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

Arrows

You're doing a good job in this exercise, your linework is smooth and confident, this helps communicate the sense of fluidity that arrows have as they move across the page. Your shading could be pushed slightly further, while you add it with confidence and to the correct side of the arrow bends your lines end at arbitrary places, remember the concepts introduced in Lesson 1 and how all marks must have a clear start and end point, as such make sure your mark runs from one end of the arrow's width to the other.

You mention you had trouble with one of your arrows, this is because the placement of your shading for this arrow is placed incorrectly, it's at the wrong side of the arrow bend, this contradicts the illusion of depth you wish to achieve.

• 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. Following this logic, an object of consistent size moving through space should have parts of it grow bigger, and others become smaller based on the perspective of the scene, so the bigger part of the arrow is always going to be the one closest to the viewer, therefore the smaller segments should be the ones getting the hatching.

Overall, you've done a good job with this exercise and you're demonstrating a great sense of spatial reasoning already, perhaps you should consider challenging yourself in your future page of arrows, attempting different kinds of arrows with all kinds of twists, bends and overlaps in order to really push your understanding of how these objects work even further.

Leaves

For your page of leaves, first thing's first, don't grind. The requested amount of pages for this exercise was just one page, remember that you should only complete the assigned number of pages, as they sre assigned, do not try to perfect your work or do more than what was requested, you'll have ample time to keep practicing these exercises again during your warm ups.

The sense of fluidity present in your arrows carries over nicely into your leaves, giving them a great sense of energy and good flow as you not only capture how they sit statically within space, but also how they move from moment to moment.

Your addition of edge detail is incredibly sparse, if we look at the instructions for this exercise again, we can see that edge detail is, despite it's name, actually another step of construction, as such it's not optional and you should try your best to make use of reference to add it to your leaf structures. Additionally, this is something that whenever possible you'll want to add additively instead of cutting back into your initial construction. Cutting into our constructions can often make us change our mindset and start thinking in terms of shapes and silhouettes and how to change then in a 2D space, without taking into consideration how those cuts change our form's edge in 3D space.

You're making very good use of the complex leaf construction method which helps make your construction really tight and well defined.

Branches

Again, do not grind, only complete the amount of work that is assigned to you.

To answer your question, the spacement of your ellipses is alright, it's enough of a lenght that you can comfortably execute your lines from the shoulder and no, there are no tricks to drawing branches, as with all other things in this course what we're striving for is to execute the core steps for the methods correctly so that through discipline and repetition we can naturally improve. But continuing on to your branches your frustrations might be caused by the fact that there's a pretty major issue present in your branches and that's the fact that you're extending your segments, but you're not starting new segments at the previous ellipse point, this means that the healthy overlaps we aim to achieve in this exercise are effectively removed.

So keep in mind the steps for drawing branches, by starting your initial segment at the first ellipse mark, then extending it past the second ellipse, then stopping your mark at the halfway point between the second and third ellipse. Afterwards you'll start your next segment, not at the place where your previous line ends, but back at the second ellipse and extend your line from there, rinse and repeat these steps until you finish your entire branch.

For your ellipses it's great to see that you're making the effort to draw through them twice, but there are a couple of places where you aren't as consistent, so make sure that you're always ghosting enough times in order to draw through your ellipses twice. You're doing a really good job by varying the degree of your ellipses throughout the lenght of your branch, this really helps solidify the tridimensionality of these forms.

Plant Construction Section

And finally let's talk about your plant constructions. They're looking quite nicely put together, you're using the methods introduced in this lesson very effectively and your constructions are coming out very tridimensional as a result. Good job, you're already demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

There are however, some issues present in your constructions which are holding you from your full potential, I'll point them out to you today so you can keep getting the most out of these exercises.

For this flower construction you're not respecting the boundary that the ellipse establishes and as such, the construction is less tight than it could be of a construction that's looser than it could be. The ellipse shape establishes a decision being made - this is how far out the petal sructures will extend - and so the flow lines for the later leaf structures should abide by that boundary, otherwise it may as well not exist.

This construction is particularly well made and looks incredibly tridimensional, what you could improve in here is simply your use of lineweight, some of your leaves look like they have lines that were redone, but this might actually have been caused by innacuracy when adding lineweight. Remember that lineweight should be used in order to help distinguish how different parts of a construction overlap one another.

You skipped some construction steps in this construction by not drawing the complex leaf structure with their own flow lines and afterwards connecting them in order to create the complex structure, this flattens and stiffens the form. Another problem present in this plant is the fact that you're not drawing the petals for the flower part of the structure with the leaf construction method, which causes you to rely on your observation skills in order to capture the petals instead, you also end up not drawing through your forms.

Keep in mind that the methods shown here are not suggestions, they aren't guidelines or recommendations. They are tools, tools which will aid you when tackling the tridimensional puzzles we encounter during these exercises, it's important to always make use of the methods and techniques shown because they're the ones which will help you truly understand how the structure you're drawing works and how it exists in a real tridimensional space, and through that develop your sense of spatial reasoning.

Don't fill in large areas of black in your exercise such as in here, not only does it obscures the underlying construction, making it harder to properly evaluate your homework assignment, it also goes against the principles of texture introduced in lesson 2.

Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction, with construction being focused on the big and primitive forms that make up different structures and texture focusing on communicating the small forms that run along the surface of an object, essentially texture is a way of visually communicating to the viewer what it would feel like to run their hands across that surface, filled in areas of black go against the idea of drawing implicitly.

This doesn't have anything to do with decorating any of our work, what we draw here is based on what's physically present in our reference. As introduced here, we can notice that we should focus on each individual form and how it casts a shadow on neighboring surfaces, understanding how each individual form sits in 3D space, and analyzing all of the information present in our reference in order to translate it to our study. This means that the shape of our shadows 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, but in the long run this method of texture is the one who enforces the ideas of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following these ideas, you'll find yourself asking how to convey texture in the most efficient way possible, with less lines and ink, focusing more 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 doing a fantastic job with these exercises, you're demonstrating a great understanding of these techniques and methods, as well as a great sense of spatial reasoning. Your constructions are coming out quite solid as a result, although you should make sure to always apply the methods as thoroughly as you can, which for Drawabox purposes really means every time they can be used, you should also revisit the page for the branches exercise and carefully revisit the instructions in order to be able to apply the feedback I've provided today.

Even with the issues present within your work, I've got no doubt you've understood the lesson material, as such I'll be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.