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. I will note that this is something that is prevalent in nearly exercise of your submission, I'd encourage you to revisit the principles of markmaking in lesson 1 as it seems you may not be following them as closely as you could be.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. When it comes to line weight it looks like you may be trying to apply it which would be a good thing, however you're redrawing your lines so frequently it becomes difficult to distinguish if the intent is line weight or to cover a mistake which hurts the attempts overall. I'd like you to experiment more with foreshortening in your future attempts, 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 object moving through 3D space as demonstrated here.

• Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise some of your forms are getting a bit too complex or too simple to the point they're nearly ellipses. 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. Your line confidence suffers here at times as well, most notably in your contour curves which you're frequently redrawing. 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. Unfortunately you're not sticking to the principles of markmaking here either which is noticeable in attempts like your pineapple skin dissection, instead of making solid marks and then filling in shadows it's mostly just sketchy 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.Your forms are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, which is great but your lines per usual are holding the attempts back.

• 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 shadows at times are hugging the form creating them rather than being cast on to another surface believably. Your shadows appear to be following a consistent light source, be sure to experiment with different angles and intensities when trying this exercise again in the future. 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.

Seeing as how the principles of markmaking were underutilized in every exercise through this submission I did consider assigning a full redo. This is because it's a core principle of the course and as such remains important in every exercise. That being said, line quality aside your attempts here were often quite solid so I feel like that wouldn't be the best use of anyone's time. I won't be asking for a total redo but you do still need to prove that you can utilize the principles of markmaking properly in these exercises that aren't primarily focused on just your line quality, so I'll be asking you to complete the following exercises:

• 4 pages of the form intersections exercise

• 2 pages of the organic intersections exercise

Thesse pages should give you a good mix of curved and straight lines as well as plenty of time to re-form the habit of drawing confidently.

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.