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

Arrows

You're making good use of the depth of the page, your arrows have a nice sense of perspective due to the correct use of overlaps and their size changing as they move through the page, with only minor consistency problems. But your arrows aren't flowing as smoothly as they could be due to visible signs of hesitation in your linework.

Remember that as explained in the principles of mark making from lesson 1 confidence is much more important than accuracy, so use the ghosting method as many times as necessary before committing to any mark, and when you do feel ready to execute it, do so swiftly and from the shoulder.

Another thing that can be improved in your arrows is the incorrectly placed hatching.

• Due to the way perspective works, objects will appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when further away even if they're the exact same size. How this affects an object of consistent size that stretches across space is that segments will get smaller as they move away from the viewer and bigger as they get closer. The way you shade some of your arrows, such as this one implies that they're getting exponentially bigger as they move away from the viewer, this breaks the perspective of your arrows, here's the way your arrow's hatching placement should be approached instead, as well as me checking off the places where you applied your hatching correctly and the places you don't.

Leaves

For the most part the bends in your leaves are correct, what's holding you back from your full potential is your unconfident linework which is much more present in this page and it's making your leaves look inorganic and stiff.

You also need to be attentive to the instructions for this exercise as in this leaf you didn't actually draw your flow line completely, there's a noticeable gap in the middle where your flow line should connect if it had been drawn correctly.

Here's a small demonstration of how this leaf should be approached, notice that here the flow line is one single confident mark.

Branches

Remember to make sure that when you're following these exercises that you're executing each step carefully and to the best of your ability. I can see you extending your edges sometimes which is great, but since you're not always extending them it leads me to believe that at some level you're either rushing past this step or not being careful enough, relying on making marks impulsively before considering your next actions.

For branches you must extend your lines by starting a segment at the first ellipse, drawing your line past the second ellipse, and then stopping halfway to the third, with the next segment restarting the pattern from the second ellipse until you finish your entire branch.

Also remember to draw through your ellipses twice and consider the orientation of your ellipses in relation to the minor axis, some of your ellipses are misaligned. Keeping your ellipses aligned to the minor axis is a concept introduced both in lesson 1 during the funnels exercise as well as lesson 2 when tackling organic forms.

Continuing on your ellipses you have no variation in the degrees of your ellipses, which is another thing that constributes to them looking flat, remember to change their degrees as they move away or closer towards the viewer based on this section of lesson 1.

Plant Construction Section

Now onto your plant constructions, I must start by mentioning that your work here is looking very light, which makes it hard to analyze your homework properly sometimes. If you're scanning your homework pages make sure to change the settings so that the lines are a rich and visible black and that they look as close as possible to the actual drawings.

Moving on while you did very well on your hibiscus demo I can see that you're struggling to apply the concepts learned in this lesson to your plants, as well as generally having a difficult time with conveying your drawings in a tridimensional manner.

For your page of mushrooms you don't use the branch method for drawing the body of the mushrooms. You should keep in mind that cylindrical objects should be constructed around a minor axis.

This helps keep their size and alignment coherent. So for example, your mushrooms in this page are all looking a bit flat because they weren't drawn around a minor axis. The minor axis helps maintain a close relationship between each section of the mushroom construction, you're also making the mistake of not drawing through your ellipses twice, and here this is particularly detrimental to your work, as this coupled with your unconfident linework makes your mushrooms stiff and flat.

Quite frequently you're also committing the mistake of not completely following the instructions for the leaves exercise as you often leave them open ended with an arbitrary gap between the flow line and the outer edges when they should be connected.

For your venus fly trap construction it seems you're relying too much on your observation skills to represent it in your page instead of using the reference as a base to analyze, then break down into simple forms that you'll draw and build on top of later with extra detail. For example, the stems for the venus fly trap aren't drawn with any kind of construction technique such as the branch method. You also end up zigzagging the edge detail in this plant construction a lot, for example in here.

• Your pages have a lot of white space, empty space and your constructions are on the smaller side, this space could have been better used much by drawing bigger. Drawing bigger would allows our brains more room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises, it also gives us more ample opportunity to fully engage our shoulder.

And lastly on your addition of texture to your constructions, you're usually adding this kind of detail in a very explicit manner, when you should remember to draw implicitly. For example, in this plant construction you draw the stripes on the top branch very explicitly, if these were cast shadows the top parts of the branch would need to be much thicker in order to cast those shadows onto the lower sections of the form. The way you approach it right now suggests you were attempting to convey some kind of color change in your reference with the use of solid black, but this goes against the principles of texture in introduced in lesson 2.

The same happens for the lower branches where you struggle to wrap your texture convincingly around the underlying construction. Keep in mind this section from Lesson 2 as it goes over this mistake.

Here and here are some useful reminders on texture and how it's used in Drawabox.

Final Thoughts

You're on the right track, but you're still struggling with many of these concepts and harming your progression by not always following the instructions closely. Your work looks good when you take the time to follow things more closely, even if those pages still have their flaws, anf when you forsake this you also forsake the quality of your work and sabotage your own improvement.

I'm going to be asking you for some revisions as I feel you're not ready for Lesson 4 yet. Your sense of construction and spatial reasoning is not very strong yet and by revisiting the lesson material that's been mentioned here and paying close attention to it you'll be able to develop your skills further. If you're struggling you can also feel free to ask for help over at the drawabox discord in the appropriate lesson channel.