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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows their linework is looking confident and smooth which gives them a great feeling of fluidity as they move through the world. You're making really good use of the depth of the page with your use of foreshortening.

It's good that you're applying hatching to your work and that it's really well executed as that helps you reinforce your spatial reasoning skills, but for this arrow you placed your hatching on the incorrect side of the arrow's overlap, which disrupts the illusion of depth you wanted to achieve.

Perspective works in the following manner: things that are further away from the viewer will look smaller, and as they get closer to the viewer they'll look bigger. The way this affects an object of consistent size and width that stretches across space is that certain segments of this object will look bigger and others smaller, either gradually or dramatically depending on the perspective of the scene, as such the bigger part of the arrow will always be the one that's closest to the viewer so the segment that's behind it should be the one that you apply the hatching to.

As a finishing touch to your arrows don't forget to make use of extra lineweight on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves the fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely in how you're approaching your leaves. There are some which feel a little bit stiff, but in general they feel energetic and organic.

You're not always considering how the center line is more than just a 2D mark and that it establishes how a flat object moves across 3D space freely. Because of this some of your leaf structures that bend in some way or another often fold unaturally, such as this leaf, this one and also this leaf, because you're too afraid of letting your edges overlap, which distorts and flattens the structure, keep in mind that leaves are very flexible along their spine, but not so much along their width, as if they were a piece of paper, if you were to hold a piece of paper in from of you and try to bend it in the same way these leaves do, the paper would rip at the sides.

It's good to see that you're experimenting with complex leaf structures.

Your application of edge detail is coming along really nicely, in general you're not trying to capture more than one piece or element of edge detail at a time which allows you to maintain higher control over your marks and create a tighter, more specific construction. But do make sure not to leaves gaps in your edge detail, as they undermine the solidity of your construction, and remember to always construct edge detail additively, avoid cutting back into the forms you've already drawn, as that can cause you to focus too much on manipulating 2d shapes on the page, instead of how these marks represent 3d edges in space.

Branches

Onto your branches it seems that you're not always following the instructions for this exercise as closely as you could, while it's possible to see that you're extending some of your edge segments you're not always doing so, and in a couple cases you're extending not extending them completely up to the halfway point between ellipses, which partially removes the healthy overlap between lines that we want to achieve in this exercise.

So don't forget how branches should be approached](https://drawabox.com/lesson/3/2/onestroke), by having each segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully to the halfway point to the third ellipse. Afterwards you'll start a new segment, placing your pen at the second ellipse, making sure not to leave any gaps in between your edge and your ellipse, and not cut into your ellipse as it undermines the solidity of your forms. Once you're done, repeat this pattern until your entire branch is complete.

Onto your ellipses it's good that you're making the effort to always draw through them at least twice. You also seem aware of the ellipse degree shift, but in some of your branches the ellipse's degrees barely change when they should as shown here. Remember that as a cylindrical form shifts towards or away from the viewer, the degree of the ellipses within that structure will also shift.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly, let's look at how you're applying the concepts you've learned previously to actual structures, which are looking really well done, for the most part you're sticking to the instructions for the exercise and following the construction techniques introduced in the lesson material. You're certainly demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

Of course there are a couple of things that can still be improved in your work, so let's take a look at the things that could be approached differently in your pages and the things that should be avoided so that you can take your homework into the next level.

One thing you must address is the fact that you're often drawing earlier phases of construction with lighter, fainter lines. Drawing earlier phases of construction more faintly can make one think of Drawabox exercises as sketching, where the initial lines are only building blocks for the refinement that comes later on. But Drawabox exercises are not sketching, they're drills created with the explicit purpose of helping you develop your spatial reasoning skills, it's important that you commit to your marks and respect the decisions and boundaries that they establish as they all contribute equally to the solidity of your structure, as such all phases of construction should be drawn with the same line thickness.

On top of that you have a tendency to add some heavy lineweight around the silhouette of your forms, such as in here, here and here, this softens the distinctions between the forms and flattens the structure out somewhat, almost as if pulling a sock over a vase. Lineweight should be added subtly, with only a single line, and only with the purpose of helping clarify the distinctions between overlaps.

You're making really good use of boundaries which is helping you greatly in keeping your leaf structures more consistent with one another and thus creating a tighter, more specific construction.

• Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

• For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

• While this is something that you do generally respect (and you generally don't ever cut into your silhouettes), we can see some spots in this orchid where you actually did extend off existing forms' silhouettes.

Instead of thinking in terms of shapes and silhouettes, we can reinforce the principles Drawabox wants to teach by also constructing new forms on top of the previous ones with organic forms.

You're not always making use of edge detail very thoroughly in your pages, if we revisit the instructions for this exercise we can see that only the last step of construction, texture, is optional, so make sure to add edge detail to your work in order to further communicate the form of your leaf structures and how they sit and move through space. On top of that, follow the instructions for adding edge detail, and remember the principles of mark-making from lesson 1, as the "edge detail" in your bee orchid construction is very haph-hazardly made, while that's because it's not exactly edge detail the same rules apply - these small fur-like pieces of detail on your reference must be carefully planned and added to your work.

You're adding too many big areas of black into your work, such as in your cactus construction. This can obscure your construction and make your work harder to critique, and it also doesn't follow the principles of texture in this course.

Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction - in essence, they're the same concept, just at different scales, with construction focusing on the primitive forms that make up different objects and texture focuses on communicating the small forms that run along the surface of said subject. While construction tells the viewer what it'd feel like to manipulate that object with their hands, texture visually communicates what it would feel like to run their hands across the surface of that object.

Neither construction nor texture have anything to do with aesthetics or making a drawing visually interesting, what we draw here is based on what's physically present in our reference. As mentioned here when making use of texture, we should focus on how each individual form present on the surface of an object casts a shadow onto that same surface, and how that shadow would then be distorted by the surface it's being cast on. This means that the shape of this shadow is incredibly important as it defines the relationships between the form casting it and the surface it's being cast on, as such you should design your shadow shape in a way that feels dynamic, as shown here.

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 that enforces the ideals of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following them, you'll find yourself asking how to convey 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 should be approached.

Final Thoughts

In general your work is good, you're moving in the right direction. You're starting to understand the concepts this lesson seeks to teach, you're stumbling upon a couple of roadblocks which harm some of the solidity of your work and stop you from making the most out of this lesson, so you must keep them in mind and remember to avoid these mistakes in your next attempts.

I believe you're ready for the construction challenges in the next lesson, as such I'm going to mark this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.