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

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 good use of perspective and the depth of your page, this gives a nice extra layer of tridimensionality to your arrows.

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. 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, but do remember that your hatching lines must still follow the principles of ghosting and mark-making, they must have clear end and start points, be carefully planned and not end at arbitrary points.

Still speaking of hatching, there are a couple of times where you've placed it incorrectly, making it seem like your arrow is getting bigger the further away it is, and getting smaller the closer it gets to the viewer, which goes against the rules of perspective.

• 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 receiving the hatching.

In general you're doing well, so keep tackling this exercise during your warm ups in order take your understanding of arrows and 3D space further, experiment with the different ways arrows can twist and bend and move across space, try different rates of foreshortening and experiment with the negative space between overlaps, all of these will help you challenge yourself and develop your skills further.

Leaves

The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, but you also have some unnatural bends present in your leaves. Keep in mind that even though leaves are very flexible structures, that mostly applies to their length and not their width. They're like a piece of paper, not a piece of rubber, they can fold and bend in a lot of ways, but they can't stretch or compress, and if you try to force them to they'll simply rip apart.

It's good to see that you're also experimenting with some more complex types of leaf structures, and doing so by following the instructions, which allows you to create a much tighter and more solid looking structure that still feels flexible and energetic.

Your edge detail is looking quite well made, you're not attempting to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, and you're often approaching it additively - that is, constructing it on top of your preexisting structure, but I did notice that your earlier linework has several passes on top of it and it's more faint, this is an issue that also shows up in your plant constructions. Remember to keep the line thickness for each phase of construction roughly consistent, so as not to encourage yourself to redraw more than you strictly need to.

Your addition of texture is coming along quite explicit as you outline your textures which leaves no transitions from light to dark in an attempt to capture the representation of what's going on with your structure.

This doesn't allow you to properly focus on the cast shadows present and thus your addition of texture is less specific than it could be. There's much more going on than just a few stray marks implying veins and we can do much more to accurately communicate this type of texture, take a look at this informal demo on how to approach leaf texture, and make sure to give these reminders on how texture works in Drawabox a read.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently made as you're generally following the instructions for the exercise, but they can still be improved. While it's good to see that you're drawing your edges in segments you're always extending said segment completely up to the halfway point between ellipses, which partially removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve in these structures.

So remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, 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 entire branch is complete.

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 starting to move in the right direction as you generally make use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in this Lesson which helps you create the illusion of tridimensionality in your work, however you are falling for a couple of pitfalls which affect the quality of your work and stop you from getting the most out of this lesson.

So here are the issues present in your work and how to address them the next time you tackle exercises.

First things first don't forget to pay close attention to the homework section of the lesson and any specifications made there. You've submitted 15 pages of plant constructions, almost double of what is specified in the Lesson material. As mentioned in the homework section of the lesson page if you wish to add your own attempts at the demos alongside your homework they must not make up more than half of your total pages, so in this case that means no more than 3 of your pages should be your own attempts at the demos.

I've noticed that for these pages you had a tendency to choose more complex plant structures with lots of elements to them, while this is not necessarily a mistake it can end up limiting your ability to hone your skills and fully become acquaintanced with the construction techniques and methods, choosing some less leafy and more simple structures would have allowed you to focus more on applying the construction techniques and methods to your structures, rather than trying to juggle several elements at once.

Another issue that severely impacts the quality of your work is the fact that you're approaching Drawabox as if it was sketching, drawing earlier phases of construction much more faintly, with several passes over certain sections of your construction, and some of your marks are so light and faint they even make me suspect you might have been using pencil or a lighter pen such as in here, here and here.

So don't forget why we use the tools we use and keep in mind that if this is the case - changing pens or using pencils this will not be allowed in the future.

Remember that the construction methods and techniques introduced in this course must always be applied to your work, as they're tools which will help you construct much tighter and solid looking structures, there are moments where you skip construction steps by not drawing your branches with the correct construction method, causing them to look flatter and inconsistent, the same can be said about these mushrooms where you didn't construct the body of the mushroom, this causes their size to feel inconsistent and this flattens the structures.

Always keep in mind that these methods and techniques will help you develop your sense of form and spatial reasoning, they will help you have a tighter grasp on how different forms exist in tridimensional space and how they relate to one another, but they can only do that if you're consistently applying them. They're not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.

Another mistake present in several of your pages is the fact that you're not drawing through your forms. I've noticed that in several of your constructions you mostly draw the parts of your construction that would be visible to the viewer such as in the leaves in this structure, these structures in this succulent construction, the petals in here, these mushrooms and so on. This limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of these exercises as not drawing through your forms means you're relying on your observation skills, you're drawing what you think you see rather than engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and through it trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, where each form comes from, what each and every structure attaches to, how it all comes together to create a single tridimensional structure.

Ease up on your lineweight, it's thick, with several passes going over the same marks and jump from one form's silhouette to another, which smooths everything out too much. Almost as if you pulled a sock over a vase, it softens the distinctions between the forms and flattens the structures out somewhat.

Instead lineweight must be subtle, used only to clarify the overlaps between the forms that are being built up, as explained here.

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 and hatching to your work, which is not allowed. You also don't design your shadows with a specific purpose in mind and so there are no focal points of detail in your constructions which leaves no places for your viewer to focus on or any areas of rest for their eyes, there's no contrast and so everything competes to keep the viewer's attention.

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.

So for example, in this construction you have several big areas of black that didn't necessarily need to be there, at least not to this extent, and these shadows coupled with the stems that were not properly constructed only serve to flatten the rest of the structure. If we compare it to a similar construction, such as the potato plant demo we can see that in the potato plant demo the areas of shadows are so densely packed with leaves that no light reaches the soil, and in your construction you have areas such as close to the edges that would recieve much more light, thus cast less shadows.

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're starting to move in the right direction but you're still struggling on a couple of points and applying these methods consistently to your work, as such I believe you would benefit from tackling these exercises again before moving on to more complex tridimensional challenges.

Please reply with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

2 plant constructions.