Hello, HuynhMichChi I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your lines are looking very confident and smooth, which gives them a great sense of energy and fluidity in your arrows as they move through the world. You're making really good use of the depth of the page due to your application of foreshortening to your arrows.

It's good that you're making use of some well applied hatching as that helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space and your own understanding of the tridimensional space these objects occupy. Just don't forget to make use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps as a finishing touch to your arrows.

You're doing very well in this exercise, so I'd just like to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise, as your arrows are generally very similar in the way they move through space as well as their rates of foreshortening. Try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different types of perspective and foreshortening, keep in mind that arrows are very flexible objects and can move freely across the world in all sorts of manners, so you should push yourself and explore the different possibilities.

Leaves

The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, it's good that you're not only trying to capture how these structures sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

For your edge detail it's good to see that you're generally not trying to capture more than one piece of detail at a time, as well as keeping the line thickness between your phases of construction roughly consistent. However there are many times where you're exclusively constructing it subtractively which is a mistake, instead, make sure to always construct your edge detail carefully, and additively, on top of your construction, as cutting back into our forms can cause us to focus too much on manipulating the 2d shapes on the page, instead of how our marks represent edges in tridimensional space.

It's good to see that you've experimented with complex leaf structures such as in these leaves, but remember not to skip construction steps when approaching these more intricate structures. There are several of your structures which are looser than they could be for two different reasons, one of them is because you did not put down a boundary, despite complex structures being made up of several different parts, they still exist as a single entity, by making use of boundaries and keeping each phase of construction clear and specific you can ensure that your constructions will turn out much more solid but still very energetic.

You must also always fully construct each individual arm of the complex structure in order to maintain the relationships between your phases of construction tight and specific.

Branches

For your branches you are generally following the instructions for the exercise which is good, but there are a couple of places where you're not following them completely to the letter which stops you from getting the most out of this exercise. For example, while it's possible to notice that you're breaking your marks into segments, there are times where you construct edges in a single stroke or don't extend them as far as you should, or too far.

So remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully up to the halfway point to the third ellipse, afterwards you'll start a new segment, making sure to place your pen at the second ellipse and repeat this pattern until your entire branch is complete.

It's good to see that you're following the instructions for drawing knots and forking branches correctly.

For your ellipses it's good to see that you're drawing through them twice, as that allows for a smoother and more confident mark overall. When it comes to your application of the ellipse degree shift to your branches, it's almost nonexistent as most of your degrees are too consistent and hardly change, this mistake flattens your structures. Remember that as a form shifts in relation to the viewer, so will the degree of the ellipses within that structure also shift.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions. For the most part you're making an attempt to stick to the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson which helps you to create some very tridimensional and solid looking constructions, you're demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

You're not only trying to capture what these structures look like, but you're focusing on how they work, how they exist fully in their tridimensional space. This is all very good and it's helping you develop a strong sense of spatial reasoning, with that being said, there are still a couple of big issues present in your work which are holding you back from your full potential, so keep them in mind as you go forward in order to keep improving and getting the most out of Drawabox.

One of the biggest issues present in your work that affects it's quality without you even noticing is the fact that you're pre planning how many constructions you wish to fit on any given page.

There are generally two things we must allow ourselves when tackling these exercises in order to get the most out of them, these are time and space, in this case, you're not allowing yourself enough space when approaching these exercises. This artificially limits the space your brain has to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that naturally arise as we tackle these exercises, as well as your ability to thoroughly apply the techniques introduced in the lesson. So make sure that your first construction is always as big as it needs to be, only afterwards should you gauge whether there is enough space on the page to add another construction, if not, it's completely okay to only have a single drawing per page.

Not drawing big enough can also lead into the next issue, which is not always drawing through your forms.

You're not always drawing through all of the forms in your work, this can be seen in places such as in here and here. This is not helpful because it doesn't allow you to engage and develop the skills Drawabox is trying to teach you - your sense of spatial reasoning. When we draw only what's visible we're relying on our observation skills rather than fully constructing the structure, but when we draw through your forms and construct them fully we're engaging our brain and forcing ourselves to look at our structure not as something to copy, but a tridimensional puzzle that we must solve using the tools we've been given beforehand, this way we can fully understand how structures exists in space and how each form relates to one another.

So draw through all of your forms, as small or as unecessary as you might believe them to be, forms don't stop existing when they become obscured by others parts of a construction.

Don't forget to keep your phases of construction tight and specific, don't leave gaps in between structures and forms, don't leave gaps in between a leaf's flow line and it's outer edges, they must connect.

You are going a little too heavy on your lineweight, so don't forget that as with all other techniques we use in this course, line weight is a tool that has specific uses, it shouldn't jump from one form's silhouette to another or thicken lines arbitrarily, as this tends to smooth everything out too much. Kind of like pulling a sock over a vase, it softens the distinctions between forms and flattens the structure out somewhat.

Instead, lineweight should only be used subtly to help clarify the distinction between overlaps, as demonstrated here.

You're filling in too many large areas of black in your drawings such as in here, which obscures the underlying construction, makes it harder to evaluate your homework assignment and doesn't follow the principles of texture as introduced in lesson 2. Texture in Drawabox is based on cast shadows, large areas of black like this break the concepts of drawing implicitly, here are some useful reminders on texture and how it should be used in Drawabox exercises.

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Our focus should be on understanding how each individual form sits in 3D space and how that form then creates a shadow that is cast onto that same surface, only after analyzing all of the information present in our reference we'll be able to translate it to our study. This means that the shape of our shadow is important as it's the shape that defines the relationships between the form casting it and the surface it's being cast on, which is why we need to consider carefully how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic.

This approach is of course much harder than basing our understanding of texture on other methods that may seem more intuitive or basing it on the idea that texture = making our work look good, but in the long run this method of applying texture is the one that enforces the ideals of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following these ideals, you'll find yourself asking how to convey texture in the most efficient way possible, with less lines and ink, focusing on the implicit mark-making techniques introduced in Lesson 2.

Final Thoughts

In general I believe you have understood the purpose of this lesson, as you're doing very well with constructing these structures even if there are some issues, such as not drawing big enough or not always drawing through your forms. Regardless I believe you have shown yourself capable of tackling the construction challenges present in the next lesson, as such I'll be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.