In the future, please refrain from including your warmups in the submissions. To put it simply, they kind of throw off my focus and rhythm, and make it difficult to parse out what exactly is part of the assigned lesson work, and what is not. In general though, it helps a lot to approach everything within Drawabox in a structured, presentable manner. I know there may be a certain urge to jump around and do things more haphazardly, but giving each exercise their own page, or their own allotted section of a page (rather than exercises overlapping each other freely) is best.

Remember that Drawabox is all about developing a sense of control over your actions, and to do that, a clear, purposeful mindset is best. It goes to the point where having a clean workspace also helps.

Alright, so starting with your arrows, you're laying them out such that they flow through space fairly well. My one concern there in regards to how the arrows are laid out is that you need to be more aware of the spacing between the zigzagging sections - not just the width of the ribbon itself, which gets smaller as it moves farther away. The spacing between those zigzags also is subject to perspective, and so it will compress as we look farther back as well.

A bigger concern however comes down to the actual linework. For the most part, your initial lines are good - you draw them fairly confidently and smoothly. But when you come back to reinforce those lines, you do so using chicken scratch - shorter segments piled on top of one another - and longer lines that are drawn more carefully so as to trace over the existing marks. Tracing is essentially where we follow along an existing line slowly and carefully, and results in us focusing entirely on how that line exists on the page instead of how it flows as an edge through 3D space.

Both of these (chicken-scratching and tracing) are incorrect. Every single mark you draw must be drawn using the ghosting method, which ultimately means a smooth, confident execution without any hesitation. This may sacrifice some accuracy at first, but that will come back with practice. When a line wobbles, however, its accuracy becomes irrelevant.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, what stands out most is that your sausage forms do not follow the characteristics of simple sausages outlined in the instructions. Now, from what I can see, you are attempting to follow this, but you're showing a lot of signs that you may be drawing these shapes more from your wrist, resulting in most of these coming out stiff and deformed. There are definitely some better ones (I've pointed out the better ones with green checkmarks here) and this shows that you are absolutely capable of drawing these correctly. You may however be rushing through them. Each and every mark we draw requires a great deal of focus and attention - we need to always put our effort towards completing the exercise to the best of our ability, rather than to just getting it done.

Looking at your contour lines (the ellipses and curves), these are largely drawn quite stiffly. Again you might be drawing them from your wrist, as well as executing them more hesitantly rather than applying the ghosting method (in order to execute them confidently without hesitation).

Now there is more I can offer about how the contour lines should be drawn, but I think it's best just for you to focus entirely on executing the marks with confidence, and drawing from your shoulder. Once you're able to get that down, we'll address the other issues. There are two things I want to offer to get you to that point:

• It's possible that you may not be fully understanding what the ghosting method is about (and you may not be applying it to each and every mark, as you're meant to - remember that it should be used for everything, from straight lines to curves to ellipses). The ghosting method is all about separating the process of mark making into 3 distinct stages. First we identify the specific nature of the mark we want to draw, then we go through the motion of taking those marching orders and pushing them down into our muscle memory, and finally we execute those marks confidently without steering them with our conscious mind. I go into greater detail about how you should be thinking about the ghosting method in this response to another student.

• ScyllaStew puts full real-time recordings of her work through the lessons on her youtube channel and does an excellent job of demonstrating how to work through these exercises with a good pacing focused entirely on executing each mark to the best of her ability. You may find that your expectations of how long everything is meant to take may be much lower than the amount of time that is actually required for each and every exercise. If that is the case, those videos should help you reevaluate things.

Moving onto the texture analysis, I think you're doing a very good job of demonstrating that you grasp the core focus of this exercise - that is, learning to rely entirely on shadow shapes rather than on lines and outlines. This is great to see. I do think that as a whole you could put more time investment into the actual observation and study of your reference images to identify greater nuances and subtler details, and to continually look back at that reference (relying less on memory and more on direct observation) but this is totally normal. This exercise is an introduction to a concept students are not expected to have any prior experience with, so it marks a starting point, to push students to think about things they may not have considered until now. You're definitely going in the right direction here.

You continue showing improvement with more careful observation throughout your dissections - there is still room to grow, but as far as this goes you're showing exactly the kind of progress I want to see.

Moving into your form intersections, starting with your boxes-only page, I think you've gone back into executing your marks with the ghosting method, and doing so much more correctly than you have been throughout the earlier parts of this lesson. Your base lines are considerably more carefully drawn here. You do end up slipping back into more haphazard approaches when you add line weight to clarify those intersections, as discussed previously though - remember that even the ghosting method should be executed with the ghosting method.

