Hello fortunasoleil, 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 keeping foreshortening in mind while constructing your arrows which allows you to make really good use of perspective and the depth of your page, this gives a nice extra layer of tridimensionality to your arrows.
Your usage of hatching helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space and further your own understanding of the tridimensional space these objects occupy, but do remember that your hatching lines must still follow the principles of ghosting and mark-making, they must have clear end and start points, be carefully planned and executed and not end at arbitrary points.
Still speaking of hatching, there are a couple of times where you've placed it incorrectly, making it seem like your arrow is getting bigger the further away it is, and getting smaller as it gets closer, which goes against the rules of perspective.
It's good that you're making use of added line weight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.
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.
When it comes to your addition of edge detail you need to spend more time with the execution of each mark - because there are so many and they seem individually unimportant, you're putting less time into each one and so they do not properly rise off and return to the existing stroke - there are often fuzzy marks that do not properly communicate the new forms, overshoots, and zigzagging marks which are a mistake that should be avoided as it goes against the third principle of mark making from Lesson 1. No mark you draw is unimportant - if you decided it was worth adding, it's worth giving as much time as it needs to be done to the best of your current ability.
Your addition of texture is coming along quite explicitly made as you outline your textures which leaves no transitions from light to dark in an attempt to capture the representation of what's going on with your structure.
This doesn't allow you to properly focus on the cast shadows present and thus your addition of texture is less specific than it could be. There's much more going on than just a few stray marks implying veins and we can do much more to accurately communicate this type of texture, 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
Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently made as you're generally following the instructions for the exercise, but they can still be improved. While it's good to see that you're drawing your edges in segments you're not always extending said segment completely up to the halfway point between ellipses, which partially removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve in these structures.
So remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully up to the halfway point to the third ellipse, afterwards you'll start a new segment, making sure to place your pen at the second ellipse and repeat this pattern until your entire branch is complete.
For 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 overall. When it comes to your application of the ellipse degree shift to your branches it can be improved, as it stands your degrees are too consistent and hardly change which is a mistake that flattens your structures. Remember that as a form shifts in relation to the viewer, so will the degree of the ellipses within that structure also shift.
Plant Construction Section
And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are coming along quite nicely made. You're generally making use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in this Lesson which helps you create the illusion of tridimensionality in your work, you're not only trying to capture what these structures look like, but you also focus on how they work, how they exist fully in tridimensional space by drawing through your forms and thinking about the way each piece of your construction exists 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 to the next level.
First things first, an issue that hurts your work without you even realizing is the fact that you're pre-planning the amount of constructions you want to fit on a given page before you've even committed to any of them, which artificially limits how much space you have to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise as we tackle these constructions.
Instead by limiting how many constructions you add to your page you'll allow yourself not only more room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises, but also give you enough space to fully engage your whole arm.
As it stands some of your constructions are too small and you have also chosen some very complex structures which has limited your ability to make use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in your work.
When approaching cylindrical structures such as plant pots and mushrooms make sure to start with a minor axis in order to keep your several ellipses aligned to each other more easily. Going further don't forget to construct the outer rim that's present in most types of plant pots and when constructing mushrooms make sure to draw through them, for example when constructing a mushroom's cap make use of an ellipse in order to fully capture how the entirety of the structure sits in 3d space.
It's good to see that you've experimented with complex leaf structures but remember not to skip construction steps when approaching these more intricate structures.
The leaves in this construction are looser than they could be, because you're skipping construction steps and tried to capture the sillhouette of the smaller leaves right away, instead of constructing each individual arm with the leaf construction method, starting with the flow line and only then constructing the rest of the structure. Even though leaves are single entities they can still made be made up of several parts and each one of these parts must be constructed fully.
Always keep in mind that the construction methods and techniques introduced in this course must always be applied to your work, as they're tools which will help you construct much tighter and solid looking structures, while this is something that you generally respect you haven't constructed each individual leaf structure in this cypress topiary. Now, this isn't necessarily a mistake because due to the nature of the techniques we use as well as the limitations of the tools we are using it would be simply impossible to draw every single leaf structure present in a tree, even a miniature one.
As such it's best to avoid trees and tree-like structures when working through this lesson as they do not allow us to properly apply the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson. Instead focus on simpler structures that will actually allow you to maximize your learning time by being simple enough that you can use the techniques present in the lesson but challenging enough that they force you to develop your skills further.
And lastly let's take a look at your addition of texture to these structures, which is starting to move in the right direction but needs some work as you don't design your shadows with a specific purpose in mind and so there are not a lot of clear focal points of detail in your constructions.
So let's revisit how texture in Drawabox is approached, by looking back on this page we can refresh our memory on texture through the lens of Drawabox and see that it is not used to make our work aesthetic or good looking, 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. Only after analyzing all of this information present in our reference will we be able to translate it to our construction. 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 and communicates this tridimensional information.
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. Make sure to go over these reminders in order to solidify your understanding of texture further.
Final Thoughts
In general you are doing well, I believe that in these pages you have demonstrated that you do understand the way these construction methods and techniques should be used and why they're important for your work even if it can be improved upon, as such I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.
Next Steps:
Don't forget to add these exercises to your list of warm ups.
Move on to Lesson 4.
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.
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