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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your lines are confidently drawn, this helps push the feeling of fluidity that arrows have as they move across the world. You're also making good use of the depth of the page with the perspective added to your arrows.

It's good to see you making use of added lineweight on your arrows, but make sure to always add it on top of arrow overlaps, as sometimes you forget this step, and remember that extra lineweight should only be applied to overlaps, not the entire length of the arrow.

Onto your application of hatching, overall it's looking pretty neat and tidy, in order to make your hatching even better remember the principles of ghosting from lesson 1, and how marks should have a clear start and end point, as such make sure your shading starts at one end of the arrow and ends at the other, instead of floating in the middle of your arrow or ending at arbitrary intervals.

Another thing you've done really well is the placement of your hatching lines, with the exception of here they're all correctly placed which helps reinforce the narrative of depth you wish to create.

I'd like to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you attempt this exercise, you arrows, with the exception of one are all pretty similar and consistent in their perspective and orientation. Remember that arrows are very flexible objects, they can move freely across the page in all sorts of manners, you should capture that by experimenting with different perspectives, rates of foreshortening and diminishing negative space between overlaps.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves the fluidity present in your arrows is carrying over nicely into them and giving them a great sense of flow and energy. They're well made and feel very organic, you're not only capturing how leaves sit statically but also how they move freely across the space they occupy, good job.

It's good to see you experiment with different kinds of leaf structures. Although make sure to keep tight and specific relationships between your phases of construction, your [oak leaf] 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. It's just easy to forget that when these previous shapes don't actually define forms as much as spatial boundaries/scaffolding for us to use.

Your addition of edge detail is looking good, generally you seem to avoid trying to capture more than one piece of detail at a time, although I can notice one instance where you zigzag your edge detail. So keep an eye out for this, another thing you should look out for is your tendency to draw earlier phases of construction, this is consistently present in all your homework pages.

Drawing earlier phases of construction more faintly can make one think of Drawabox exercises as sketching, where the initial lines are less important than the refinement that comes later on. But Drawabox exercises are not sketching, they're drills created with the explicit purpose of helping gou develop your spatial reasoning skills, in order to do so it's important that you commit to your marks and respect the decisions and boundaries that they establish, as such all phases of construction must be drawn in roughly the same line thickness. Line weight itself can be added towards the

end of a construction, focusing specifically on capturing how the different forms overlap one another, as explained here.

You're moving in the right direction with your application of texture. Here are some extra notes on how to add texture to your leaves.

Branches

For your branches they're generally coming along decently as you apply the instructions for the exercise, but your branches aren't as solid as they could be due to your ellipses being drawn pretty faintly, this leaves the relationships between your forms vague and undefined.

It's good to see you generally extending your branches, although I've noticed that sometimes there are places where you don't extend your lines as well as places where you didn't extend your branches fully to the halfway point between ellipses.

Branches should be approached in the following manner - by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse, and stopping halfway to the third, with the new segment repeating the pattern from the 2nd ellipse until your branch is complete. This helps us maintain control of our marks and allows for a healthy overlap between them, which helps to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition.

It's good to see the variation in your ellipse's degrees, as well as the fact that you're drawing through your ellipses.

Plant Construction Section

Moving on to your plant constructions you're doing a very good job of capturing their solidity. You're applying the concepts and instructions introduced in the lesson very effectively which is showing in your work, demonstrating a good deal of spatial reasoning skills.

There's still a couple of issues present within your work which are holding you back from your full potential. Going forward please keep these points in mind, addressing them will help you whenever you tackle these exercises again.

For your first page of construction, remember to draw cylindrical structures around a minor axis in order to keep your various ellipses aligned, for this particular construction you've also made the mushroom much taller, while this isn't necessarily a problem by itself, as you made the mushroom taller you didn't adapt your ellipse's degrees to the new mushroom shape, this causes your mushroom to look a little bit weird as your ellipses are not only ever so slightly misaligned, giving the impression that the mushroom is about to topple over, but also the feeling that your mushroom's body is shaped like a 0 instead of an O.

As I've called out previously in the leaf section of this critique, you have a tendency to draw your earlier phases of construction lighter. This often ends up harming the solidity of your constructions and might be contributing to you being a bit looser on your constructions as sometimes you cut back into your forms, or don't respect them, such as in your blueberry construction, where by not respecting the outermost edges of the ellipse as the defining form, you undermine the overall solidity of the plant.

For your second page of plant constructions, you establish the main stem correctly, but the smaller branches within the plant weren't drawn with a minor axis. This is also true for your Persian Lily construction where you make use of the method for the main branch, but don't for the ones that connect the individual flowers to the main stem.

For your second page you also don't fully construct the top stems of the flower,which leaves them as vague, floating sets of lines on top of your flower, it's unclear where they attach to and they don't come across as tridimensional.

For your ceropegia stapeliiformis you do a really good job at constructing the form on the right, but the structure on the left isn't as strong as you don't draw it's appendage-like structures with the branch construction method, the bottom part of the plant also doesn't have a minor axis.

Don't fill in large areas of black in your drawings such as in your Persian Lily 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, which help convey to the viewer what are the small forms that run along the surface an object, if it's thick and rugged, or if it's smooth and sharp, essentially texture is a form of visually communicating to the viewer what it would feel like to run their hands across that object's surface.

None of this has to do with decorating any of our drawings, what we draw here is based on what's physically present in our construction. As introduced here in what are essentially the "principles" of texture in Drawabox and how it is used in the course, we can notice that we should focus on each individual form and how it casts a shadow on neighboring surfaces, understanding how each individual form sits on a 3D space, and closely analyzing all of this information present in our reference to be able to translate it to our study.

The shape of this 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, only after careful observation can we understand how to best design a good shadow shape.

This approach is of course much harder than basing our understanding of texture on other methods that may seem more intuitive, but in the long run this method of texture is the one who enforces the ideas of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following these ideas and as you keep applying it to your work, you'll find yourself asking how to convey the texture in the most efficient way possible, with less lines and ink, focusing more 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.

You've done well in your Moonstones.

For your astrophyum myriostigma I've noticed that not all leaves were drawn with the leaf construction method, as you don't always draw through your forms.

• The purpose of these exercises is to develop our sense of spatial reasoning through the use of exercises which are essentially drills, think of how an athetle might repeat the same set of exercises while training for the olympics, while they won't always execute it correctly or even perfectly, what's important is that the theory behind it is correct so that eventually they'll develop their skills. Otherwise, at best they could train themselves wrong and won't improve as fast as they might otherwise, at worst they could hinder their own improvement or even injure themselves.

  • This is why it's incredibly important for you to draw through all of your forms, as small or as unecessary as you might believe them to be, by drawing through your forms you're helping develop your sense of spatial reasoning and training your brain to think in 3D.

For your last plant, you're not actually constructing the longer thin structures, this by itself already flattens your construction as they become inconsistent in their shape and size, but by leaving some of them open ended you leave the relationships between forms ambiguous and remind the viewer that these are just lines on a page.

Final Thoughts

Overall, you'd done really well in this lesson, you're clearly developing a strong sense of spatial reasoning through the use of these exercises and applying it effectively to your work. The only things I fear are holding you back are your tendency to draw fainter, as well as the fact you seem to be rushing to finish some of these constructions, if you had put some more time and effort into thinking them through carefully, you wouldn't have jumped certain construction steps.

Regardless of these issues, your work here is pretty good and you've clearly understood the purpose of this lesson, as such I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Make sure to keep these points in mind going forward, so that you can keep developing your skills. Good luck in Lesson 4.