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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your linework is looking smooth and confident which helps communicate the feeling of fluidity that arrows have as they move across the world. You're making good use of the depth of the page with your addition of foreshortening which helps give your arrows an extra feeling of tridimensionality, however your arrows sometimes bulge or narrow suddenly, especially close to their bends and overlaps, these unnatural bends slightly flatten your structure. When constructing your arrow, you can do so by slowly building your curves in segments with the ghosting method, and afterwards connecting them together, which will allow you to create the illusion of a single line, while still allowing you to maintain higher control of your marks.

You seem hesitant to make use of hatching in your arrows, so don't be afraid to add it in, it will help you further your knowledge of 3d space by helping you understand more clearly how your structures twist and turn as they move through the world. As a finishing touch to your arrows don't forget to make use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth.

In general you're doing well, so keep experimenting 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

Moving on to your leaves the fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely into these new structures, you're capturing a good sense of flow and energy as you don't only capture how these structures sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

Your addition of edge detail is coming along quite nicely, as you're adding it in with the same line thickness as the rest of your construction, you're also not trying to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, which helps you maintain higher control over your marks. You're also generally approaching it additively, constructing your new forms on top of your preexisting construction, instead of cutting back into it.

Branches

For your branches they're coming along really decently as you're generally following the instructions for this exercise, although there are some changes that can be made that will help you create even better, more tight and more specific branch structures.

It's good that you're extending your edges in segments, but there are some minor mistakes present in here, while it's good that you're extending your marks you're not always extending them fully up to the halfway point between ellipses, which partially removes the healthy overlaps between marks that we wish to achieve in this exercise.

So make sure to follow the instructions more closely for this exercise, take your time with each mark and each form in order to execute it to the best of your current ability, on top of this you also have many visible tails present in your branches, which can be addressed by placing your ellipses further apart, allowing for a bigger length of runway between segments and creating a smoother, more seamless transition between marks.

For your ellipses it's good to see that you're always drawing through your ellipses twice. Another thing you should address is how some of your ellipses degrees barely change when they should due to how the ellipse degree shift works, as shown here. 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

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are coming along quite decently made, you're certainly moving in the right direction as you're following the instructions for these exercises and applying the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson, which are helping you develop your sense of spatial reasoning as you work through these pages.

Of course there are always things to improve, so here are some of the things you should keep in mind for the next time you attempt these exercises, so that you can take your work to the next level.

• Don't forget that when approaching any ellipses, always draw through them twice, in order to keep them confident and smooth.

You're not really making use of edge detail in your plant constructions. Despite it's misleading name, edge detail is actually another essential step of leaf construction which helps you further communicate the way your leaf structures move through space, as well as communicate to the viewer the unique characteristics of that leaf, so make sure to always add it in when applicable.

When approaching any construction, make sure to keep your structure confined to the inside of your page, don't let forms run off from the page or suddenly get cut off, make sure the entire construction fits neatly into the space of your page.

• When approaching cylindrical structures such as plant pots make sure to start with a minor axis in order to keep your several ellipses aligned to each other more easily.

• Don't forget to always make use of the construction methods introduced in the lesson material, in this construction you haven't made use of the method for approaching knots and forking branches, which leaves the relationships between your forms much more vague and undefined. This construction has a similar problem, where for the smaller branch structures you haven't constructed them with the branch construction method, opting instead for single lines which don't communicate any sense of volume or tridimensionality. Make sure to always construct forms fully, in order to truly understand how your structure exists in 3d space.

For this Datora construction you haven't constructed it by following the techniques introduced in the lesson, that is, while it's good that you establish a boundary for the petal structures, you do not construct the individual petal structures of the flower with the leaf construction method - instead you cut back into the boundary you drew, trying to manipulate the silhouette of your structure which leaves your construction feeling flat and stiff, not making use of the leaf construction method takes away the fluidity and energy from your forms.

Despite this flower's more odd shape, it is still very leaf-like in it's nature, and as such it's petals must be approached with the leaf construction method. There are two ways you 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, which is a valid and less time consuming approach, but that leaves a lot of room for mistakes or for the different phases of your construction to be less tight and specific than they could be.

The other way you can approach these types of structures is by using a slightly tapered cylinder in order to construct the main body of the flower, then afterwards make use of a boundary which will establish how far out your petals structures will extent. Going forward, make use of the leaf construction method, constructing the petal structures 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 in the context of a Daffodil flower for a different student once, but I believe you will find it helpful.

And lastly let's take a look at your usage of texture in your work, you're certainly starting to understand how to make use of texture in order to take your structure further, however there are a couple of issues in your understanding of texture, as you're often confusing cast shadows for local texture, and making use of form shadows instead of cast shadows.

In general, you should avoid filling in huge areas of black in your work, since they don't follow the principles of texture introduced in lesson 2.

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 is why 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, this is why we should consider carefully how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic, as mentioned previously.

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. Going forward here are a couple of final reminders of how texture in Drawabox is approached.

Final Thoughts

Overall, you seem to understand the purpose behind each exercise and how it should be applied even if you have some shortcomings, don't forget to keep practicing these exercises during your warm ups in order to keep improving your skills. I'm going to mark this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.