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. 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. 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. You're keeping your line work mostly confident here which is good, if you feel uncomfortable working with contours still don't stress with more mileage it'll become more natural. Speaking of contours, try to push your contour curves further so that they hook back into the for as discussed here. I'd also 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.

• I get the impression that you may have tackled the texture exercises a bit too quickly. You're focusing largely on outlines and negative space rather than cast shadows as instructed. 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.Your forms are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, good work.

• 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 drawing your forms over one another rather than wrapping thema round the forms below. When trying this again in the future try to think of it as a plate with sausages stacking upwards. You're keeping your forms relatively simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. Your line quality does get a bit shaky here which shows you may be hesitating and not drawing as confidently as you could be.Your shadows are hugging the form creating them rather than being cast on to another surface believably. It appears like your shadows aren't following a consistent light source, 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. Two quick final things to point out in this section, you're drawing your small contour ellipse on both ends of your forms at times, it should only be on the end of the form visible to the viewer, and you're often not drawing through these ellipses. Remember that no matter how big or small you should draw through all of your ellipses.

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.

Something I do notice is that you tend to draw lots of smaller forms (your arrows and organic forms with contours in this case) I recommend drawing fewer but larger forms going forward. Drawing larger helps build up muscle memory using your shoulder, allows you to see your mistakes more clearly, encourages patience while using the ghosting technique, and tends to be less tedious. Try sticking to 4-6 per page.

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

• 1 page of the organic forms with contours exercise (half with curves, half with ellipses)

• 1 page of the texture analysis exercise

• 1 page of the organic 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.