Hello Can_I_Use_A_Random_Name_For_This, 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 give your arrows a nice feeling of fluidity as they move through the world. While your arrows look clearly tridimensional they're generally a bit too contained to the depth of the page, so make sure to push the size difference between your segments much further and explore the different rates of foreshortening possible.

It's good to see that you're making use of hatching as that helps you clarify how your arrows twist and turn in space and reinforce your spatial reasoning skills, and it's also good that you're making use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth.

What you can do you can do in order to take your understanding of arrows and 3D space further is to start exploring the different ways arrows can move across the world, while your arrows certainly look tridimensional, they're a bit too similar to one another, and don't fully stretch through the 3d space available to them. Explore the different ways they can twist and bend and move across the world as well as experiment with the negative space between overlaps in order to challenge yourself.

Leaves

Onto your leaves the fluidity present in your arrows translates nicely into these new objects, they have a nice sense of energy as you don't only try to capture how these objects sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

For your usage of edge detail you're adding it in quite nicely, you generally do not attempt to capture more than one piece or bump of detail at a time, and you're often putting it down additively - that is, constructing new forms on top of what you've already drawn, instead of cutting back into the structures you've already established - the only thing you can improve is that sometimes you add it in with a slightly thicker lineweight than your original marks, so make sure to draw all of your phases of construction with the same general line thickness.

Your addition of texture, while sparse, leans towards the more explicit side, as you focus on outlines to try communicate the texture present in the surface of your forms, but this doesn't follow the principles of texture in Drawabox and actually stiffens many of your leaf structures. Take a look at this demonstration of how we can create more dynamic shadow shapes when tackling texture, as well as this informal demo on how to think when approaching leaf texture, notice how there's a lot more going on than just a couple lines implying veins in the surface of the leaf - there's a lot you can explore to more convincingly communicate this type of tridimensional information.

Branches

For your branches they're coming along decently made as you're generally following the instructions for this exercise, although it's still possible to strengthen a couple of points and stick to the instructions for how to draw branches more closely. It's good that you're drawing your edges in segments, but sometimes you're starting your new edge segment close to where your previous mark ended, instead of starting it at the previous ellipse point, or not extending your segment completely up to the halfway point between ellipses.

So make sure to revisit the instructions for the exercise, remember that you must start a segment at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully to the halfway point between the third and second ellipses, with a new segment repeating this pattern from the 2nd ellipse and so on until your branch is complete. This helps us maintain higher control over our lines and allows for a healthier, more seamless transition between marks.

For your ellipses it's good that you're putting in the effort to draw through them twice, but sometimes you're going a bit too far which makes your ellipses a bit too loose and messy, try to stick with drawing through your ellipses 2-3 times at most, 2 is the ideal, but 3 is also acceptable. Something you should keep in mind is that many 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 finish this critique by taking a look at your plant constructions. Overall you've done quite well in these exercises, you're applying the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson to quite great effect, and this greatly helps your work look more solid and believably tridimensional as a result. There are some things which can be approached differently in your work, which will help you get even more out of these exercises.

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

Throughout your work, such as in your page of branches as well as your plant constructions there are several moments where you don't respect your initial constructions as closely as you should by cutting back into your ellipses, but this can be handled pretty easily though by simply treating your ellipse's outermost perimeter as the edge of the form's silhouette, as this keeps any stray marks contained within the form itself.

Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, in this construction and this structure there are structures floating and they are disconnected from the other structures in the construction.

Keep in mind that the exercises we're approaching here are more like tridimensional puzzles that we're solving in order to further understand how these structures exist in tridimensional space. Not drawing through your forms means you're not going through the process of solving these puzzles and trying to understand how the object you're drawing fully works, and this limits how much you're getting out of the exercise as you rely on your observation skills, rather than your spatial reasoning skills.

Final Thoughts

And lastly let's take a look at your question.

i tried to learn some anatomy outside of drawabox but i stalled out on gesture. there are so many different resorces that say one thing or another, im not sure how to move forward learning. any tips?

As we go through our art journey it's completely normal to feel pulled in many different directions, especially when we're not following a traditional school curriculum, which would naturally lay down each new step of the way for us, telling us what to do and what to study and for how long. When the responsability falls on us to choose our own path it can feel incredibly overwhelming with the amount of resources available, as well as the fact that we don't know enough to distinguish what the best path would be.

As such we shouldn't be worried about the best or worst path, they're just difterent paths to the same goal, and the only way to figure out if they will be helpful to you is to simply commit to a given choice, so that you're not second guessing yourself every step of the way and trust the instructor you've chosen to learn from.

You may find this comic helpful, as it also deals with this issue that so many students face.

Of course even though there are several different resources, not all of them are made equal, but we can simply avoid the resources that will be less useful by listening to those who are further along in their art journey, as well as putting our trust in instructors who have already proven themselves to be quite helpful and knowledgeable. Two instructors that are usually recommend by members of the community are Proko and Brent Eviston, with Proko even having a free version of his figure and anatomy drawing course up on YouTube.

Uncomfortable does recommend Steve Huston's figure drawing lessons available on NMA, but full disclosure that NMA sponsors Drawabox.

So make sure that you just make a choice, stick with it, and if you must, set a period of time (a month or two) before you allow yourself to ask whether the course has actually helped or not, and make sure to not work in a vacuum, so your judgment is not tainted by your own biases.

I believe you've shown yourself to understand the concepts shown here and be capable of applying them to your work, a lot of it is pretty solid and turning out very well, although you're encountering a couple bumps and hiccups along the way. So make sure to take as much time as you need in order to ensure you're always applying the instructions to their full extent, so that you can get the most out of these exercises. I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.