Also, line weight should be added with the same kind of pen you drew the original lines with. You don't want that line weight to be significantly heavier than your original marks. Line weight is all about subtle changes that the subconscious picks up on. Even if your conscious mind can't see those differences directly, it'll grasp enough to be able to make better sense of how your forms overlap.

The intersections for this box-only page are coming along quite well too. This is a concept we're merely introducing here, similarly to the texture stuff. The spatial relationships we explore here are at the core of drawabox as a whole, and will be a subject we will continue to explore throughout the next several lessons. This component of the form intersection exercise is itself just intended to plant a seed that will be nurtured further, and you've got a great start with these boxes.

Now, I purposely discussed your box-only page separately from the rest because I think you approached it in a fundamentally different manner than the next page where you introduce additional kinds of forms. There are a number of shortcomings here:

• Your linework is getting sloppy again - you're not applying the ghosting method as consistently as you should. Some longer lines in your boxes are still decent, but for the most part they waver much more, demonstrate far less accuracy and control, and are a visible step down from that preivous page.

• You missed the instruction to avoid forms that are elongated (like longer cylinders), and to focus more on forms that are equilateral (roughly the same size in all three dimensions). This is specifically to avoid the inclusion of additional complication from foreshortening which would make a difficult exercise even more challenging, and would serve as a distraction

• Your linework on your ellipses is very haphazard - I suspect you may be drawing these more from your wrist, and should be drawing them from your shoulder to maintain a more consistent, even shape throughout.

Your willingness to invest more time and patience into your work varies quite a bit. The form intersection pages that follow are definitely better than the second one, but it goes back and forth. As a whole, the problem is very clear: you have a strong tendency to rush.

As discussed back in Lesson 0, I do not expect students to submit perfect work. I expect there to be misunderstandings, and I expect students to miss key instructions (as the lessons are dense, and things get lost in the shuffle). What I ask of students however is one thing: that they invest the time to complete each exercise to the best of their current ability. That means investing the time into each individual action, not to abide by a deadline or timeline of their own making, but to execute each individual mark as well as they can.

Now, I can clearly see from your work as a whole and your eagerness to actually do previous exercises as part of your warmups (though keep in mind that warmups should consist of exercises from lessons that have been marked as complete, I see some lesson 2 exercises mixed in there as well). You're not purposely trying to rush through the work, and you are absolutely not being lazy.

This issue is just a matter of where your priorities lie, and what your expectations for yourself may be. You may see other more established artists be able to whip off lines quickly and easily, without much thought or preplanning. You may see them as relying on their instincts, and you may feel that you too should be doing the same. But the fact of the matter is that instincts are trained through countless hours of working purposefully and with intent, with planning and explicit, focused action. The things we do in Drawabox are intended to train your instincts - but what you're doing is attempting to train your instincts by relying on your instincts, and the inevitable result of that is a mess.

You are not the first student who has made this mistake, and you will not be the last. They have been able to change their outlook and approach, and have grown from it, and if you focus on following the instructions exactly as they are written throughout the entirety of this course, you will too.

The last exercise is largely done pretty decently. You're stacking your organic forms in three dimensions - not stamping shapes on top of shapes on a flat page, but rather actually establishing the illusion of gravity in how they slump and sag against one another. Now, some of your linework is still stiff in places, but this exercise is for its own purposes moving in the right direction.

As you might have figured by this point, I'm going to be assigning some additional pages for you to demonstrate your understanding of what I've laid out here, and of the principles covered in the lessons prior to this one. For each and every exercise I reassign, I want you to go through its instructions immediately before doing the work. Also, I recommend that you look at how those exercises are approached in ScyllaStew's videos. She should have the videos for the form intersections and organic intersections uploaded over the next week, but everything prior to that point is already there.

The issue is not that you are not capable of this work. It is that you simply need to approach them more patiently, and allow for situations where certain tasks take far longer than you may expect them to.

Also - and I feel it necessary to mention this, as I have other students who have various circumstances that contribute to issues like these - if you have any conditions, medical or otherwise that may be relevant, please do let me know so I can adjust my own expectations for you as a student and provide you with feedback and advice that is as appropriate as possible. Nothing worse than receiving a harsh critique where the instructor may not be aware of certain things.