Hello 4kthom, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.
Arrows
Starting with your arrows, you're executing your lines confidently which makes them look fluid and smooth. This is essential and it helps convey the sense of fluidity that arrows have as they move through space.
Something to improve here is the orientation of your arrows, sometimes you're adding your hatching to the wrong side of the overlap, which hurts the illusion of depth you attempt to achieve.
I've marked here the places where you added your hatching to the incorrect side of the bend, places that weren't marked are correct.
Another thing to note is that you can reinforce arrow overlaps with the use of extra lineweight.
Leaves
Onto your leaves they're looking energetic and are flowing nicely across the page as the fluidity you had in the arrows exercise is translating nicely into your leaves.
Something you should look out for are the unnatural folds present in your leaves.
Remember the concepts introduced in the arrows exercise and how to familiarize yourself with the depth of the page, instead of being constrained to the 2d space it offers. If possible grab a leaf and attempt to fold it in the same manner some of your leaves are folding and you'll see that they'll crack at the pressure, that's because even though leaves are pretty flexible along their lenght due to their spine, they're not as flexible along their width.
There are a couple of extra points I'd like to mention, although some of them are minor, but worth mentioning regardless:
The size of these smaller leaves doesn't allow you to fully draw from your shoulder.
Remember to keep tight and specific relationships between each phase of construction, make sure your lines are roughly consistent in their line thickness, don't try and make later marks, such as edge detail, thicker than the initial lines.
The purpose of thse exercises is to develop your sense of spatial reasoning, to teach you to believe that the marks you lay down on a page aren't just lines, but part of an object with real volume to it, an object that feels tridimensional despite being confined to a 2d page. As such, all phases of construction must be given the same value by being drawn in the same rich shade of black.
I would also like to suggest that you spend more time with the execution of each mark - because there are so many and they seem individually unimportant, you're putting less time into each one, and so they do not properly rise off and return to the existing stroke of the outer edge - there are often gaps, overshoots, etc. that could be avoided by putting more time into the planning and execution of your lines. No mark you draw is unimportant - if you decided it was worth adding, it's worth giving as much time as it needs to be done to the best of your current ability.
Branches
Your branches are looking very decent, you seem to be generally following the instructions for this exercise, although sometimes you forget to extend your branches and draw your lines in a single stroke, which is a mistake as outlined here.
Remember how branches should be approached: by starting your segment at the first ellipse mark, then extending it past the second ellipse with confidence, then stopping your mark at the halfway point between the second and third ellipse.
You have some visible tails in your compound strokes, but that's completely expected, your accuracy will naturally improve as you continue practicing these exercises.
Onto your ellipses, keep in mind the principles introduced in previous lessons, your ellipse's degrees are looking a little bit too consistent, which hurts the solidity of your branches, flattening them. Remember that as your cylindrical forms shift away from the viewer, the degrees of your ellipses will also shift. And lastly, I can see that you're attempting to draw through your ellipses twice, good job, but make sure that you're always drawing through your ellipses, sometimes you fall short on this in your smaller ellipses.
Plant Construction Section
So! Moving on to your plant constructions. They're coming out quite nicely and often with a good sense of tridimensionality to them. But there are a couple of problems which are holding your work back from it's full potential.
One of the things that immediately stands out is how often you're drawing your initial constructions lighter, then going over with a darker pass and completely outlining the previous forms. Be sure to keep the line thickness for each phase of construction roughly consistent, so as not to encourage yourself to redraw more than you strictly need to.
Drawing lighter also tends to make one think of Drawabox exercises as sketching, what we're doing here is not sketching, we're not laying down a base that can later be altered to our needs, we're constructing objects with the explicit purpose of developing our skills.
Line weight itself can be added towards the end of a construction, focusing specifically on capturing how the different forms overlap one another, as explained here.
Another thing is how in your plant constructions you often fall back into zigzagging your edge detail, often cutting back into your original forms, this undermines the decisions established in your initial phases of construction and makes one forget about the illusion of solidity these forms are meant to have.
Make sure to maintain tight and specific relationships between your phases of construction. Don't leave arbitrary gaps between your leaf's flow line and the outer edges.
In this succulent you start by establishing boundaries for the arms of the plant, but later on you undermine it by having the arms extend past the ellipse. This shape is a decision being made, it establishes how far out the general structure will extend, and so the flow lines for the later leaf structures must abide by that. Since these shapes don't define clear forms it's easy to forget this, but if you decide you want to make use of these boundaries, respect them, otherwise they might as well not exist.
In this page you're not drawing through your forms, more specifically you don't completely draw the stems of the flowers, cutting it off at the points where they would become obscured by the petals. Drawabox seeks to develop your skills through the use of exercises and drills. As such it's important for you to draw through all of your forms, as small or as unecessary as you might believe them to be and even if they would logically be hidden by other parts of your construction, by drawing through your forms you're helping develop your sense of spatial reasoning and training your brain to think in 3D.
This is certainly admirable as you wish to get more practice out of each page, but in the long run it's more beneficial for you to draw as big as you need, and only then, gauge whether or not your page has the space available for one more drawing, if yes, add it in and then do the same until your page doesn't have more space, and when it doesn't, be that after the first or third drawing, move on to the next page.
Drawing bigger will not only allow you more room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises, but also give you enough space to fully engage your shoulder when drawing.
Your application of texture is few and far in between, but it seems that you're often drawing it explicitly. Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction. In a lot of ways they're the same concept, with construction being focused on the big and primitive forms that make up different objects, and texture simply being focused on conveying to the viewer the small forms that run along the surface an object, if it's thick and rugged, or if it's smooth and sharp, essentially texture is a form of visually communicating to the viewer what it would feel like to run their hands across that object's surface.
What we draw is based on what's physically present in our construction. As introduced here in what are essentially the "principles" of texture in Drawabox and how it is used in the course, 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 on a 3D space, and closely analyzing all of this information present in our reference to be able to translate it to our study.
The shape of this 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, only after careful observation can we understand how to best design a shadow shape that best conveys the texture of an object, as well as how that shadow would be affected by the surface it's being cast on, as a shadow cast on a round surface will be round, while a shadow on a plain smooth surface will suffer less distortion to it's original shape.
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 and as you keep applying it to your work, you'll find yourself asking how to convey the 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 showing a great deal of understanding of 3d forms and how they can be used in conjunction with one another to build solid objects. Keep these points in mind and you'll be improving even more when you tackle these exercises again.
I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.
Next Steps:
Don't forget to add these exercises to your pool of warm-ups.
Good luck in Lesson 4.
Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.
The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.
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