Hi there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.

You are doing really well but I'll try to help with some mistakes I see you making.

• In your arrows exercise your hatching could be planned out more and appear cleaner. I'm happy to see you are using foreshortening, good job.

• In the organic forms with contours you want to make sure you keep your form simple, you made them too complex at times. You can read about how to keep your forms simple here. You also want to shift the degree of your ellipses along the length of the form. 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.

• Texture is difficult, so don't feel bad about not understanding it right away. The real world is made up of every shade of grey, but in these drawings due to how the exercise limits our tools, we are forced to choose between just two. When it comes to certain examples, like the crumpled paper, this means we have to decide on an arbitrary "threshold" - like the border between what we decide to draw as black, and what we decide to draw as white. In our gradients, that "threshold" changes. On the far left side, the threshold is very low. The lightest grey value might still be captured as black. As we slide towards the right though, the threshold goes up, with more and more of those greys starting to be captured as white instead of black. On the far right, everything will be captured as white. This is how we achieve those gradients.

Remember you want to focus on the cast shadows created by forms along the texture, not the outlines or negative space. You can read about this here.

• There are a few mistakes in the forms intersections exercises.

You don't want to draw small groups of forms as seen here.

You want to make sure you follow these directions when drawing cylinders.

You want to avoid using stretched forms as seen here.

• Your organic intersections are coming along nicely. You do make the forms a bit too complex as seen here. Your shadows are well done, you just want to make sure you keep the light source consistent so the shadows go in the same direction.

Overall you made some mistakes but showed that you have a good grasp of a lot of the exercises.

I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to lesson 3.

Good luck!