Hello again! I'm glad to see you stuck around and are working on the course still.

For future reference we prefer if you don't self critique your work in your submission, it's great that you're looking things over and trying to reflect on what you think you did well or struggled with but it tends to go a bit smoother for us if we don't have to worry about your critique influencing ours (like if you said you did x badly we'll sit there and look at it wondering what you may be struggling with if it actually looks pretty solid etc.)

If you have questions you're encouraged to ask them in your submission however, we're here to help things just go a bit more smoothly if we don't have to read paragraphs to get to questions and it allows us to get to the next person faster as well.

With all of that out of the way I will quickly mention before getting into your critique that this work is a huge step up in quality compared to your previous attempt. I'm really glad to see it and it's clear you put a lot more time into trying to understand the concepts and give your best attempts at each exercise. There may be some mistakes still but we aren't looking for perfection, we just want to see that you're understanding what's being asked of you and to see that you're putting in your best work so you're more likely to succeed and absorb what the course is teaching you.

Let's get started.

• Starting off in the arrows section your lines are looking smoothly and confidently drawn. You're doing a good job maintaining a consistent width as your arrows widen while moving closer to the viewer and with more mileage you'll become more consistent. It's good to see that you're trying to implement line weight, just remember that you want to keep your applications subtle and you'll become consistent with mileage. here are some things to look out for when applying it. I'd like you to experiment with foreshortening more 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 you're doing a good job keeping your forms simple, there are times when one end is a bit smaller than the other but largely these are what we're looking for and you'll become more consistent with more mileage. You're keeping your line work confident here as well which is great, if you feel uncomfortable working with contours still don't stress with more mileage it'll become more natural. There's still room to shift the degree of your contours more, I can see you're trying in your ellipses you just need to push them a bit 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'm going to be including a fairly typical texture critique up next but after the rest of the critique I'll go into the exercise a bit more to try and help you understand it a bit more. It's something the majority of students have trouble with and it does get expanded on in the upcoming material but seeing as this is your second pass through I want to help explain it to help ease any feelings of hopelessness you may have surrounding them (if you feel that way at all, they're pretty tricky at first).

• In the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines (snake scales are a good example) and negative space rather than cast shadows created by forms along the texture itself. 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. 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 these are a noticeable improvement over your last attempts. Everything appears much more well thought out and approached with more patience.

• While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you're demonstrating that your sense of 3D space is developing as your forms begin to wrap around each other believably, there's still room to grow but this a great step forward, you'll find that giving some of your forms just a bit more length helps them wrap around one another more. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. When it comes to your shadows you're pushing them enough so that they cast rather than just hugging the form that creates them which is a great start. 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.

Overall this was a solid submission, while you may have some things to work on I have no doubt you will improve with more mileage.

Now let's try to tackle texture quickly, then I have some final words to share with you before we move you on to the next step.

First things first I'd like you to open up and take a look at this leaf texture. While it's not something we should always rely on, when starting out it can help to look at textures converted into a black and white image, this is because people tend to get hung up on colour and if they see an object naturally get dark they try to include it. That's not the goal of these particular exercises however, we just want to capture cast shadows.

Students tend to simpify the process a bit too much when trying to capture these shadows, they tend to just look at the image and draw what they see. The first thing most people tend to do when asked to draw this leaf's texture would be to try and draw all the individual veins, or simplify the image and draw a select few, however this would be drawing outlines, not cast shadows. After realizing this isn't what we want people tend to go "ok well, if I can't draw the veins I'll draw everything but the veins" and this is a case of drawing negative space. Observational drawing isn't necessarily a bad process but largely what this course is about is developing our understanding of 3D space so not only do we observe something, but we try our best to be able to construct it as well so we aren't completely reliant on what we see. Every texture is different but using this leaf as an example we can break it down into some basic forms. All the vein like forms are basically cylinders or organic forms, and the fleshy bit of the leaf is much like a plane or a thin box (the leaf usually curves as well due to gravity's effect).

