In regards to the complaint, we are making pushes in the coming months to reproduce all the video content (or most of it, anyway), as much of it is quite old and hasn't been able to be updated as easily as the text material, resulting in some minor contradictions. There are certain things you mentioned that are the way they are for a reason - for example, we do not include an example of crumpled paper because we want students to try and figure that out for themselves. It's okay for them to struggle with it and not be able to pull it off, but it's better that they try and fail than having students simply copy what they see in an example for that particular case.

Now, my teaching assistant passed this one off to me because while there are definitely areas in which you've improved, there are still a number of issues that are coming up that need to be addressed. So, let's try and identify them and work through them.

Arrows

There are three main issues I'm seeing here:

• Firstly, the slight wavering and wobbling to your linework suggests that you are hesitating when you execute the marks. While this is a normal issue students face, it is a choice that is made. We can either choose to execute our marks hesitantly, worried that we're going to go off-track, and slow down to compensate for that, or we can choose to drive our marks forward without any hesitation, doing so with a confident stroke accepting that from the moment our pen touches the page, any opportunity for avoiding a mistake has passed. Accuracy can be practiced, and the use of the ghosting method (which we should be employing for each and every mark we draw) can help with that. Confidence, however, is a matter of approach and process. This explanation of the mindset that drives the ghosting method may help you better understand how to think about the execution of each and every mark. Of course, being sure to draw from your shoulder will also help, though it does appear that you are doing this for the most part. Now, I know for a fact that you are 100% capable of executing your marks confidently and smoothly, because you show that you can in a few cases, usually with one side of a given arrow. But because you're worried about messing up while drawing the other edge, you're making the choice not to draw with confidence. It's worth mentioning that your second page of arrows is better in terms of confidence.

• The hatching lines are really sloppy. This is again another case of you being fully capable to draw those hatching lines will and conscientiously, but you're choosing to treat them as an afterthought. Draw those hatching lines individually, confidently, using the ghosting method as needed, and instead of having them stop at some arbitrary distance, draw each line fully across the ribbon from edge to edge. If you want to create the impression that your hatching is getting lighter, you can increase the spacing between the lines. Here's what I mean.

• Your addition of line weight is kinda haphazard as well. I'm glad to see that you're only adding it in specific localized areas, but drawing it confidently (again, using the ghosting method to achieve a confident stroke) is important because it generates a taper towards the start and end of the mark, because your pen would already be in motion by the time it touches down. Pressing too hard can also impede that natural tapering. Here's an explanation of why confident marks are important when adding line weight.

Organic Forms with Contour Lines

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, you are definitely being more mindful of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages as explained in the instructions, but you're not 100% there. Being closer than before is a good sign however. Just watch out for cases like this one where your sausage form is definitely widening through its midsection. Always strive to keep the ends of your sausages circular and equal in size, avoid stretching those ends out, and keep the width consistent throughout the sausage's length.

The contour lines themselves are a bit of a mixed bag:

• Your contour ellipses are generally okay, although I suspect you might be drawing them more from your elbow than your shoulder. They're reasonably even, but more consistently using your shoulder here will help you tighten them up (along with practice, of course).

• Your contour curves are much more stiff and uneven, ending up with a lot of irregularities. Again - draw them from your shoulder, and apply the ghosting method to execute them with confidence.

I'm also noticing that you're also inconsistent in varying the degree of your ellipses. Sometimes you do, but it might just be a coincidence. Remember that the orientation of each cross-sectional slice is conveyed by the degree of the contour line that defines it. As you can see here, as the form turns and as we get closer or farther away from the viewer, that degree shifts wider or narrower.

Texture Analyses

While for the most part you're working towards the right direction, there is one element of this exercise you entirely missed, and you missed it previously as well: that solid black bar we draw on the left side of each gradient serves a specific purpose. As explained in the middle paragraph of this section, your whole goal is to blend that black bar seamlessly into the rest of your texture, so its right edge is indistinguishable. You made no effort to do this, suggesting that you didn't note that part of the instructions.

There is also a lot of... not scribbling, exactly, but you do make your marks in a scratchy fashion, meaning that you're creating these shadow shapes bit by bit, rather than planning out entire shapes (and thinking about how they relate to the forms that cast them). A better way to approach this is to make every mark using this two-step process, essentially first outlining your intended shape, then filling it in. Do this for every textural mark you draw, as a rule, so you can avoid putting down simple half-hearted marks without really thinking each one through.

Another issue I'm noticing is that you are still relying quite a bit on memory, rather than direct observation. This is normal for a student at this stage, but as you continue to work on this, it is very important that you get used to observing your reference image almost constantly, taking only momentary breaks to draw specific marks. The key here is to ensure that you're always identifying specific textural forms that exist in your object and thinking about the kinds of shadows they cast on their surroundings. Looking away for more than a moment causes us to rely on what we remember, which is always going to be oversimplified, resulting in the somewhat cartoonier results you have here. What this really demands, above all else, is patience. Patience not to just try to draw what you see (which is what I believe causes all the sketchy haphazard marks), but instead to think through what you're seeing and consider the shadows those forms cast.

Now, you are showing attempts in your texture analyses to work less with lines and outlines, but there is an element of guesswork when deciding where to actually place your shadow shapes. I explain how to think about this in this section - specifically in the bottom right of the diagram where I talk about "deeper cracks where forms meet retain their shadows".

Dissections

While you're showing some greater tendency to capture your textures with shadow shapes rather than outlines and lines, that doesn't carry over into your dissections. You're definitely working hard to really drill into the information present in your reference images, but again adhering to the two step process for every single textural mark you draw is critical here. Resist the urge to outline your forms. You also don't need to go crazy on how much detail you pack in there. The goal of this exercise is not to be visually overwhelming - it's just to show that you can think in terms of the shadows these forms cast.

Form Intersections

The issues here fall into a few different categories:

• Your line quality. Every mark, as always, should be executed using the ghosting method (normally when students do this, there's little signs like the odd point that doesn't get swallowed up by a stroke - I'm not seeing any of these). Time is invested into planning and preparation, and finally a mark is executed with confidence. If you still end up making a mistake, that's fine - but do not correct it. You've got loads of places where you've followed up with a little bit of an extra line, or attempting to redraw an entire stroke. One mark per line, period.

• When drawing your boxes, right now it does look like you're trying to draw your sets of lines (which are parallel in 3D space) as being parallel on the page, rather than thinking about how all sets of lines that run parallel in 3D space will converge towards a shared vanishing point when drawn on a two dimensional page. It's easy for students to forget about this when getting caught up in drawing lots of forms, but the principles covered in previous lessons will always remain relevant as we move forwards. So take your time - rushing through work will make one more susceptible to forgetting these key points.

• Your ellipses tend to be a little uneven and loose, so keep working on applying the ghosting method and drawing them from your shoulder to both keep them even and tight.

When it comes to the intersections themselves, there's plenty of room for improvement, but we're not worried about that at this point. It's the sort of thing we'll continue to explore throughout the rest of the course. This exercise merely serves as an introduction to these kinds of spatial problems.

Organic Intersections

Again, a number of issues:

• You should still be focusing on maintaining simple sausages - two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Avoid all the wavy lines and wobbling - treat each sausage form as though it is a water balloon that is totally full, such that it can bend as a whole, but isn't going to have a lot of give to it. Focus on how each form sags over the ones beneath it, rather than how it melts and conforms to every little gap and bump.

• You need to be drawing each sausage in its entirety. Drawing each form, even where its view is blocked by another, is critical to help us grasp how each form sits in space, and how they relate to the other forms around them. Do not cut them off where they are overlapped, as this will cause us to focus more on how what we're drawing exists on the flat piece of paper, not in a 3D space.

• Your contour curves tend to be very shallow, as explained here, which flattens out the forms.

Conclusion

As a whole, your work here still has a number of critical issues. There are still areas where you're not following the instructions to the letter, and others where concepts covered in previous lessons have been forgotten or abandoned. The absolute most important point is to be patience and mindful with every single exercise. The instructions are, admittedly, dense, and there's a lot of information present. A lot of reading to be done, and often reading through the material multiple times is useful to help it all sink in.

A second priority really is to get your line quality under control, and while I've definitely repeated it way too many times, I'll say it again - the ghosting method is integral. It helps us break the process of mark making into distinct steps, each with their own priorities, which should never bleed over into any step but their own.

I am going to assign a more limited set of revisions (not a complete redo), but I am going to ask that given the amount of time that has been invested into this critique, you submit them as a fresh submission rather than in response to this critique. I will list the requested revisions below.