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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your linework is looking confident and nicely executed, this is greatly important for arrows as it communicates the sense of fluidity they have as they move across the page.

You're making good use of the depth of the page, the points that you can improve here are: the size consistency of your arrows as well as your extra lineweight.

• When it comes to perspective, when something is further away it becomes smaller and if it's closer to the viewer it gets bigger. The way this affects an object of consistent size that stretches across space means certain segments of the object will look bigger and others smaller, but some of your arrows are narrowing a bit too suddenly in certain parts and getting bigger too quickly in others, which is not coherent with the rest of the perspective applied to the arrow.

Make sure to plan your arrows carefully beforehand with the ghosting method, you can use it as a means of building your arrow in segments and keeping your arrow's sizes more consistent.

• While it's good to see you applying extra lineweight on top of your arrows, keep in mind that it should be applied with a single confident stroke, superimposed on top of the overlap. Some of them are looking a little bit too thick, or weren't applied on top of the overlap.

Another thing you do correctly is the hatching, you're adding it to the right side of the arrow's overlaps, with the exception of here.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves, the sense of fluidity present in your arrows carries over nicely into them which gives them great energy and a good flow as they move across the space they occupy.

Your leaves are also bending correctly and it's good to see you generally avoid drawing more than one piece of edge detail with a single stroke, although for this leaf there are a couple of bumps where you attempt to capture more than one piece of detail at a time, so keep an eye out for that as it also shows up in your plant constructions sometimes. Also make sure to draw big enough in order to fully engage your arm, these leaves were generally drawn too small, which doesn't allow you to properly construct them nor their edge detail.

Something you should also look out for is how sometimes you're relying on applying your edge detail subtractively, when you should be working additively whenever possible as explained in the following excerpt from the leaves exercise instructions:

"Additionally, wherever possible, work additively - don't cut back into what you've already drawn, as this often makes us think more about the flat shapes on the page, rather than the solid, 3D forms they represent. [...]"

With leaves working subtractively is not a huge problem because leaves are already flat objects, but they're still tridimensional and should be treated as any other construction in the course, whenever possible always add to your construction instead of taking away from it.

Branches

It's good to see you extending your lines for your branches, but you're not always applying it properly. Remember that branches should be approached in the following manner: by having a segment start at the first ellipse, extending it past the second ellipse, and then stopping halfway to the third ellipse.

Sometimes you're extending your lines too far away, or drawing branches in a single stroke, which is a mistake as outlined here.

You must also remember to draw through your ellipses twice. You're already doing a good job by drawing through most of them, but you sometimes falter when it comes to drawing through your smaller ellipses.

Plant Construction Section

Onto your plant constructions your work is generally looking good but there are a couple of problems that are holding your work back. The biggest one seems to be that you're often choosing to focus on big plantd and big sections of those plants in constructions, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but by trying to capture such a big part of these plants in your homework in what seems to be a regular A4 page, you're forcing yourself to draw individual sections of your constructions way too small, which is causing you to skip construction steps and not follow instructions as closely as they should be approached.

For example, in your attempt at the daisy demo and several of your plants with branches or stems, you're not drawing through your ellipses twice and you're often not applying the branch construction method correctly, be it by not adding a minor axis or not extending lines, this is sacrificing the solidity of your constructions.

For this plant while I can see what seem to be flow lines you're not making use of them as you opt to approach your leaves with ellipses. While this approach may seem more appropriate for capturing certain leaf's shapes, it doesn't carry the same sense of energy and flow that the leaf construction method offers, as such the leaves end up looking like rigid, thin discs.

It's very good to see you applying the complex leaf construction method to your leaves in this page, and they'll come across much more solid if you make sure to always draw your outer edges fully to both ends of your flow line.

• When constructing any kind of cylindrical structure it's important to do so around a minor axis in order to keep your various ellipses aligned. So make sure to include a minor axis when drawing mushrooms as well as flower pots, although it's very good to see you going beyond the simple structure of flower pots and constructing the rim as well.

Now, onto your hibiscus.

I've already mentioned some points that can be improved on in this critique, but overall you've done really well in your attempt at this demo.

Onto your question you actually have the right idea when it comes to building the more complex parts of construction. When constructing anything it's important to maintain tight, specific relationships between different forms, the boundary ellipse is one part of the established phases of construction, so by adding it you're deciding how far out the general structure will extend, as such flow lines for the leaf/petal structures should abide by that.

However when adding edge detail on top of that it's completely fine, because it's being built on top of a 3D structure that already exists on the page. If you're using something from a different phase of construction to decide how a structure will be built then you must follow it specifically, but if what you're doing doing has nothing to do with, such as adding texture of edge detail, then you don't need to worry about how other structures relate to it.

What you can improve in your usage of edge detail in this construction is that you're not starting your lines from the surface of the leaf, adding your new structure on top and then coming back down and connecting it to the outer edge. Sometimes there are visible gaps between the outer edges of your leaf and the edge detail, remember that marks must maintain a consistent trajectory.

Onto your question about the Cactus is that it depends on what your addition of these lines means for your overall construction. There are two ways to approach this, fully constructing these parts of the cactus or approaching it as texture. It seems you're trying to capture it as texture.

• Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction and in a lot of ways they're the same concept. Construction focuses on the nore prominent and primitive forms that make up the structure of an object, while texture focuses on conveying to the viewer what small forms run along the surface of that object, if they're thick and rugged, or if they're 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.

• As introduced here in what are essentially the "principles" of texture in Drawabox and how it's 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, this also means that we must approach our shadows in this manner instead of as single lines, as the shape of this shadow is important because it defines the relationship 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 shadow that conveys the texture of an object as well as how that shadow would be affected by the surface it's being casted on, as a shadow on a rounded will be rounded, while a shadow on a plain smooth surface will suffer less distortion to it's original shape.

• This approach is of course much harder and less intuitive than basing our understanding of texture on other methods, but this manner of approaching texture is the one that enforces the ideas of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following them and as you keep applying them 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. Here and here are a couple of final reminders on texture in Drawabox that you might want to keep in mind going forward.

Final Thoughts

Your work has a lot of potential and your constructions are showing a good deal of solidity and understanding of the illusion of 3D spave we want to capture in this course. Your homework is only being held back because of the points mentioned above, in the future, follow the instructions as closely as they ought to be, so you can get the most out of these exercises.

I'm going to be assigning you with some revisions, as it's necessary that you show that you understand these instructions and how they should be approached by adding them to your work.