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 with the arrows section you want to be making sure you're drawing confidently to keep your arrows as smooth as possible, accuracy will come with mileage. You're drawing over your lines quite a bit as well, while this could be considered line weight it doesn't seem to be following consistent rules which gives the impression that you're just not drawing confidently and making multiple passes. You're doing a good job maintaining a consistent width as your arrows widen while moving closer to the viewer and with more mileage you'll become more consistent. This is a good exercise to experiment with line weight 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. At times you don't overlap your edges when you should, this results in your arrows flattening out as you can see here. 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.

• Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise you're doing a good job keeping your forms simple, plenty of people tend to over-complicate them. When it comes to your contour curves you're drawing over them multiple times, while you should draw through your ellipses the contour curves should just be 1 single confident line. 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 you're focusing largely on outlines 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. 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. While your shapes themselves are looking solid you're not following the principles of markmaking, instead you're making multiple passes on everything rather than drawing single confident lines.

• While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you do a great 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. Your lines here betray you and make your work look messier than it needs to be. 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.

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.

The quality of your lines is by the biggest issue here, there's a lot of new concepts being introduced so it's understandable that people sometimes let the previous ones slip their mind. That being said try to keep in mind that every lesson and exercise builds off the previous ones, every line you make should be planned using the ghosting technique and then drawn in a single smooth confident motion.

With that being said I'd like you to please complete:

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves

• 1 page of form intersections

• 1 page of organic intersections

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.