Hello HubbleHD, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.
Arrows
You've submitted more pages than were requested, you've submitted two pages of arrows when only one was assigned.
Starting with your 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 really 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, as a finishing touch to your arrows don't forget to make use of added line weight on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth.
Generally you're doing a good job with this exercise, I'd like to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise in order to keep pushing yourself. 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.
Leaves
I've noticed that other leaf constructions are showing up behind your page, drawing more work than what was requested is considered grinding. As stated back in Lesson 0 only complete the amount of homework requested as it is requested. You will have plenty of time in the future to add these exercises to your list of warm ups after you've recieved feedback on how to improve, but grinding it right now will be pointless as you cannot trust yourself to judge your own work, and you're likely to unintentionally practice bad habits.
The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, it's good that you're not only trying to capture how these structures sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.
It's good to see that you've experimented with complex leaf structures but remember not to skip construction steps when approaching these more intricate structures.
These structures are looser than they could be, because you did not establish the spatial boundary that all of the later structures should abide to, despite complex structures being made up of several different parts, they still exist as a single entity, by not skipping construction steps you can ensure that your constructions are much more solid and specific.
You addition of edge detail needs some work, while it's good to see that you're not trying to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time you're often constructing it subtractively which is a mistake, instead, make sure to always construct your edge detail carefully, and additively, on top of your construction, as cutting back into our forms can cause us to focus too much on manipulating the 2d shapes on the page, instead of how our marks represent edges in tridimensional space.
You must also construct your edge detail with the same line thickness as your initial construction, so as to not encourage yourself to redraw more than you strictly need to.
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 allows you to maintain higher control over your marks and helps you create solid but still organic looking structures.
There are a lot of visible tails present in these branch structures, while this is a very common mistake we can attempt to mitigate it by limiting the amount of ellipses in our branches, by spacing them further apart we'll allow for a bigger length of runway between ellipses, and ensure a smoother, more seamless transition between marks.
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, which are coming along quite nicely made. You're generally making use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in this Lesson which helps you create the illusion of tridimensionality in your work, you're not only trying to capture what these structures look like, but you also focus on how they work, how they exist fully in tridimensional space by drawing through your forms and thinking about the way each piece of your construction exists in relation to one another.
This is all very good and it's helping you develop a strong sense of spatial reasoning, there are only a couple of small things that if kept in mind will help you take your work to the next level.
Your own attempts at the demos are all coming along really nicely constructed and solid, but there are a couple of moments such as in your pitcher plant construction](https://imgur.com/a/gDpUck3) where you've drawn over your marks more than three times, don't forget that part of the reason we draw in pen is to instill in us a respect for each and every mark we make, so that we focus our efforts on carefully planning each stroke we'll make, minimizing mistakes and maximizing the confidence in our marks. If we start to draw over them however this respect is lost and we're more likely to be careless both in the planning and execution stages.
Remember that you must be fully focused on the task at hand, do not multitask, and when working on your homework pages only your plant constructions should be present, there should be no other drawings, pieces of different exercises, or these arrows in this page.
Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that in certain parts of your constructions you don't draw through some of your forms, such as in this construction where you only drew parts of the petals that were visible at points, rather than constructing the entire structure, and for the structures at the top you've drawn them as shapes, this has flattened the overall construction and it limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise as not drawing through your forms and constructing them fully means you're relying on your observation skills, instead of engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and truly trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, where it comes from, what it attaches to.
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 to your work, which goes against the concept of drawing implicitly. You also don't design your shadows with a specific purpose in mind and so there are not a lot of clear focal points of detail in your constructions.
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
In general you are doing well, I believe that in these pages you have demonstrated that you do understand the way these construction methods and techniques should be used and why they're important for your work even if it can be improved upon, as such I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.
Next Steps:
Don't forget to add these exercises to your list of warm ups.
Move on to Lesson 4.
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.
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