Before I get into your critique, I'll jump right into answering your question - why can't we use some digital tools. You are not wrong in that this far into the course, students will have developed a lot of the good habits and the respect for every painstaking step involved in these constructions. It's for that reason that we open the door to using rulers, ellipse guides, ballpoint pens, etc - but the use of digital tools in Drawabox in general is simply a contentious topic. A lot of students get frustrated at the fact that we don't allow them through the whole course, and so it's become a very hard line at which we've had to stand firm.

To put it simply, if we back off from that position anywhere in the core lesson material, we open the door to students pushing back with other lessons as well, and that is not something we want to deal with. It's one of those points that has

Additionally, the vast majority of students don't actually shell out for a full set of ellipse guides at any point in the course, because at least for the core material, they don't really need to. Instead, they purchased a "master ellipse template", as explained in the assignment section. This limits the size of the ellipses you can draw (and thus makes for smaller wheels), but since the main structural marks aren't being freehanded, it's not an issue. Furthermore, the ellipses we require in Lesson 7 - the ones that are most important, and that benefit from far greater accuracy - don't have to be all that big. Those are the ones we use in order to construct 3D unit grids, allowing us to build our vehicles to specific proportions.

Actually the reason I'm responding to your submission at midnight is because I actually spent the whole day working on the Lesson 0 video that goes into the tools we use throughout the course, where I mention the fact that students won't need a full ellipse guide, just a master ellipse template.

Obviously the whole answer of "this is the way Drawabox does things" is not a satisfactory one, especially not when you're looking down the barrel of a ton of hours of work for Lesson 7, but it is a fact of this course. Everyone who's completed Drawabox has gone through that gauntlet, and the "Completionist" rank holds a fair bit of weight as a result, and that won't be changing any time soon.

So, let's get onto the critique.

Starting with your form intersections, your work here is by and large extremely well done. There are a few little hiccups which I've called out here, but as a whole you're making a lot of clear, bold, intentional choices with each intersection, and aside from a few mistakes you are by and large demonstrating a well developing understanding of how these forms relate to one another. Among the mistakes I called out, there were two cases where they were round-on-round surfaces (the sphere/cylinder in the bottom right and the cone/cone on the top left). In these cases, it helps to consider the curvature of each individual surface involved one at a time, then consider how these pieces need to merge together to create the intersection (as shown in the transition from blue to red on the sphere/cylinder).

Continuing onto the object constructions, this lesson really focuses on one core concept - precision. And you have entirely knocked it out of the park. Precision is often conflated with accuracy, but they're actually two different things (at least insofar as I use the terms here). Where accuracy speaks to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, precision actually has nothing to do with putting the mark down on the page. It's about the steps you take beforehand to declare those intentions.

So for example, if we look at the ghosting method, when going through the planning phase of a straight line, we can place a start/end point down. This increases the precision of our drawing, by declaring what we intend to do. From there the mark may miss those points, or it may nail them, it may overshoot, or whatever else - but prior to any of that, we have declared our intent, explaining our thought process, and in so doing, ensuring that we ourselves are acting on that clearly defined intent, rather than just putting marks down and then figuring things out as we go.

In our constructions here, we build up precision primarily through the use of the subdivisions. These allow us to meaningfully study the proportions of our intended object in two dimensions with an orthographic study, then apply those same proportions to the object in three dimensions.

In being as meticulous and thorough as you have been, in ensuring that every single decision, every element you placed, every form you added, was first given a clear footprint to be placed upon, or some other specific determination of how big it's meant to be.

That isn't to say your drawings are perfect - there are certainly areas where your proportions are off (like the head on this bottle is rather squat compared to the reference), but the fact of the matter is that you declared your specific intent for those proportions ahead of time - and so without looking at the reference, the object still looks to be exactly what you intended.

Similarly, I did notice that you appeared to actively avoid some of the rounded edges (so again, using that squeeze bottle as an example), but you did build up everything you would have needed to execute the rounding, you just chose not to hit that last step. Which is arguably a mistake (in the sense that you're not done until you round out those sharp corners where necessary), but it's not something I'm actually concerned about, because the rounded corners were never important. The scaffolding that supports them is what's important, and you've done a great job establishing it thoroughly.

Of course, you did delve into rounding in other places - this remote applied it quite effectively.

Before I call this done, there are really just two things I wanted to call out as far as issues go, and they're both minor:

• Firstly, keep in mind that with this lesson and all the others that allow ballpoint, you do still need to stick to the same tool for all your linework. Don't lay down an underdrawing of ballpoint, then trace back over it with fineliner. This is mentioned in the instructions.

• Secondly, keep an eye on your initial bounding boxes, as some of them do have a tendency to be a little wonky. I noticed this most of all in this table, and while you did the right thing in sticking to that structure rather than trying to correct the mistake, generally you should be able to leverage your use of a ruler to improve the consistency of your convergences. That is, the ruler gives us a sort of projection of how the line we're about to draw is going to converge with the others in its set, helping us to avoid glaring mistakes a little more easily.

Anyway, you've done a great job, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work.