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

Arrows

Your lines are looking fairly confident and smooth, which helps communicate a nice sense of fluidity in your arrows as they move through the world. You're keeping foreshortening in mind while constructing your arrows which allows you to make good use of perspective and the depth of your page, this gives a nice extra layer of tridimensionality to your arrows.

Your usage of hatching helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space and further your own understanding of the tridimensional space these objects occupy. It's also good that you're making use of added line weight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth, but don't forget that your marks must integrate seamlessly into the underlying stroke, your new mark must taper at the end in order to create an invisible transition between the two marks.

You've done a good job with this exercise, but I'd like to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise, try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different rates of foreshortening, keep in mind that arrows are very flexible objects and can move freely across the world in all sorts of manners, so you should push yourself and explore the different possibilities in order to further your understanding of tridimensional space.

Leaves

The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, although you do have some unnatural bends present in your leaves. Keep in mind that even though leaves are very flexible structures, that mostly applies to their length and not their width. They're like a piece of paper, not a piece of rubber, they can fold and bend in a lot of ways, but they can't stretch or compress, and if you try to force them to they'll simply rip apart, this is why the width of your leaves looks "unbalanced", keep tackling arrows and leaves during your warm ups in order to keep developing this skill.

You need to make use of edge detail more thoroughly in your work, because you're not always making use of edge detail in your leaf structures they are left very simple, edge detail is a great tool to further help you communicate the form of your structures and how they move through space. So don't forget that only the last stage of construction, texture, is optional.

In the times where you do make use of edge detail in your plant constructions it is starting to move in the right direction, but it still needs work, while you usually avoid trying to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time I did still notice certain places where you've zigzagged your marks which is a mistake that should be avoided, as it goes against the third principle of mark-making from lesson 1. You also have a tendency to cut back into some of your forms and draw your edge detail marks with a thicker lineweight than the original construction.

If that was intentional, just 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.

Your addition of texture is coming along quite explicit as you outline your textures which leaves no transitions from light to dark in an attempt to capture the representation of what's going on with your structure, but this doesn't allow you to focus on the cast shadows present and thus properly communicate the forms that run along the surface of that form. There's much more going on than just a few stray marks implying veins and we can do much more to accurately communicate this type of texture, take a look at this informal demo on how to approach leaf texture, and make sure to give these reminders on how texture works in Drawabox a read.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently made as you're following the instructions for the exercise, you're drawing your edges in segments which helps you maintain higher control over your marks and allows you to create more solid but still organic looking structures.

For ellipses it's good to see that you're making an attempt to always draw through them twice, as that allows for a smoother mark overall. When it comes to your application of the ellipse degree shift to your branches it can be improved, as it stands your degrees are too consistent and hardly change which is a mistake that flattens your structures. Remember that as a form shifts in relation to the viewer, so will the degree of the ellipses within that structure also shift.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions where you are starting to get acquaintanced with these construction methods and techniques and understand why and how they need to be applied to your work. But you're facing a couple of obstacles that are hurting the quality of your work and stopping you from getting the most out of this Lesson.

So here are the issues present in your work and how to address them the next time you tackle exercises.

First things first do not forget that the construction methods and techniques introduced in this course must always be applied to your work, as they're tools which will help you construct much tighter and solid looking structures, here are some of the examples of the times where you've deviated from the construction methods:

In here you draw the leaf structures outlined in red as outline, rather than constructing them with a flow line, which causes them to look flat and stiff.

You can see in this construction that you've skipped construction steps when approaching the stems of the flower structure because you did not construct the branches around a minor axis.

In this snapdragon construction you do not construct these structures as complete forms with their own volume, instead you try to capture them with an outline of their shapes, which not only does not communicate any sense of form or volume, but it flattens the rest of the entire structure. Even though this is a complex structure it's very much still a type of flower and so it should be thoroughly constructed with the leaf construction method in order to capture a sense of solidity and flow.

Remember that these methods and techniques will help you develop your sense of form and spatial reasoning, they will help you have a tighter grasp on how different forms exist in tridimensional space and how they relate to one another, but they can only do that if you're consistently applying them. They're not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.

Another mistake that often comes in tandem with the first is the fact that you're not drawing through your forms. I've noticed that in several of your constructions you mostly draw the parts of your construction that would be visible to the viewer such as in the leaves in this structure, the structures behind the main petals of this flower and your snapdragon construction. This limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of these exercises as not drawing through your forms means you're relying on your observation skills, you're drawing what you think you see rather than engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and through it trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, where each form comes from, what each and every structure attaches to, how it all comes together to create a single tridimensional structure.

When working on these exercises make sure to keep the entirety of your construction contained to the space of your page, don't let forms run off from the page or leave them open ended, letting them run off from the page won't allow you to fully construct them and truly understand how your structure exists in 3d space, and leaving constructions open ended will flatten them.

Your tomatoes are looking a bit flat and stiff, that's because you didn't draw through your ellipses twice which has caused them to appear bumpy and inconsistent. Don't forget to always draw through your ellipses twice in this course.

And lastly let's take a look at your addition of texture to these structures, which needs some work as it's looking very explicit as you add too many big areas of black, they're not designed with a specific purpose in mind and so there are no focal points of detail in your constructions which leaves no places for your viewer to focus on or any areas of rest, there's no contrast and so everything competes to keep the viewer's attention.

So let's revisit how texture in Drawabox is approached, by looking back on this page we can refresh our memory on texture through the lens of Drawabox and see that it is not used to make our work aesthetic or good looking, 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. Only after analyzing all of this information present in our reference will we be able to translate it to our construction. This means that 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, which is why we need to consider carefully how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic and communicates this tridimensional information.

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. Make sure to go over these reminders in order to solidify your understanding of texture further.

Final Thoughts

It seems to me that you haven't fully grasped why these techniques and methods should be applied to your work, and why they are important, which causes the quality of your work and the usage of these methods to be a bit inconsistent in your pages.

It's important that you understand how to make use of these techniques to the best of your ability in order to construct a structure that feels tridimensional. As such I'm going to be asking you for some revisions so that you can revisit these exercises before delving into more complex subjects. Take your time to look at the relevant lesson material mentioned here, then please reply once you're finished with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

4 plant construction pages.