intersections are by and large pretty well done. I am noticing the tendency to have your contour curves' degrees remain fairly consistent in most cases, but the forms themselves do a good job of capturing how they interact together under the influence of gravity.

All in all, you made a bad call in one area, and it undermined some things. It happens. I'll be assigning some revisions, which you'll find assigned below - but I wouldn't get too worried about it. We make bad decisions sometimes, and we learn from them. Just be sure to stick to the way in which the course is intended to be used, and maybe make a habit of reviewing Lesson 0 periodically to ensure you haven't forgotten any of the important information there.

Oh, and as a side note - when a critique marks your lesson as complete, you'll be told what to move onto next. You can also scroll down to any page in the course and click the link there (which is followed by >>>) and it'll take you to the next page - even if you're at the end of a lesson, it'll send you onto the next lesson or challenge that follows. Additionally, all of the challenges state in their introduction text when it's recommended for them to be completed - the next challenge to come up is the 250 cylinder challenge, but that is not recommended to be done until between Lessons 5 and 6. So, you needn't worry about what to do next - the course is very specific in what order to do things in, and you will always be told.