Jumping right in with the arrows, very nice work! I can see that you've not only been leaning very nicely with executing those side edges with confidence, which helps to lean into the fluidity with which the arrow structures move through space, but you've also done a great job of establishing the depth in the scene they move through by consciously applying foreshortening to both the positive and negative space.

Looking at your sausages with contour lines, I can see that you're making an effort to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages, although I am noticing a tendency to stretch out the ends rather than having them entirely circular in shape. It is entirely normal to have room to improve on this front, and you'll have plenty of time to get more practice in with these before they start playing a role in our constructions in Lesson 4. That said, do make sure that you continue to be conscious in your application of these characteristics, and also keep working on engaging your whole arm from the shoulder, which can help in achieving the appropriate curvatures where they're needed. The video for the exercise demonstrates this from a few different camera angles to help ensure students can see how to approach it, so it may be worth giving another look when practicing this next in your warmups.

As for the contour lines themselves, you're drawing your ellipses fairly confidently (there's a bit of hesitation - again, continuing to push the use of your whole arm from the shoulder will help with this, as once you get comfortable with it, it can serve as a sort of stabilizer to help you keep your marks confident at a slower speed), and your contour curves are coming along nicely. You're also demonstrating an awareness and consideration of the orientation of each cross-sectional slice in space relative to the viewer, and factoring that into the degree you choose, which is great to see.

Continuing onto the texture section, one thing to keep in mind is that the concepts we introduce relating to texture rely on skills our students generally don't have right now - because they're the skills this entire course is designed to develop. That is, spatial reasoning. Understanding how the textural forms sit on a given surface, and how they relate to the surfaces around them (which is necessary to design the shadow they would cast) is a matter of understanding 3D spatial relationships. The reason we introduce it here is to provide context and direction for what we'll explore later - similarly to the rotated boxes/organic perspective boxes in Lesson 1 introducing a problem we engage with more thoroughly in the box challenge. Ultimately my concern right now is just how closely you're adhering to the underlying steps and procedure we prescribe (especially those in these reminders).

I am very pleased to see that you're adhering quite closely to this methodology throughout your texture analyses, and while you do slip back into using more one-off strokes in your dissections, I still do see you employing this methodology here and there, and by and large it's pretty normal to see this from students at this stage. Just be sure to keep pushing yourself to adhere to that two-step, controlled methodology of outlining/designing your shadow shapes, before filling them in, when tackling textural problems in the future, to the exclusion of all other approaches you may be more tempted to use. While it's true that there are certainly going to be shadows that are cast that are so small they can't reasonably be executed using our two step methodology, and you'll think to draw them with singular, one-off strokes, in such cases it's better to actually leave them out, for the following reasons:

• A designed shape, despite not being something we can create quite as small as a one-off stroke, tapers in a more nuanced, delicate fashion, whereas a one-off stroke is more likely to end in a manner that feels more sudden. Thus, the shapes lean better into our goal of creating a gradient that transitions from black to white (and ultimately we have to pick a point for the shadows to drop off altogether anyway, so pushing a little farther with singular strokes isn't strictly necessary).

• Drawing in one-off strokes allows us to lean more into drawing directly from observation (as opposed to observing, understanding the forms that we see as they exist in 3D space, then creating shadows based on that understanding), which can be very tempting as it can allow us to create more visually pleasing things without all of the extra baggage of thinking in 3D. But of course, 3D spatial reasoning is the purpose of this course.

Moving onto the form intersections, this exercise serves two main purposes:

• Similarly to the textures, it introduces the problem of the intersection lines themselves, which students are not expected to understand how to apply successfully, but rather just make an attempt at - this will continue to be developed from lessons 3-7, and this exercise will return in the homework in lessons 6 and 7 for additional analysis, and advice where it is deemed to be necessary). As it stands, the way in which you're drawing your contour lines clearly shows that you're thinking about how your forms relate to one another in 3D space, which is exactly what we're hoping to see at this stage.

• The other, far more important use of this exercise (at least in the context of this stage in the course) is that it is essentially a combination of everything we've introduced thus far. The principles of linework, the use of the ghosting method, the concepts surrounding ellipses along with their axes/degrees, perspective, foreshortening, convergence, the Y method, and so forth - all of it is present in this exercise. Where we've already confirmed your general grasp of these concepts in isolation in previous exercises, it is in presenting it all together that can really challenge a student's patience and discipline, and so it allows us to catch any issues that might interfere with their ability to continue forward as meaningfully as we intend.

As to this latter point, you're doing quite well! I can see a lot of care and patience in how you plan out your marks, and their execution is consistently confident. Though I noticed a bit of stiffness to your ellipses in the sausages with contour lines exercise, here they're much more evenly shaped - suggesting that you may have simply been letting the stress of having them fit snugly within those sausages' silhouettes get to you. Always remember - once your pen touches the page to execute that mark, any concerns about accuracy need to be set aside.

There's just one thing in regards to the form intersections I do want to call out - make sure that you're not defaulting to drawing your cylinders' side edges, or any set of edges, as being parallel on the page. This only occurs when those edges are intended to be oriented perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight, as those are the circumstances that would result in their vanishing point being pushed to infinity (as discussed in Lesson 1). If that is not your intent - and in this exercise we're rotating our forms arbitrarily in space, so it wouldn't be - then it's important to include some minimal amount of visible convergence.

And finally, your organic intersections are coming along quite well. You're demonstrating that you're thinking about how these forms sag and drape over one another under the influence of gravity, and you're leveraging your cast shadows to emphasize this nicely. Just one thing - don't sneak forms under forms you've already drawn, as you did here. Since there's no way to adjust the form on top to respond to the presence of that form underneath, there's no way to have it come out correctly. You're basically signing yourself up to add a mistake, so it's best avoided altogether, only placing new forms on top of the pile, where they can respond to the forms that are already there.

Anyway, all in all, very solid work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.