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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows you're doing an excellent job here, your linework is looking confident and nicely executed which helps communicate the sense of fluidity they have as they move across the page, you're making really good use of the depth of the page and you have a good amount of variety in your arrows.

Overall, you're doing great in this exercise, the only thing I could mention is your hatching, you're adding it to the correct side of the arrow's overlap which helps reinforce its depth, but some of your lines end at the halfway mark of your arrow's width, keep in mind the principles of ghosting and remembering that all lines should have clear start and end points, in this case your lines should go from one end of the arrow's width to the other.

Leaves

Moving onto your leaves we face a problem right away, while this isn't an outright mistake it does miss the point of the exercise. You're approaching all of your leaves by drawing them completely straight on, you're not considering how the center line is more than just a 2D mark, just like in the arrows exercise it establishes how a flat object moves across 3D space freely.

In actual plant structures you'll find that it's very rare for leaf structures to be assorted in this manner, instead they'll be found in all sorts of rotations and can be influenced by all sorts of external forces such as the wind or their own weight pulling them down, as such you should focus on drawing leaf structures that bend, twist and fold, making use of all of the tridimensional space available to them, making sure to not only capture how they sit statically within space, but also how they move across that space from moment to moment, otherwise your leaf structures end up feeling like flat stickers on a page, instead of the real tridimensional objects that we want to draw them as.

Moving on to your application of edge detail it's quite good, you're not trying to capture more than one piece or bump of edge detail at a time which allows for you to construct a tigher and more specific structure.

Branches

For your branches they're generally coming along decently as you're making use of the exercise's instructions, which helps you maintain tighter control over your lines and maintain the solidity of your form. But while it's good to see that you're generally extending your line segments you're not always extending it completely up to the halfway point between ellipses. Another important thing that is explained more in depth here is that it's important to keep your ellipses far enough away to ensure your halfway point is at a comfortable distance for you to engage your whole arm when drawing and create a more seamless transition between segments.

Another important thing is that you must follow the characteristics for simple branches in this exercise, which are simple cylinders of consistent width and no foreshortening.

It's good to see that you're always drawing through your ellipses twice, this greatly helps make your forms more solid. It's good to see that you're making an attempt at varying your ellipses degrees, however your ellipses degrees are inconsistent with the foreshortening of your forms.

As shown here as cylindrical forms shift away from the viewer, the side that is the furthest away will be the side that has the biggest ellipse degree, but you inverted this in your branches, the smallest ellipse degree should be the side closest to the viewer and thus, the bigger side.

Plant Construction Section

Onto your plant constructions, your work is looking solid and well constructed, you're applying the techniques and methods shown and as such you demonstrate a good sense of spatial reasoning in these pages. There's a couple of issues here and there present in your work, I'd like to point them out so you can be aware of them and address them in the future so you can take your work to the next lesson and get even more out of your practice time.

You have quite a couple of issues that relate to drawing leaves, they are as follows:

Undefined relationships between phases of construction, you're gonna want to keep them as tight and specific as you can in order to not leave any room for ambiguity in your construction. Don't leave any arbitrary gaps between you leaf's flow line and it's outer edges, they should connect.

In this construction you're zigzagging your edge detail which is a mistake and should be avoided because it goes against the third principle of mark-making introduced in Lesson 1.

Don't skip construction steps in your work, for this Budda belly construction you don't capture the overall form of the leaf before drawing the individual arms of the complex structure as shown in the complex leaf construction method. It's important to do this because even though complex leaf structures possess their own arms, they're all still part of a single entity, with each arm of the leaf being constrained and affected by the others, they function as a unity and as such this should be taken into consideration.

For the budda belly plant you don't fully construct some of the branch structures with the branch construction method either.

Keep in mind that the methods and techniques introduced here aren't suggestions or recommendations, they're tools which have the explicit purpose to help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning through methods that will help you not only draw how these structures look, but also understand how they work and how they exist in a tridimensional space. So always make use of the methods introduced in the lesson.

In this plant the forms on the stem-like structure aren't wrapping around the form in a convincing manner which flattens the construction, as introduced in Lesson 2 on the topic of texture new forms must follow the underlying structure, if that structure is rounded then the new forms must follow the curvature of the form.

Moving onto your use of texture in this lesson it's moving in the right direction, but there are some points that would be good to mention, if we 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 shown here. This also means that we should only be drawing cast shadows, no form 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. Going forward here are a couple of final reminders of how texture in Drawabox is approached.

Final Thoughts

Overall you've done really well in this lesson, you're applying the concepts taught in the lesson very effectively and your plants are turning out quite tridimensional due to that. Keep the points I mention here in mind in the future so that you can take your work from great to incredible. I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete as I believe you're ready to tackle the challenges introduced in the next lesson. Good luck in Lesson 4.