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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows, they're capturing a very strong sense of fluidity, due to how confidently they're drawn.

Your hatching is correctly placed and it's good to see you make use of added lineweight, you're also making good use of the depth of the page with the perspective in your arrows - with the exception of here, where your edges don't overlap when they should - all of this helps sell the illusion of depth in your arrows.

You're already doing very well in this exercise, what you can look towards improving here is your application of shading to your arrows, your lines often end at arbitrary points or float in the middle of your arrow. Remember the principles of mark-making from lesson 1, lines must have a clear start and end point, as such make sure that they go from one end of the arrow to the other.

Leaves

Onto your leaves, your initial construction is very energetic and has a good sense of flow, but your addition of contour lines doesn't carry the same confidence behind it, this stiffens your leaves and is detrimental to the illusion of tridimensionality and energy of your leaves. Leaves are very flat and simple structures, there's not much going on with them, more contour lines won't convey any new information to the viewer and are therefore unnecessary, forego them entirely or add only the bare minimum, the more you add the more likely you are to add a line that contradicts the illusion you wish to create and undermine your construction.

This leaf structure is looser than it could be, due to the flow lines for the individual "arms" of the complex structure going past the initial 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 should abide by that.

While it's generally better to add to your construction rather than take away, cutting back into your initial construction will sometimes be inevitable, such as for this leaf structure, in these cases it's best to keep these notes on cutting back into your leaves in mind.

Make sure not to skip construction steps either, such as for this leaf structure. It's important to establish the overall footprint of your leaf structure before establishing how individual arms move, because even though the leaf is separated into different structures it's core is kept the same and these smaller arms abide by it.

Don't add thick lines of black on top of your leaves, structures in real life don't have thick, noticeable outlines, so by adding it to your construction you flatten your drawing and remind the viewer that this isn't a real object, but just lines on a page.

Branches

Onto your branches there are a couple of issues present with them.

Firstly you seem to be attempting to extend your lines, but you're not pushing them far enough, remember how branches should be approached: by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse, and stopping halfway to the third, with the new segment repeating the pattern from the 2nd ellipse until your branch is complete.

The way you're approaching them now is by extending your lines only slightly past the ellipse point before starting a new segment, which essentially removes the healthy overlap we aim to execute in this exercise and is stressed in the instructions, which helps us achieve a smoother, more seamless transition between lines.

Onto your ellipses it's good to see the variation in their degrees as the form shifts. What you can improved here is to remember to draw through your ellipses twice. Since you're not drawing through your ellipses they look stiff and hesitant, this flattens your forms.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's move on to your plant constructions, you don't always apply the instructions and methods introduced previously in the lesson when constructing your plants, this severely impacts the quality of your work, let's go through each of these pages and break down their issues and what you can keep in mind going forward.

These pages of plant constructions in your homework are looking particularly flat as you often don't make use of the methods introduced in the lesson material. This causes the relationships between your forms to be kept vague, forms to be undefined and inconsistent which hurts their solidity, and you often leave stems and branches open ended, all of these remind the viewer that these are indeed just lines on a page and not solid structures.

• The purpose of these exercises is to develop your sense of spatial reasoning through the use of exercises which are essentially drills, think of how an athetle might repeat the same set of exercises while training for the olympics, while they won't always execute it correctly or even perfectly, what's important is that the theory behind it is correct so that eventually they'll develop their skills. Otherwise, at best they could train themselves wrong and won't improve as fast as they might otherwise, at worst they could hinder their own improvement or even injure themselves.

  • Luckily you're not as likely to injure yourself when drawing, but this is why it's incredibly important for you to use the correct methods introduced in the material, this isn't a "how to draw plants" lesson, the objective is not to draw pretty looking plants, it's to use these structures as objects of study - tridimensional puzzles which we can break down and rebuild on our page and, in this manner, push our understanding of spatial reasoning further.

  • When approaching cylindrical structures such as flower pots and mushrooms, make sure to construct them around a minor axis in order to keep your various ellipses aligned.

You have a tendency to draw your earlier phases of construction lighter and afterwards, retrace the lines you deem more important. This often ends up harming the solidity of your constructions as your new lines are unconfident and wobbly, and retracing might be contributing to you being a bit looser on your constructions as sometimes you cut back into your forms, or don't respect the boundaries and forms that they establish.

In order to convince your viewer and yourself of the lie that these are actual solid objects, you must give all stages of construction the same importance by drawing them with roughly the same line thickness. Lineweight itself can be added towards the end of a construction in order to clarify overlaps.

While you get better at this as you move along the lesson it's something that I've noticed is present within your work. Remember that Drawabox seeks to develop your skills through the use of exercises and drills, as such you should be drawing through all of your forms, no matter how much it would be logically obscured by other parts of the construction or obscure said parts. This allows your brain to work through these spatial reasoning challenges to it's full extent.

There are two things we must allow ourselves when tackling these exercises in order to get the most out of these exercises. They are time and space, in this case, you're not allowing yourself enough space when approaching these exercises because you're preplanning how many drawings you wish to fit on a given page, this is artificially limiting your ability to apply the proper construction methods introduced in the lesson. So draw bigger, make sure that your first construction is as big as it needs to be, only afterwards should you gauge whether there is enough space on the page to add another construction, if not, it's completely okay to have a single construction in your page. Drawing bigger will allow you not only 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 whole arm when drawing.

• Something that is holding you back from your full potential is how you're sometimes skipping construction steps, such as in this rose and in this flower where not only do you not draw through your forms which limits your ability to use the leaf construction method correctly, but you also attempt to capture the complex detail of the petals immediately, instead of building this detail up as additional edge detail.

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 they're thick and rugged, or if they're smooth and sharp - texture is a way 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 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

Considering how your work often doesn't follow instructions I'm afraid you haven't paid as much attention to the lesson material as you could have, as such you're not allowing yourself enough time and space to fully work on these exercises, this is very noticeable in your work and it's significantly hurting it's quality, as well as limiting how much you're getting out of it.

With these points in mind, I'm not going to be passing you onto the next lesson, these concepts are highly important not only now, but in the following lessons as well, you need to show that you truy understand the instructions by applying them to your work before moving forward. Please reply with your revisions after revisiting any relevant lesson material.