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

Arrows

Jumping in with your arrows, you're executing them with a good deal of confidence, your linework is looking smooth which helps push the illusion of fluidity that arrows have as they move through space. In general your arrows are looking very well made.

One thing that can be improved upon here is the placement of your hatching, sometimes you've added it to the incorrect side of the arrow bend, which hurts the illusion of depth you attempt to achieve.

• Perspective works by having objects appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when further away, even if they're the exact same size. Following this logic, the bigger part of the arrow is always going to be the one closest to the viewer, therefore the smaller part of the segment should be the one getting the hatching.

Leaves

The fluidity you had present in your arrowsnis carrying over nicely into your leaves, they're looking energetic and have a good sense of flow, you're not only capturing how these leaves sit statically within space but also how they move through this space they occupy from moment to moment.

When it comes to your edge detail it's looking alright, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind, even though edge detail is referred to as "detail" it's actually a different step of construction, so edge detail should always be applied to your constructions, only the last step, texture is optional.

Still speaking of edge detail, as explained in this section of the drawing leaves exercise not only is zigzagging edge detail a mistake, as it causes you to lose control of your lines and skips construction phases, but you'll generally want to approach this step of construction additively, instead of cutting back into your forms. In the cases where working subtractively becomes unavoidable, these notes are incredibly useful.

The texture in your leaves is leaning towards the explicit side, you can find here some useful notes on how to think when approaching leaf textures.

Branches

Moving on to your branches you have a pretty major deviation from the characteristics we want to maintain for these forms - simple cylinders of consistent width, with no foreshortening applied to it.

Make sure that all of your ellipses are roughly the same size throughout your entire branch's lenght.

It's good to see that in general you're sticking to the instructions for this exercise by extending your line segments correctly which allows for a healthier overlap between your lines and greater control over them, while you still have some visible tails in your compound strokes this is a mistake that will be easier to avoid through practice. It's great to see that you're overall drawing through your ellipses twice.

The last issue that you can address which is currentlt heavily impacting the solidity of your branches is that your ellipses degrees barely change when they should due to how the ellipse degree shift works, as shown here. Remember that as a cylindrical form shifts towards or away from the viewer, the degree of the ellipses within that structure will also shift.

Plant Construction Section

And finally let's talk about your plant constructions, they're looking very solid and tridimensional as you're very effectively applying the methods and techniques taught in this lesson to your work, you're clearly demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

I'd like to offer you some extra points that, if addressed, will help you take your work to the next level.

It seems like there were some small cases where you had to skip some construction steps, such as drawing your leaf structures with the leaf construction method in this structure. I believe this is in part due to the size at which you're drawing these structures.

While you only have one construction per page in your work it still seems like you're drawing too small when considering the size of the letters at the top right, leaving a lot of blank space on your page sometimes which could have been greatly used to your benefit by allowing you enough space to fully work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when working through these exercises, but drawing bigger will also allow you to fully engage your whole arm when drawing, even for the smaller marks.

So draw bigger, as big as it's necessary for you to be able to properly engage your brain and arm when drawing.

When approaching your constructions make sure to never leave arbitrary gaps between your leaf's flow line and it's outer edges.

Another important thing to keep in mind when approaching construction is not to accidentally undermine the marks you've put down by drawing things later that contradict thre forms you've drawn previously.

For example, keep in mind that we're not looking to draw aesthetically pleasing plants or to draw them the prettiest we can, instead we're using these exercises as opportunities for learning and part of this learning is to understand that all marks we put down on our page aren't just lines, they represent solid structures, all marks represent edges in a 3D space.

This means that these edges must be respected as they don't only communicate forms, but also communicate their relationship to other forms, in order not to undermine your constructions by accident, always treat your ellipse's outermost perimeter as the defining form, in order to not accidentally cut into you form.

There are some cases where you're outlining some of your forms with darker lineweight, drawing over later parts of construction in this manner can encourage us to think of Drawabox as sketching, where the refinement that comes later on is more important than the first marks which act only as general guides, but Drawabox is not sketching.

These exercises have the explicit purpose of teaching you how to think in 3d and an important part of that is to make sure all of the forms you draw have solid relationships to the other forms in the scene and have the same amount of importance by being drawn in roughly the same line thickness.

We can make use of added lineweight towards the end of a construction, in order to clarify overlaps.

Avoid filled in areas of black whenever possible such as in here, as they obscure the underlying construction, making it harder to evaluate your homework assignment. They also don't follow the principles of texture introduced in lesson 2.

Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction, with construction being focused on the big and primitive forms that make up different structures and texture focusing on communicating the small forms that run along the surface of an object, essentially texture is a way of visually communicating to the viewer what it would feel like to run their hands across that surface, filled in areas of black go against the idea of drawing implicitly.

This doesn't have anything to do with decorating any of our work, what we draw here is based on what's physically present in our reference. As introduced here, 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 in 3D space, and analyzing all of the information present in our reference in order to translate it to our study. This means that the shape of our shadows is important as it's the shape that defines the relationships between the form casting it and the surface it's being cast on, this is why we should consider carefully how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic, as shown here.

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, you'll find yourself asking how to convey 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.

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. Your work here is great 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 the points I've mentioned here in mind going forward, so that you can keep developing your skills. Good luck in Lesson 4.