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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows they're looking quite smooth due to the confidence which they're drawn, this helps push the feeling of fluidity which arrows have as they move through the world. You're making good use of the depth of the page with your use of perspective.

Sometimes the hatching in your arrows is incorrectly placed, which contradicts the illusion of depth you attempt to create.

• 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, an object of consistent size moving through space will have the segments that are closer to the viewer bigger, and segments that are further away should gradually get smaller. In that same vein, your shading should be added to the smaller arrow segment, as adding it to the bigger side of the arrow would contradict the illusion of perspective.

After you finish your arrow, don't forget to add lineweight on top of the overlaps, in order to reinforce their depth.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves, there are a couple of things that should be addressed here, as some of your leaves are looking okay, but others have a couple of issues present.

For example, you didn't use the leaf construction method for this structure, which either suggests that you weren't following instructions as closely as they ought to be followed, or that you were rushing to get this page done.

Regardless of the reason, make sure to get through these exercises in the pace that is most comfortable to you, these exercises are supposed to be a metric of the best of your current ability and by rushing and not following these steps, you're bringing down the quality of your work.

Remember to keep tight and specific relationship between your phases of construction, in this leaf you leave one of the ends of your structure open ended, when the outer edges should connect to the flow line. Leaving your leaf structures open ended like this leaves the relationships between their forms vague, which hurts the solidity of the construction, and only serves to remind the viewer that they're looking at marks on a flat page, instead of looking through a window into a 3D world.

Your addition of edge detail is good for the most part, although there are a couple of cases where it seems you may have zigzagged your edge detail. Avoid this as much as possible.

While it's generally better to use additive construction whenever possible, when using subtractive construction is unavoidable, like cutting back into your leaves, it's good to keep these notes in mind.

You're moving in the right direction with your application of texture to your leaves, although there are a couple of cases where you rely a bit more on explicit texturing, or fill in large areas of black that cannot be cast shadows, you can find here some extra notes on adding texture to your leaves.

Branches

For your branches they're coming along quite decently as you generally follow the instructions for the exercise, although I have noticed that in a couple of places it seems you started you next extension line at the previous midway point between ellipses.

Remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and extending it fully to the halfway point to the third ellipse, once that's done you'll start a new segment, making sure to place your pen at the second ellipse point and repeat the pattern 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 between lines.

Some of your ellipses are getting a bit too loose, remember that ideally you should be drawing through your ellipses only twice.

Plant Construction Section

Now let's talk about your plant constructions, it's great to see that you have followed and tried your hands at all of the demos, that undoubtedly shows a great desire to learn, but don't forget to follow the instructions as they are written. You've submitted 13 pages of plant constructions, when the requested amount was 8.

The reason Drawabox critiques are able to be so cheap is by offloading as much responsibility as possible on the student, as well as having a strict exercise list that all students should abide to, this includes the amount of exercise pages, it's not necessary to submit your attempts at the demos in your submission, although if you desire to do so, make sure it's less than half of your homework pages.

Moving on your homework pages are looking decent, you're starting to grasp the concepts this lesson seeks to teach and it's showing through in your work, however there are a couple of issues holding you back from your full potential.

The first one is skipping construction steps, in your first two plant constructions as well as in this construction you have branch-like structures, but you don't draw a minor axis for them, which causes your ellipses to get misaligned, and leaves the relationships between your forms undefined such as in here, where it's unclear how the branch parts relate to one another.

You're also not making use of the forking branches method introduced previously in the lesson material.

Another example of you skipping steps, which leads me to believe you might in some level, be rushing your homework is that you're zigzagging your edge detail quite often, which hurts the solidity of your leaves.

Another issue which is holding your work from reaching it's full potential is the fact that you're often times not drawing through your forms, such as in here where you only draw the tips of the leaves which are behind the other leaf structures, this leaves the relationships between the forms vague and doesn't allow you to apply the leaf construction method to the leaves, all of this flattens your construction.

• Drawabox seeks to develop your skills through the use of exercises and drills. As such it's important to follow all instructions as they are written, otherwise you won't be getting the most out of each study session. You should be drawing through all of your forms, no matter how much it would be logically obscured by other parts of the construction or obscure said parts, think of it like a tridimensional puzzle, the most important thing is that you're thinking of how each of these forms relate and connect to one another, not how messy or clean it'll look by the end. Drawing through your forms allows your brain to work through these spatial reasoning challenges to it's full extent.

For this structure you draw out some branch-like forms with single lines and don't draw the leaf structures with the leaf construction method, this goes against the instructions and doesn't communicate any sense of form.

This flower 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 boundary 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 petal structures should abide by that, otherwise it might as well not exist.

Many of your pages have empty spaces, or feel too cluttered. It's admirable that you clearly want to get more practice out of your page, but that space could have been better used not by adding more drawings to your page, but instead by limiting them, which would allow you not only more room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises, but also give you enough space to fully engage your whole arm. Make the most use out of your page by drawing as big as you need your construction to be in order to engage your arm and apply all of the methods introduced in the lesson, only then should you gauge whether there is enough space left for another drawing.

Sometimes you addition of texture is a little bit too explicit as you add too much black to your drawings. 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.

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, 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 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, as such you should design your shadow shape in a way 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

You have a lot of potential, the quality of your work is only being diminished because you're not following instructions as closely as they ought to be followed, and not applying the instructions to your constructions.

I'm not going to be marking this lesson as complete, it's important that you show that you understand these exercises and methods by applying them to your work. Make sure to revisit any relevant lesson material, once you're finished, please reply to me with your revisions.