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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your linework is looking confident which helps push the fluidity with which your arrows move through space. Your hatching can be improved, you're doing well by keeping it confident and neatly made, but remember that shading should go from one end of the arrow to the other and not end at arbitrary places.

You're also quite often adding it to the incorrect side of the arrow bends. I've outlined here the places where you hatching should have been, things that weren't noted are correct.

• The placement of your hatching is important because if not placed correctly it'll be contrary to the illusion of depth you're trying to achieve with your arrow overlaps. Perspective works by having objects appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when further away, even if they're the exact same size. Since this means that the bigger part of the arrow is the one closest to the viewer, the smaller part of the segment should be the one getting the hatching.

You must also remember to add extra lineweight on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves, the sense of fluidity present in your arrows carries over nicely to them, giving them a great sense of energy and good flow as they move across the space they occupy.

Remember to maintain tight, specific relationships between your phases of construction, especially when dealing with complex leaf structures. You skip construction steps for this leaf and this leaf right here is looser than it could be due to your flow lines for individual leaves of the complex structure going past the boundary laid out by the previous phase of construction (the one where you established the simple overall footprint for the structure). 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 must abide by that.

Make sure that whenever possible you're working additively in your constructions, don't cut back into what you've already drawn, as this often makes us think more about the flat shapes on the page, rather than the solid forms they represent.

Branches

You're doing well by following the instructions for this exercise. Your branches are coming along quite decently and by extending your lines this allows for a healthy overlap between segments, which in turn helps us achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next.

I've noticed that you often have visible tails in your compound strokes, but this isn't a big deal, it's more important that you're extending your lines as with time your accuracy will naturally improve, you might like to attempt to superimpose your new lines on top of the previous ones in order to get better at this.

Your application of ellipse degrees can still be improved as some of them are looking a little bit too consistent or changing unnaturally, which hurts the solidity of your forms, remember that as cylindrical forms shift away from the viewer the degree of your ellipses will shift.

Plant Construction Section

Onto your plant constructions, you're doing a really good job of representing them as tridimensional objects. Your lines are very clean and your constructions are looking very solid for the most part, you're clearly demonstrating a good sense of spatial reasoning.

Of course, improvement is still possible and as such here are a couple of points that you can keep in mind moving forward.

• When approaching cylindrical structures such as flower pots, drawing a minor axis first will help with keeping the various ellipses aligned. It's also reall good to see you going past the initial steps and constructing the rim of your pots.

You don't always end up applying the methods you've learned previously to your constructions.

For example in this kumquat plant you're skipping construction steps by not drawing extra branches here and here with the forking branches method as well as by not drawing it around a minor axis, you also lose control of the branch in here by trying to draw it in a single stroke.

For your dragon tree construction you're going past the initial boundary lines, as mentioned in the leaves section of this critique, maintain specific relationships between your phases of construction, because if you're not respecting your initial boundary lines, they may as well not exist.

For your lucky bamboo plant you don't construct one of the bamboos around a minor axis.

Onto your use of lineweight, you're often using a lot of black in your constructions. Keep in mind that lineweight should only be used to clarify overlaps and added with a single confident stroke on top of your previous line.

Your mushroom is coming along quite nicely, what can be improved here is your use of texture. You're already making good use of the principles of texture but sometimes you're forgetting to apply it completely. You add too much black around the edge of the mushroom cap, even where it wouldn't make logical sense for it to be there. This is also true for your turnip, your candlestick plant and your dragon fruit, where you end up relying a bit on form shadows.

It also seems that at some point you gave up on adding texture to your mushroom, as I can see you've outlined the shapes and placement for your shadows, but you don't completely fill it in. If you decide to add a certain detail to your drawing, be it a new petal, shape, or texture, you must commit to it all the way through.

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, with 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.

None of this has to do with decorating any of our drawings, what we draw here 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 the information present in our reference to be able to translate it to our stucture.

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 design a shadow shape that best conveys the texture of this object, as well as how that shadow would be affected by the surface it's being cast on, as a shadow cast on a rounded surface will be rounded, 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 applying the concepts taught in this lesson to great effect. For the most part your constructions are looking solid and tridimensional. Make sure to keep the points I mentioned here today in mind, going forward, make sure to also carefully apply the instructions to your work.

I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete as I believe you're ready to tackle the challenges present in the next lesson. Good luck in Lesson 4.