This can be a bit overwhelming especially at the start so let's just focus on the large main vein running through the leaf, as well as it's first major branch on the far left of the image. We essentially have 2 organic forms intersecting one another as well as a plane. Keeping this idea in mind we can then use logic from some other exercises we tackled in this lesson, a key example being the organic intersections exercise and how we plotted a light source somewhere in space and tried to create shadows based on it's location. Looking at these 2 veins we're focusing on we can see there are some shadows already. Along the bottom edge of the main vein there's a cast shadow, and to the right of the branch vein there's shadow as well. From this we can estimate that the strongest light source in this image at least relative to these 2 veins is somewhere in the upper left.

When tackling texture exercises we're largely doing the same thing, we look at our image, break it down into simple forms we can have an easier time understanding and then based on a lighting location we can draw cast shadows. Depending on the size of the form or spot for light to get captured in we can determine the strength of our shadows. If a form barely has any bumps it's probably going to be more evenly lit so shadows won't be as strong, but if there's a big form blocking a bunch of light or a hole where light can't in the shadows will deepen.

Again this is pretty complex so if you feel overwhelmed or confused don't stress too much, we don't expect you to be amazing at this any time soon we just want to get you thinking about 3D space in this way. Once you get into lesson 3 you'll be working with plants and Uncomfortable has an example of a leaf texture which I'll quickly show you here so you can have an idea of what all of this would look like.

Now if you didn't know this was a leaf before seeing it you may not think it's a leaf, and that would be fair the trick we're doing by capturing just the shadows is implying information. It becomes quite a powerful tool when you're working on a larger piece with lots of forms where if you tried to capture every tiny detail you'd overwhelm people. If you take a look at some paintings you'll likely see lots of implied information once you stop looking at the main focal points.

That'll be my wall of texture explanation for now. I hope some of it was helpful, if you have questions you're free to ask them just don't be discouraged if you think it's a bit much right now, with time it'll start to make more sense.

Before I wrap things up I wanted to just mention one little thing that I don't think you did intentionally but I do want to point out just to avoid any mishaps in the future if you tackle anything skill based. In your submission you mentioned that you don't think you could do any better currently and you may not be able to continue the course, now if there's financial reasons or time obligations or anything like that that's totally understandable. If your days are super busy and you don't have time to invest then that's just how life is at the moment and I'd hope you'd try to learn how to draw again in the future. That being said though if it's just a case of "I don't think I can do better so if this doesn't pass I give up" then I'd encourage you to try and be a bit kinder to yourself as well as the person trying to help you.

As mentioned earlier in this critique we aren't expecting perfection, we just want to make sure you're putting your best effort in. While yes we may have you redo some work if we feel you're misunderstanding something or even a full lesson if we can see that you're rushing, everyone is capable of learning to draw and we want to do our best to help you. The reason I feel the need to stress this is because of what I mentioned above but also because "If I don't pass I'm not sure I can continue" puts the person critiquing your work in a bit of rock and hard place. We don't want you to give up so of course we want you to keep working and trying your best to move forward, but at the same time we can't just move you forward if there are glaring issues that need to be addressed. Thankfully your work here is really solid so it's not an issue but if you had mentioned that in your first submission it would kind of leave me trapped in a way where either outcome potentially just results in a loss. If I moved you forward you'd make more mistakes and get frustrated, if I told you to redo your work and you quit then I (or any hypothetical teacher/mentor) failed to help you which doesn't feel great for us, we're here to try and help.

Now if this wasn't the case (text can make it tricky to read tone) and it was really just due to obligations, then you can pretty much ignore the emotional aspect of it. Just something some people don't consider at times and don't want to see you fail at things in the long run because of it.

Regardless, your work is looking good. It's a huge improvement over your first attempt and while you have things to work on I have no doubt you'll continue to improve in the future. I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to lesson 3.

Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck!