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

Arrows

Your arrows are generally looking smooth, with only a couple signs of hesitation present here and there, so don't forget to always engage your shoulder when executing your marks, and to do so with confidence after making use of the ghosting method, for your second line you should also make use of the ghosting method in order to keep your lines smooth, but you can also build this line in segments in order to ensure your arrow is well constructed and your linework is confident.

When it comes to the shading you add to your arrows it's well applied, but the placement can definitely use some more thought put into it as sometimes you add it to the incorrect side of the arrow bend which disrupts the illusion of perspective you wish to achieve in this exercise.

• Due to the way perspective works objects will appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when further away, even if they're the exact same size. The way this affects an object of consistent size moving through space means that parts of it will look bigger, and others will look smaller based on the perspective of the scene and how close each part of that object is to the viewer, according to this logic this means that the smaller part of the arrow segment should always be the part getting the hatching.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves the sense of fluidity present in your arrows is carrying over nicely into them. They're coming out very organic and with a good sense of flow as you don't only capture how they sit statically within space, but how they move freely across it as well.

When dealing with more complex leaf structures (and really construction in general), be sure to maintain tight, specific relationships between your phases of construction. So for example, these leaf structures are looser than they could be, due to the fact that the flow lines for the individual "arms" of the complex structure don't adhere to the boundary laid out by the previous phase of construction (the one where you established the simple overall footprint for the structure), either going past it, or not touching it. The bigger shape establishes a decision being made - this is how far out the general structure will extend - and so the flow lines for the later leaf structures should abide by that, otherwise it may as well not exist.

Be careful of unnatural folds Remember the concepts introduced in the arrows exercise of how to make a flat object feel tridimensional, leaves are very flexible along their lenght, but not so much along their width, this is because of the spine of the leaf, so consider that when drawing your outer edges, considering the size consistency of the leaf and whether a real leaf could bend this way, or if it would break.

For your edge detail you're generally approaching it correctly as you don't attempt to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, which allows you greater control over your marks, but you have some moments such as in here where your marks barely capture the form of your edge detail, and slightly look like zigzagging, this may in part be caused by the fact that most of your leaf structures are very small, which limits your ability to add your edge detail as efficiently, so keep in mind that it's important to draw your constructions at a comfortable enough size so that you can make sure your edge detail properly lifts off from the outer edge, establishes this smaller form, and then comes back down to the edge, integrating with it seamlessly.

Branches

For your branches they're generally coming along decently as you're making use of the exercise's instructions, which helps you maintain tighter control over your lines and maintain the solidity of your form. But while it's good to see that you're generally extending your line segments you're not always extending it completely up to the halfway point between ellipses. Another important thing that is explained more in depth here is that it's important to keep your ellipses far enough away to ensure your halfway point is at a comfortable distance for you to engage your whole arm when drawing and create a more seamless transition between segments.

So remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse, 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 branch is complete.

When it comes to your ellipses, while some of then were drawn through, for the most part your ellipses were only drawn once, remembee that you should always draw through your ellipses twice in order to keep them confident and smooth. It's great to see that you're varying the degrees of your ellipses as they move and shift through space, this helps reinforce the solidity of your forms, just make sure that they're shifting consistently, sometimes you've got a couple of ellipse's degrees that don't change in the way they should for the orientation of your branch, such as 90° ellipses in the middle of your branch, when that would imply the branch is turned completely towards the viewer as demonstated here, so don't forget to keep this in mind.

Plant Construction Section

Now let's talk about your plant constructions, you're starting to grasp the concepts this lesson seeks to teach and showing a lot of potential in your pages as you start to demonstrate a good sense of spatial reasoning throughout these pages. Of course, despite this there are some things that can naturally be improved and some points I believe you should keep in mind when tackling these exercises again, as these are issues that are holding you from reaching your full potential.

When constructing cylindrical structures such as plant pots make sure to draw them around a minor axis in order to keep your several ellipses aligned to one another. Going further make sure to construct the plant pots in their entirery, pots often have a rim around the edge that has a thickness to it, it's important to also capture this form with extra ellipses, as well as capture with an inner ellipse the part where the pot's opening is located.

Keep in mind that the methods introduced in these lessons aren't guidelines or suggestions, they're meant to be flexible and be able to be applied to a wide variety of structures in order to help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning and create solid looking structures - but the core instructions should still be always used, don't skip or change steps as this will cause your construction to be less specific than it was, and in turn you'll gain less from these exercises

As such you should always employ these construction methods and techniques, which you're not doing in here, in this construction and in this page because you're not drawing your branch like structures with the branch construction method, more specifically you're not starting these structures with a minor axis, and you're not drawing your edges in segments, this causes you to loose control of your lines and create branch structures that suffer from size inconsistency problems, which flattens your work and reminds the viewer that they're just looking at flat lines on a page.

Make sure to keep all phases of your construction tight and specific, as such don't leave any gaps between your leaf's flow line and the outer edges, they should connect.

You're often making use of what seems to be incredibly thick lineweight or cast shadows, keep in mind that lineweight should be subtle, [and only used in order to help differentiate how the different forms exist in relation to one another in a scene] (https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes/1/overlaps), in simpler terms they should only be used to help clarify overlaps. If they are cast shadows remember that as explained in the organic intersections exercise it's important that your shadows conform to the form of the surface they're being cast on, instead of "sticking" to the form that casts them, as this is unnatural, a shadow that is cast on a plain surface will suffer minimal to no distortion, but a shadow cast on a rounded surface will distort and follow the form of the surface.

In this page we can see an example where your cast shadows are inconsistent, both suns - red and blue - depict a lightsource that exists on the scene that can be inferred from some of the cast shadows they cause to exist, however these lightsources are contradictory, because if the red lightsource exists the blue shadows cannot exist, as they would be directly in light, and if the blue lightsource exists the red shadows would be in light and therefore, also not exist.

Moving onto your use of texture in this exercise it's pretty sparse, but you seem to be leaning towards the explicit side of drawing texture.

If we revisit how texture in Drawabox is approached, by looking back at this page we can refresh our memory and see that texture through the lens of Drawabox is not used to make our work aesthetic or pretty, instead every textural form we draw is based on what's physically present in our reference. 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, after analyzing all of the information present in our reference we'll be able to translate it to our study. This is why 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, this is why we should consider carefully how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic as shown here.

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. Going forward here are a couple of final reminders of how texture in Drawabox is approached.

Final Thoughts

You're clearly showing a lot of potential in here as your later constructions are looking much more solid than your initial attempts, but the small inconsistencies with your usage of the techniques causes your work to be less solid, less specific and flatter.

Your potato plant for example and this construction are examples of constructions that are moving in the right direction but suffer due to the issues mentioned in this critique. I won't be passing you onto the next lesson just yet, as I believe you need to internalize some principles of construction before facing more complex challenges, as such I'll be asking you for some revisions, please reply once you're finished.