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

Arrows

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 making good use of the depth of the page due to your application of foreshortening to your arrows.

It's good that you're making use of some well applied hatching as that helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space and your own understanding of the tridimensional space these objects occupy, as well as making use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps as a finishing touch to your arrows.

You're doing very well in this exercise, so I'd just like to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise, as your arrows are generally very similar in the way they move through space as well as their rates of foreshortening. Try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different types of perspective and 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

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. However 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.

Your addition of edge detail is generally looking good, as you don't usually attempt to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, although do remember to always approach it additively whenever possible. You're also keeping the line thickness between your phases of construction roughly consistent, all of which is very good and helps you create a tighter, more solid construction that still feels fluid and energetic.

Moving on to your application of texture it's looking generally alright, as you're attempting to follow the instructions for texture in these structures, however you can definitely push your application of it further, 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

For your branches they are generally coming along decently as you're putting in the effort to follow the instructions for this exercise, but there are a couple of changes that can be made in order to help you stick to the instructions more closely. It's good to see that you're extending your edges in segments, but you often just extend your marks up to the next ellipse point, not past it and up to the halfway point between ellipses, which partially removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve in this exercise.

So remember how branches should be approached, notice how each new edge segment starts at an ellipse point, continues past the second ellipse and goes up fully to the halfway point to the third ellipse. Afterwards you'll start a new segment at the next ellipse point, extending it past the third ellipse, and stopping halfway to the fourth, and so on until your entire branch is complete. The purpose of this methodology is to get us used to this technique of building up complex lines with individual strokes that overlap to create the illusion of a single mark.

For your 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. You don't seem aware of the ellipse degree shift as your degrees are all very similar to 90° ellipses and do not change change throughout your branches, they remain mostly static which is a mistake. 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

Let's finish this critique by taking a look at your plant constructions, which are looking incredibly well made, for the most part you're sticking to the construction methods and techniques introduced in this Lesson which helps you to create some very tridimensional and solid looking constructions, you're demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

You're not only trying to capture what these structures look like, but you're focusing on how they work, how they exist fully in their tridimensional space by drawing through your forms and carefully thinking about the way each piece of your construction exists in 3d space and how the different parts of your structure exist 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 into the next level, so here are some of the points you should keep in mind whenever you tackle these exercises again.

There are generally two things we must allow ourselves when tackling these exercises in order to get the most out of them, as they can impact the quality of our work without us even realizing it.

These are time and space, in this case, you don't always allow yourself enough space when approaching these exercises because you're pre-planning how many drawings you wish to fit on a given page, which artificially limits the space your brain has to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that naturally arise as we tackle these exercises. So make sure that your first construction is as big as it needs to be, only afterwards should you gauge whether there is enough space on the page to add another construction, if not, it's completely okay to have a single drawing per page.

Your construction of this Narcissus is looking pretty solid and well constructed, but there are some things that if approached differently would have allowed you to create a tighter structure that still maintains the characteristics of a flower. Despite the odd conical shape of the petal structures of a narcissus, they are still very leaf-like in nature, as such they should be approached with the leaf construction method. There are two ways we can generally approach it - either by drawing different sections of this structure with the leaf construction method, and afterwards connecting the different leaves together in order to build the complex shape, or by using a slightly tapered cylinder in order to construct the main body of the leaf shape, then afterwards make use of the leaf construction method, build it on top of the cylinder in order to capture the flow of the different sections of the leaf structure, and lastly connect them together, making use of edge detail in order to finish the complex structure. I actually put together a quick demonstration of how this would look like for a different student once, and I believe you might find it helpful.

And lastly let's take a look at your application of texture which is generally moving in the right direction, but can still be improved as you often rely on big areas of black to convey texture, rather than focusing stritcly on cast shadows. So let's revisit how texture in Drawabox is approached, by looking back at this page we can refresh our memory and see that texture through the lens of Drawabox is not used to make our work aesthetic or pretty, 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, after analyzing all of the information present in our reference we'll be able to translate it to our study. 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.

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.

Final Thoughts

I believe you have understood the purpose of this lesson and the concepts it seeks to instill in Drawabox students, as such I believe you're ready to face the more complex constructional challenges present in the following lessons, I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.