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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your lines are looking pretty confident here, it's good to see that you're making use of the ghosting method in order to carefully plan your marks. They're pretty smooth as a result which helps communicate a good sense of fluidity in your arrows as they move through the world. You're also making good use of the depth of the page with your application of perspective and foreshortening.

It's good that you're making use of hatching as that helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space and your own understanding of the tridimensional space these objects occupy. It's also good that you're making use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps as a finishing touch to your arrows, but don't forget that when adding it in it must be added subtly with a single mark only.

In general your work here is looking good, keep pushing yourself make outside of your comfort zone and keep experimenting with different kinds of twists and turns and different rates of foreshortening for your arrows in order to challenge yourself and develop your skills further, keep in mind that arrows are very flexible objects and can move freely across the world in all sorts of manners, so you should push yourself to explore all of the different possibilities.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves the initial linework for these structures looks pretty fluid and confident, and it's good that you're not only trying to capture how these structures exist statically within 3d space, but also how they move through the world from moment to moment. However you're committing a couple of mistakes as you move into the later steps of leaf construction which this original fluidity.

For example you're deviating from the instructions for how to draw edge detail which stiffens your leaves. The way you're currently approaching your edge detail can be severely improved, as you zigzag your marks which goes against the third principle of mark-making from lesson 1 and is something you should avoid. You're also cutting back into the marks you've already drawn, but you should focus on always constructing your edge detail carefully, and additively, on top of your construction, as cutting back into our forms can cause us to focus too much on manipulating the 2d shapes on the page, instead of how our marks represent edges in tridimensional space.

It's good to see that you've experimented with complex leaf structures such as in these leaves, but remember not to skip construction steps when approaching these more intricate structures. There are several of your structures which are looser than they could be, because you did not respect the boundaries for the forms that you laid down.

For example this structure is looser than it could be, due to the flow lines for the individual "arms" of the complex structure going past the boundary laid out by the previous phase of construction (the one where you established the simple overall footprint for the structure). The bigger shape establishes a decision being made - this is how far out the general structure will extend - and so the flow lines for the later leaf structures should abide by that. Make sure to revisit the complex leaf structures demo for a refresher.

Your application of texture can also be pushed further, as you've got several small and timid marks throughout your leaf structures, and no focal points of detail in your structures. This is a way of adding detail that focuses much more on drawing the representation of texture, than applying it by following the principles of texture as they're taught in Drawabox.

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 generally along really decently as you're following the instructions for the exercise which allows you to create some solid but still organic looking structures.

There are a lot of visible tails present in your branch structures, while this is a very common mistake we can attempt to mitigate it by limiting the amount of ellipses in our branches, by spacing them further apart we'll allow for a bigger length of runway between ellipses, and ensure a smoother, more seamless transition between marks.

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 in general. 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, where unfortunately it seems that you haven't always followed the instructions for the exercises and recommendations for these pages as closely as you could have, which leads into a couple of problems that are vastly bringing down the quality of your work despite the fact that you're demonstrating a strong developing sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

It's really important to address these issues in order to get the most out of Drawabox and the most out of your studies, so keep these points in mind whenever you tackle these exercises again.

First things first, it's absolutely critical that you're always applying the construction methods and techniques to your work, as they're tools which will help you construct much tighter and solid looking structures, but there are many examples where you deviate from the instructions.

For example in this sea anemone construction - fun fact, sea anemones are in fact, not plants, they're actually animals - you're not constructing the branch like structures with the branch construction method, which causes them to be inconsistent in their size, marks to be awkward and stiff, and it generally flattens what could otherwise be a solid construction.

Similarly in this construction you're skipping construction steps by not drawing each individual petal by with the leaf construction method, instead your attempt to modify the silhouette of your forms, which is a mistake that flattens and stiffens the structure.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

Other examples of you cutting back into preexisting forms or attempting to manipulate the silhouette of your structure by extending off preexisting forms can be seen here, here and here.

Remember that the methods and techniques are not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.

Another problem that heavily impacts the quality of your work and often comes in tandem with the previous issue discussed, as well as the next point I'll make is the fact that you're pre-planning how many constructions you wish to fit on a given page before committing to any of them.

There are generally two things we must allow ourselves when tackling these exercises in order to get the most out of them, these are time and space, in this case, you don't always allow yourself enough space when approaching these exercises because you're pre-planning how many drawings you wish to fit on a given page, which artificially limits the space your brain has to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that naturally arise as we tackle these exercises and your ability to thoroughly apply the techniques introduced in the lesson. So make sure that your first construction is as big as it needs to be, only afterwards should you gauge whether there is enough space on the page to add another construction, if not, it's completely okay to have a single drawing per page.

On top of that, make sure your work is always contained to the inside of your page, don't let structures be halfway outside of your paper and forms get cut off at the edges.

You should also make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that in several of your constructions you don't draw through several of your forms, such as the structures here, the leaf structures here, in your sea anemone the same can be said for their tentacles and many more.

This limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise as not drawing throug your forms means relying on your observation skills, you're drawing what you see rather engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and truly trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, where it comes from, what it attaches to, how the different forms in relation to one another and how they exist fully in tridimensional space.

You're often not respecting the boundaries that you've laid down, such as in here and here where the forms for the leaf structures go past the boundary you put down, this form dictates how far out the general structure will extend, if your steuctures extend past it then it may as well not exist.

And lastly let's take a look at your application of texture, and the points that you can improve upon it. Firstly don't fill in large areas of black in your construction as it obscures the underlying construction, making it hard to evaluate your homework assignment. It also doesn't follow the principles of texture introduced in lesson 2. Texture in Drawabox is based on cast shadows, large areas of black like this break the concepts of drawing implicitly.

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

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 the information present in our reference we'll be able to translate it to our study. 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.

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.

Final Thoughts

Due to a couple of different factors your work is suffering in quality and you're not getting as much as you otherwise would in the lessons. I'm not going to be moving you onto the next lesson yet, each lesson builds on top of the previous one and introduces even more complex concepts, if you haven't grasped the concepts in this lesson and haven't been able to apply these techniques to the spatial reasoning puzzles that arised then you'll struggle in the following lessons.

As such I'm going to be assigning you some revisions in order to give you the opportunity to review these methods and techniques before tackling more difficult exercises.

Please revisit the relevant lesson material then please reply with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

4 plant constructions, 1 plant per page.