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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows you're doing very well in this exercise, they're looking quite smooth due to the confidence which they're drawn, this helps push the feeling of fluidity which arrows have as they move through the world. You're making good use of the depth of the page with your use of perspective.

Your addition of hatching is pretty neat and tidy, but remember that your lines should go from one end of the arrow to the other, they shouldn't float or end at arbitrary places.

Don't forget the last step for this exercise. After your arrow is complete add lineweight to reinforce your arrow's overlaps.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves the fluidity present in your arrows is translating very nicely into this exercise. They're looking quite energetic as you not only capture how they sit statically within space, but also how they move across it.

Your addition of edge detail is generally looking good, you're generally avoiding capturing more than one bump or piece of detail at a time, and roughly putting it down with the same line thickness as the rest of your construction. Although there are some cases where you falter and do rely on zigzagging your edge detail and cutting back into your original construction. Generally you'll want to avoid cutting back into your original construction, working additively whenever possible, but when working subtractively becomes unavoidable it's good to keep these notes in mind.

You addition of texture is looking a bit explicit. If you look here you can find some extra notes on leaf texture.

Branches

Onto your branches you have a couple of divergences from the instructions this exercise. Remember the characteristics of branches, simple cylinders of consistent width, with no foreshortening applied to them.

I can see that you're attempting to extend your lines, but sometimes you draw big sections of your branches in a single stroke, which is a mistake as outlined here. 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. This helps us maintain control of our marks and allows for a healthy overlap between them, which helps to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition.

Lastly, don't forget to always draw through your ellipses twice.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly onto your plant constructions, you're applying the techniques and methods introduced in the lesson and showing a great understanding of spatial reasoning, your constructions are looking very tridimensional and solid as a result.

Your work here is very good, here are some extra points that you can keep in mind whenever you tackle these exercises again in order to push your work into the next level.

You have a tendency to go back over your initial lines and trace over them, but all this does is remove the confidence your original lines had as well as undermine your previous phases of construction, as you often cut back into your initial forms, contradicting the forms they establish. Tracing in general is something to avoid when possible, because it tends to make us focus more on how we're following a line on a flat page, rather than how that line represents an edge in 3D space.

Tracing over later phases of construction can also make one think of Drawabox exercises as sketching, where the initial lines are less important than 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 stages of construction must be drawn in roughly the same line thickness. Lineweight itself can be added towards the

end of a construction, focusing specifically on capturing how the different forms overlap one another, as explained here.

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

Make sure not to leave any parts of your construction open ended as that can remind the viewer that these are indeed just lines on a page, and it also leaves their relationships to other phases of construction unclear and undefined, once you finish a stem or branch, make sure to cap the end off with an ellipse.

In that same vein, don't leave any gaps between your flow line and your outer edges in your leaf constructions, they must connect.

When working subtractively in your leaf structures becomes unavoidable, make sure to keep these notes in mind.

Make sure to keep applying the instructions from the methods previously introduced in the lesson in your plant constructions, you fall back into the habit of drawing branch edges in a single stroke in your plant constructions, and in the cases where you do extend your lines, you're not fully extending it until the halfway point between ellipses.

I've noticed in your rafflesia construction that the cylindrical forms behind it are not actually fully constructed, and are instead just drawn with a couple of lines and left open ended, this flattens the construction.

Don't forget that filled in areas of black should be reserved for cast shadows. In this flower construction you fill in the leaf structure on the stem with solid black, but that's not a cast shadow ( a shadow that is cast onto neighboring surfaces due to a form blocking the light ) but a form shadow ( a shadow that appears on an object itself, due to the object itself blocking the light from reaching the other side ).

Overall your use of texture here is moving in the right direction, although I did notice in your rafflesia construction that you end up filling in large areas of black which aren't cast shadows, in this case it may be that you're attempting to capture local color present in your reference picture, but keep in mind that texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction, with construction being focused on the big and primitive forms that make up different structures and texture focusing on communicating the small forms that run along the surface of an object, essentially texture is a way of visually communicating to the viewer what it would feel like to run their hands across that 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, 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 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, 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 who enforces the ideas of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following these ideas, 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 is approached.

Final Thoughts

Your work here is pretty good, you're moving in the right direction and already demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning which is aiding you as you tackle these constructions.

Don't forget to apply some of the methods more consistently and thoroughly, keep in mind that Drawabox doesn't care about the end result, you're here to use these structures, plants and otherwise, as bases upon which you can apply the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson in order to practice your skills.

I'll be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.