Greetings Artbytpo! Congrats on finishing lesson 2. I'm Strauss and would be pleased to critique your work, I hope that they can help you one way or another on your art journey. I’ll divided this into 5 major sections, now let us dive into it:

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Organic Arrows

• First, with arrows section, your lines are being executed smoothly and confidently. You also made some great attempt at making the arrows bigger/smaller towards/away from the viewer (this is very important since we want to convey perspective), plus, the act of adding line weight in overlapping areas also help strengthen the illusion of 3D space we’re trying to make. And as always, just a reminder, for every single line that you put on the page, don’t forget to employ the ghosting method plus rotating the canvas to achieve the smoothest linework.

• Next, please take a look at this image (https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/011d064f.jpg) not only did the size of the arrows have to change, but the negative space between each fold has to also change adhere to it, too. I can see you actually apply this in some of your arrows, I just want to remind you since this is an element that people tends to overlook.

Organic Forms with Contours

• Now moving on to the organic forms with contours ellipses exercise, you’re doing great with confident lines. You’re also sticking to simple sausage forms which is nice, since we don’t want to end up with forms that are too complex, as being said in the official instruction material. For contour ellipses, I can see that you're intentionally shifting the degree of your ellipses with an awareness as to how they rotate and moving through space, the ellipses also fit in snugly/tightly within the sausage. Good job. If I can nitpicking something, it would be the lack of variation of degree changing of the ellipses. Try to experiment with even more extreme degree-changing sausages next time!

• The contour curves are also beginning to wrap around believably on the surface of the forms, but they barely changing any degrees, keep in mind when you decided to use this exercise for future warm-ups. One way to help with this is to try using the ghosting method with more consideration and calculation beforehand, also, try to imagine how a sausage would look like in your head and the way the contour lines wraps around the form itself will help you immensely before you put a mark on the page.

• I also want to note that the concept of “contour” itself is a double-edged sword. Granted, it’s a very useful tool to describe how a form sits in 3D space, but it can easily work against us by flattening our drawing and makes it hard to read, so use them wisely and sparingly, and make sure to keep experimenting later on.

Textures

• Textures Analysis: For texture, you're currently focusing largely on outlines, explicit mark-making (instead of implicit mark-making) and negative space rather than the cast shadow itself.

• Dissections: Solid attempt at minding, respect the curvature of the sausage forms, and wrapping the textures around them logically. You also take every chances you have to break the silhouette of the forms, which makes them easier to read. Silhouette-breaking is a super useful tool to help convey the texture better and makes it look more believable/realistic. Some of your texture looks good and you’re able to achieve a nice range of gradient, for example, the Alligator Skin texture.

But, like I said above in the Texture Analysis section: you're focusing largely on outlines, explicit mark-making (instead of implicit mark-making) and negative space rather than the cast shadow .Here’s a tip for you to draw texture (at least that’s how I did it several months ago, take this with a grain of salt):

1) Decide the texture you want to draw.

2) Use any search engine to find multiple references with high solution, around 2-5 is preferable.

3) Now, stare at them, closely and carefully. This step is the most important because you have to identify the cast shadow apart from the form shadow, and always ask yourself “should I use this part, or this part to apply them in my sausages scaffolding, and how should I apply it, using what kind of mark-making, where is the light source…” (you can go on and on with this one honestly). Using a scrap paper to note things down is highly recommend during this phase too (remember the 2nd row of your Texture Analysis assignment, it’s the same thing, but less formal)

4) Now, make some mark on your page, then go back and forth between step 3rd and 4th until you are satisfy with the result.

P/S: There are ABSOLUTELY NO guaranteed that following these steps will make your drawings look “prettier” (so don’t expect that), but they definitely will help you understand the core concept of texture, which is mainly from careful and thoughtful observation. Overall, texture is not an easy thing to grasp, and there’ll be plenty opportunities for you to tackle and improving in the future, so don’t beat yourself to it.

Form Intersections

• Now moving on to the form intersections, you have drawn your forms in a way that they seem to be sharing the same cohesive, believably 3D space. Good job. It’s very normal to feel like you’re not really comprehend this at its core, since this exercise is only meant to introduce to you about forms and how they can interact and intersect with each other, like puzzle pieces. We will have a lot of opportunities to tackle this again in later lessons so no worries. If I have to nitpicking something, it would be this: https://imgur.com/a/YHX2Ivr

Organic Intersections

• And for the last one, organic intersections, , I want to point out a few things, take a look again at the official website as how it should look like: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/9/example , https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/9/complicated, https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/9/parallel and https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/9/shadows. Please also check out this link: https://imgur.com/a/UXreMAD

• One common mistake people usually made for this particular assignment is not drawing through forms. You should always draw through forms, just like the form intersections exercise. This isn’t mentioned in the instruction, so it’s reasonable that you do not acknowledge and choose not to apply this technique in your assignment, but you have to know that some of the material written on this website is a bit…old, and is in progress of reconstruction. Next time, try to draw through forms when you’re using this as your warm-up exercise.

Overall, you did great! Your effort at tackling the whole lesson is very admirable. Though, I’ll ask for a redo of Organic Intersections exercise. Please keep in mind everything that I’ve discussed above.