Hello MagneticScrolls, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.
Arrows
Let's start this critique off by talking about your arrows, your linework is generally looking smooth and confident, which helps give your arrows a certain sense of fluidity, but be careful with being too afraid of letting your edges overlap when they should as this mistake is very present throughout this page and greatly impacts the feeling of fluidity and solidity in your arrows.
Instead of trying to draw your second line in one stroke and risk not overlapping edges, or causing your arrows to bulge or narrow suddenly and contradict the illusion of depth you wish to create, you can make use of the ghosting method and plan your lines beforehand with the use of dots, and gauge whether the line created would then fulfill it's purpose.
It's good that you're making use of hatching in order to push the depth of your arrows, but you're sometimes adding it to the incorrect side of the bend, which contradicts the illusion of depth you wish to achieve in your work.
As a finishing touch don't forget to make use of extra lineweight on top of overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.
Leaves
Moving on to your leaves they're looking pretty fluid and energetic due to your confident line work. You're not only capturing how these leaves sit statically within space, but also making the effort to think of how they would twist and bend as they move across that space from time to time, which is a great start, just make sure to remember that the same principles of drawing arrows in space apply, as you've got some places where your leaves are folding a bit unnaturally as their edges don't overlap when they should.
Your application of edge detail is looking good as you're generally applying it with roughly the same line weight as your initial construction. You're also generally not trying to capture more than one piece of detail at a time, but I did notice in here that your lines do seem to capture about two pieces of detail before they end, this is still zigzagging your edge detail which must be avoided because it goes against the third principle of mark making from lesson 1.
In general your leaves are very good, you'll do even better in this exercise once you consider the points above, as well as keep practicing your accuracy in order to avoid leaving gaps and overshoots between lines which can undermine the solidity of your form.
Branches
For your branches there's a couple of things which can be improved here, as you have some slight deviations from the instructions to this exercise because you're not following the characteristics for branches: simple cylinders of consistent width with no foreshortening applied to them.
Make sure that when tackling this basic exercise that all of your branches follow this pattern.
For how you're approaching your edges it's good to see that you're following the line extension method and approaching them in segments, which allows you to create more solid structures and maintain higher control over your marks while still creating the illusion of a single continuous stroke, however, in order for this to be possible it's important that you extend your lines only up to the halfway point between ellipses, but currently you're extending it too far away, which partially removes the overlaps between lines we want to achieve in this exercise.
So remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse, extending it past the second ellipse and fully up to the halfway point to the third ellipse, afterwards you'll start a new segment, making sure to place your pen at the second ellipse and repeat this pattern until your branch is complete.
For your ellipses you're not drawing through your ellipses quite often, so don't forget to always ghost your ellipses as many times as it's needed until you feel confident that you can execute your lines smoothly and swiftly not only once, but twice. Still on the topic of ellipses, don't forger to vary their degree shift across your ellipse's length, since currently your ellipses have very little to no variation between them, this causes them to look consistent which flattens your forms.
Plant Construction Section
Now let's move on to the meat of the lesson and talk about your plant constructions.
In general your constructions are looking pretty good, they're coming out quite tridimensional already, and you're well on your way to grasp the concepts this lesson seeks to teach and be able to apply them thoroughly and effectively in your work. For the most part you're making use of the construction techniques introduced in the lesson, and do note that I said for the "most part" because there are a couple of times where you're skipping construction steps despite making use of them correctly in other instances, which suggests one of two things:
Either you're aware that these steps should have been employed, and arbitrarily decided when to make use of them and when to not make use of them, which is a mistake that causes your work to be flattened and hurts your progress.
Or you don't have a complete grasp of when or why these techniques should be employed yet.
One such case is your inconsistent use of the leaf construction method, which is usually applied well in certain constructions, such as in here but in other constructions, like these despite the structure you approach being fundamentally the same you didn't make use of it.
I've noticed that the difference between when you make use of the method versus when you don't seems to be based around how you think of the structure, because you did draw "leaves" with the leaf construction method, but flower "petals" were not approached in the same way, you can see this very clearly in this construction.
I bring this up because I want to explain something very important - the idea that these techniques are not "how to"s, they're not actually teaching you anything about how to draw leaves or plants or cars and animals in following lessons. These techniques are not an approach to how to achieve a certain look, they're a tool which will help you understand and learn how the structure you're studying fully exists in 3d space. When you don't make use of them what you're affecting the final look of the piece, but how you think of it as you draw it and that - your mindset is what actually affects the final look of your work.
Despite their name, none of these methods are actually about drawing leaves, or branches, you may as well call them the "drawing triangularish cut pieces of paper" method or the "tube construction" method. Again, they're tools, ways that you can break down structures and think of them not as "this thing", "a leaf", "the car mushroom's ex girlfriend had before she left him" instead they're tools that help you rewire your brain, see things not for what you think they are, but for the fundamental forms that make them up.
While leaves and petals are not the same thing, they may as well be when we draw them, as they're both the same structurally speaking: flat objects that exist in 3d space and are flexible along their length but not so flexible that they can be bent like a piece of rubber.
While mushrooms and the branches in a monstera plant are not the same, as one is closer to an animal than to a plant, structurally speaking they are the same: a cylindrical body with a roughly consistent width which due to it's organic nature has a certain "flow" ( the minor axis ) to it, which is why we approach them with the same "method".
This is all to say that you must think about the structures you draw as what we name them as, but about how they exist in space, and what the best way to communicate that information is and construct it in a way that captures this tridimensional information on your page. So never deviate from the construction methods and techniques introduced, you can add to them, as they're very flexible, but the rule of thumb is that if a method can't be used to construct a certain one, another one, or a mix of them probably can, and you need to figure out how to construct that structure in order to develop your spatial reasoning abilities.
A different issue that greatly affects your work is the fact that you have lighter lines for the earlier phases of construction, which causes you to not respect your initial structures and boundary lines you establish as closely as you should.
There are quite a few times where you seem to have redone a line, remember that the reason we're working with ink is because we must respect all of the lines we put down, not only a few, not only must we commit to our marks, but also to our mistakes, as redrawing a mark will only make it unclear as to what the clear defining edge of your structure is.
In some of your leaf structures you drew your edge detail exclusively by cutting back into the forms you've already drawn, this is a mistake, you must always work on your edge detail additively, except when it absolutely cannot be done, this is because subtractive construction is much harder than additive construction, and cutting back into your work can cause you to focus too much on changing the silhouette of your forms, and think too much in 2d terms, instead of remembering how those marks denote edges in 3d space.
Your mushrooms are certainly well constructed, they would be even more solid if you construct the cap in it's entirety, making use of several ellipses in order to consruct the basis for the structure before trying to capture the dome like form right away.
Final Thoughts
In general you're moving in the right direction and starting to understand the concepts this lesson seeks to teach, you only need to folow the instructions more closely and make sure that you're always putting in the effort to think of the structures on your reference as tridimensional forms, and how to use that reference to construct a tridimensional structure fully.
I believe you are ready for the challenges present in the next lesson, as such I'll 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.
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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