Hello KingCactus, happy new year, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.

Arrows

Let's start by taking a look at your arrows, where 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 foreshorting in mind while constructing your arrows which allows you to make good use of perspective and the depth of your page, this gives a great extra layer of tridimensionality to your arrows.

Your neat 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. It's good to see that you are making use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps, as this helps you reinforce their depth, but don't forget that this should be added on top of the overlap subtly, with a single mark executed confidently, not very thick marks.

Generally you're doing a good job with this exercise, so I'd like to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise in order to keep pushing yourself. Try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different rates of foreshortening, 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 and explore the different possibilities.

Leaves

Your initial linework for your leaves is looking pretty smooth and confident, which helps give them a feeling of fluidity, however there are a couple of things that are holding you back from drawing leaves that are as fluid and as energetic as they could be.

One of these issues is the fact that most of your leaf structures aren't bending or folding in any way. Leaves are organic structures that are affected by all sorts of forces, from the wind to gravity to their own weight pulling them down, as such you'll find that you'll improve much more by thinking about the way these objects look when they move through the world from moment to moment, instead of just trying to capture how they sit statically within it.

And when your leaves do seem to be bending, there are unnatural bends present in your leaves. Keep in mind that even though leaves are very flexible structures, that mostly applies to their length and not their width. They're like a piece of paper, not a piece of rubber, they can fold and bend in a lot of ways, but they can't stretch or compress, and if you try to force them to they'll simply rip apart.

It's good to see that you're also experimenting with some more complex types of leaf structures, and doing so by following the instructions, which allows you to create a much tighter and more solid looking structure that still feels flexible and energetic.

Your addition of edge detail is generally looking good, as you don't usually attempt to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, and you generally construct your edge detail additively. You're also keeping the line thickness between your phases of construction roughly consistent, all of which is very good and helps you create a tighter, more solid construction that still feels fluid and energetic.

Your application of texture needs work as it's the thing that affects the visual read of your structures the most, it leans towards the explicit side of drawing texture with your use of seemingly random, single marks which do not effectively communicate the kind of bumps and forms that exist along the surface of your structure. Take a look at this informal demo on how to approach leaf texture, and make sure to give these reminders a read.

Branches

For your branches you're deviating from the instructions for this exercise which affects the quality of your work and stops you from getting the most out of this page.

While it's good to see that you're drawing your edges in segments, when you start a new segment you do so around the point where your last mark ended, instead of starting it at the previous ellipse point and superimposing your new mark on top of the preexisting one, this effectively removes the healthy overlaps we want to achieve between marks, causing you to lose control over your marks more easily.

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.

You're making the effort to draw through your ellipses twice which is good, as that helps you create smoother looking marks overall. It's good to see that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift and making use of it in your constructions, which helps these structures feel more solid and believably tridimensional.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are coming along slightly mixed, there are a couple of constructions where you're doing well and a couple where you're deviating from some of the instructions for these exercises which affects the quality of your work and how much you're getting out of these exercises.

So here are the points you should keep in mind for the next time that you attempt these exercises in order to get the most out of this course.

The biggest issue that is noticeable right away in your work is the fact that you're pre-planning the amount of constructions you want to fit in your page before you've even started 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're not always allowing yourself enough space when approaching these exercises because you're pre-planning the amount of structures you wish to fit on any given page. This artificially limits the space your brain has to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that naturally arise as we tackle these exercises, as well as your ability to thoroughly apply the techniques introduced in the lesson.

For example, in these cylindrical structures you haven't constructed them around a minor axis, and in these structures you haven't constructed the leaf structures by starting with a minor axis or following the simple leaf structure shape, which stiffens them.

So make sure that your first construction is always 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 only have a single drawing per page.

And remember 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. They're not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.

• 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.

• While this is something that you do generally respect we can see some spots in this construction and in this construction we can see spots where you have extended off pre-existing form's silhouettes.

This method may work for leaves as they're flat structures, so it's not going to make them flatter, but for forms that have volume it will, so instead we must ensure that each new piece we add to a structure is a complete form by itself, take a look at this demo on how to build upon forms that aren't already flat.

Make sure to keep the relationships between the different stages of construction always clear and specific. Don't leave gaps in between a leaf's flow line and it's outer edges, they must connect.

And in order to finish this critique, let's take a look at your application of texture in these pages. Just like in your page of leaves the texture in your plant construction pages still needs some work, it looks haphazardly made and unplanned, as if you didn't spend enough time carefully analyzing each shadow structure present in your reference, understanding it, then breaking it down into a shape and applying it to your work. As such your usage of texture is left explicit and it looks cluttered, with no focal points of detail.

So let's revisit how texture in Drawabox is approached, by looking back at this page we can refresh our memory and see that texture through the lens of Drawabox is not used to make our work aesthetic or pretty, 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, 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

You're starting to move in the right direction but you're falling into a couple of traps and pitfalls which are holding you back from your full potential, and stopping you from getting the most out of these exercises.

I'm not going to be passing you onto the next lesson yet, these concepts will be highly important in the following lessons, make sure to revisit any relevant material mentioned here, once you're finished please reply with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

2 plant construction pages, one plant per page.