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. For the majority of this exercise you're not crossing your lines as instructed (this was demonstrated here and discussed here as well) and instead trying to draw lines across to imply curves in your arrows. While some of your later arrows are fine, largely this exercise was done incorrectly. When it comes to the arrows that are done correctly, 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. 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.

• Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise a couple of your forms are getting a bit too complex. 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. Some of your line work here shows a lack of confidence as well, this is mostly noticeable in your contour curves which end up having squared edges rather than being smooth curves. Speaking of contours you're not drawing through your contour ellipses which is something you should always be doing and was discussed back here in lesson 1. That aside you're doing a good job trying to shift the degree of your contours so far, be sure to keep experimenting. 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. You also show that you're drawing from memory rather than giving yourself enough time to focus on your reference. Most of our time when doing exercises like this will be spent observing our reference and looking away for a quick second to add something to our page. 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. Two notable things worth pointing out however are that you're drawing through your ellipses way too much here, (once or twice as instructed is all that's required) and that you're stretching some of your forms (most commonly your cylinders).

• While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you show that you need a bit more time becoming comfortable with thinking of how these forms interact in 3D space and how they'd wrap around one another. Currently you're mostly just drawing them over one another or in front of each other rather than wrapping them around the forms below. I recommend trying to stack your forms perpendicularly rather than trying to keep them headed in the same direction to help make wrapping them around one another a smoother task. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. When it comes to your shadows you're playing it super safe by mostly drawing shadows under your forms or keeping them hugged quite tightly to your forms, be sure to experiment with different angles and intensities to get your shadows to cast on to other surfaces.

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.

• In your arrows you aren't overlapping your lines

• In your organic forms you're not drawing through your ellipses as noted in Lesson 1

• In the form intersections the opposite occurs, where y ou're drawing through your ellipses too much, causing your work to become messier than it needs to be.

Each of these are the results of choices. We make choices to either review old material, or review notes we may have taken of important things to avoid forgetting them. Or we make choices to push forward and rely on our memory. We make choices in how we allocate our time, how we use the space available to us on the pages, and more. We make a lot of choices, and so you will find yourself improving meaningfully if you slow down in your thinking, and pay attention to what choices you are and aren't making.

Something I didn't address until now is that this also reflects in how you chose to tackle the texture dissections exercise, there isn't a required amount of forms to be drawn it just asks for 2 pages. While we of course expect the student to face these requirements with good faith (don't just draw 1 tiny form on each page and call it a day) we do ultimately leave it up to you to decide what you feel would be the best use of your time and give yourself the needed experience to try and apply the concepts introduced. You pointed out that you only completed 1 page but you also dictated how many forms per page you had to complete, if it was an issue I would recommend drawing fewer but larger forms or drawing a form, then completing it's textures and re-evaluating how many more you feel you could complete. Of course you could have came back to this page at a later date as well.

What this means is that you do get to choose what a page means, and what workload that involves - as long as it's in good faith, and that you're still upholding your general responsibilities as laid out here in Lesson 0.

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

• 1 page of the arrows exercise

• 1 page of the organic forms with contour ellipses exercise

• 1 page of the form 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.