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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows, for the most part they're flowing nicely across the page with only minor hiccups in the confidence of your linework. What I'd like to address is how in this arrow you repeat lines, remember that you must commit to your marks and commit to your mistakes, an idea introduced in Lesson 1 and still holds true.

You also seem to be staying within your comfort zone as your overlaps are alright, with the exception of here where the edges don't overlap where they should.

Your placement of hatching lines could be improved, sometimes you add it to the wrong side of the arrow, making it look like the side that should be further away is actually the side closer to the viewer.

• 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 same size. The way this affects an object of consistent size that stretches across space is that segments get smaller as they move away from the viewer and bigger as they get closer. The way you shade some of your arrows implies that they're getting bigger as they move away from the viewer, which breaks the perspective of your arrows.

I marked in here the places where your hatching should have been placed differently, and I'd like to mention that you need to keep the size of your arrows consistent, such as in the top right arrow where the last segment of the arrow looks bigger than the middle one.

Leaves

For your leaves it's good to see that they're bending naturally and your linework is confident here, although it does falter for the leaf at the top left of the page, making it look a bit stiff and unconfident, but other than that your leaves are flowing nicely and have a good sense of energy to them.

The things that you can improve in this exercise is that you're often falling into the habit of zigzagging your lines for your edge detail such as in this leaf. This goes against the third principle of mark making from lesson 1 and is something you generally want to avoid. Take the time to carefully think about your edge detail and make sure no line is trying to capture more than one "bump" at a time. Another mistake you're running into is cutting back into your original construction way too often, as mentioned by Uncomfortable in this section:

"Additionally, wherever possible, work additively - 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, 3D forms they represent. In this case you'll notice very clearly that along the top edge of the correct example, I've come up off the edge and back down to it."

Lastly, going forward you should also remember the complex leaf construction method and not skip construction steps as you do in this leaf.

Branches

Onto your branches I can see that you understand the instructions, but you're not always applying them to your work. For example I can see that you're extending your segments, but you're not always extending them correctly and sometimes you completely skip this step and draw your branches in a single stroke, which is a mistake as outlined here.

You need to extend more of your lines, as well as extend them to the correct place, extension lines should be extended to the halfway point between ellipses, while your lines are too short, barely reaching the halfwah point. Remember that extension lines for branches must be started at the first ellipse, drawn past the second ellipse, and then stopped halfway to the third, with the next segment restarting the pattern from the second ellipse until you finish the entire branch.

Also remember to always draw through your ellipses twice, while I can see you doing this quite frequently you don't always follow this step, even in your plant constructiom pages. Your ellipses are also looking a bit wobbly, so ghost them as much as you need, and execute them fast and with confidence.

Plant Construction Section

Onto your plant constructions the first thing that stands out to me in your pages is how much white space they have. Even with several plants in your pages they're still looking quite empty.

It's important that in this course we give our work all of the time and space it requires in order for us to make the most our of our drawing session.

Right now it seems that the small size of your drawings isn't based on you naturally drawing smaller, but on you planning how many plants you wish to fit on a page ahead of time. This is great as certainly you wish to get more practice out of your studies, but for drawabox purposes drawing smaller actually limits your ability to follow these exercises to the best of your ability.

Drawing smaller means you're unable to always properly apply instructions, such as drawing from your shoulder or drawing through you ellipses, drawing bigger also makes it easier to work through the spatial reasoning problems that arise when working through these exercises. So draw bigger, go into each page with the goal that you're going to be making your drawing as big as necessary and then, only after finishing it, you can gauge whether the remaining space is enough to fit another construction in.

Now onto your actual constructions, I can see some good work here, you're starting to think in 3D and work from the ground up, starting with simpler forms.

Here are some of the points you can improve on.

• You're also doing well by drawing plants such as your cactus and banana around a minor axis, but remember to draw all cylindrical objects around a minor axis, this includes pots and mushroom caps.

• You must remember to follow the instructions for the exercises such as enclosing the ends of your leaves, sometimes you leave an arbitrary gap between your outer edges and your flow line, this shouldn't happen and often times makes your leaves/petals look crooked, stiff or unnatural.

  • You're also not following the branch construction method by not extending your lines or drawing through your ellipses, although this might in part be influences by the fact you're drawing too small.

  • Another reminder not to zigzag your leaf's edge details, such as you do for your venus fly trap.

Remember the concepts introduced in previous lessons, such as ellipse variation and how it should vary in objects with cylindrical bodies, even though this concept is introduced using sausages it still applies to branches. Your ellipses and contour lines are looking a bit too consistent, when they should be changing as they move away from the viewer, this is flattening many of your constructions.

• You're doing well by giving all the phases of your constructions the same shade of black.

I'd like to finish this section by talking about your use of textures, often times you're approaching them explicitly, such as how you approach the textures on your leaves and your tree bark.

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 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 casted on, as a shadow casted on a rounded 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 clearly understanding many of the concepts taught in this lesson and applying them well, such as the idea of drawing through your forms and constructing them as tridimensional objects, your work is only sometimes held back because you don't always follow or apply instructions.

Moving forward remember that each and every concept introduced in this course must be followed and applied to your constructions when relevant.

I believe you're ready for Lesson 4, remember to add these exercises to your pool of warm-ups and apply the feedback you've recieved today to your future homework. Good luck on the next lesson.