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

Arrows

Jumping in with your arrows, your linework is looking smooth and confident, which helps push the fluidity that arrows have as they move through space.

Something you should look out for is the orientation of your arrows, sometimes you're adding your hatching to the wrong side, 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.

I marked in here where you should place the hatching for your arrows and which ones were correct.

Your application of extra lineweight could use some work too, it's looking a little bit too thick at times and not as smooth as it could be. Remember that lineweight should be added on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth, with a single, confident line, superimposed on top of the previous one.

Also make sure to close the ends of your arrows.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves the sense of fluidity you had in your arrows is unfortunately not translating very well. Your leaves are looking stiff, with no sense of flow to them due to shaky, wobbly lines.

Remember the principles of mark making from lesson 1, lines must be confident and smooth in order to translate the sense of energy necessary for drawing leaves. You're also relying on drawing leaves with no overlaps or bends to them, remember the concepts that we learn in the arrows exercise of how to make a flat subject feel tridimensional and familiarizing ourselves with the depth of the page instead of being limited to our 2d space.

Leaves are an extension of this concept, so they should also have folds and perspective applied to them, as of now it seems you attempted to stay in your comfort zone, which is making your leaves look like flat stickers on a page. You should be attempting to draw different orientations of leaves with different bends and overlaps as it's important for plant constructions since leaves will rarely face only the viewer with no bends.

When it comes to your edge detail, you're doing well by adding it additionally, but you have a habit of zigzagging your edge detail. This is a mistake as it goes against the third principle of mark making from lesson 1. Generally you'll want to avoid this, take the time to carefully work through your edge detail and make sure no line is trying to capture more than one piece of detail at a time.

And lastly onto your textures, you're often relying on explicit textures for your leaves, when you should be remembering to draw implicitly. Here are some reminders on how texture can be approached for leaves.

Branches

You have clear divergences from this exercise's instructions. You haven't drawn a minor axis for these branches. You're not following the simple characteristics for branches either - simple cylinders with no foreshortening - don't try to alter the exercises from what's shown in the lesson material.

You're also not extending your lines fully halfway to the next ellipse and you're not always drawing through your ellipses twice. 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.

You also don't use the correct method for forking branches in this exercise, forking branches should only be attempted after you familiarize yourself with basic branches and feel comfortable with them.

Your linework can also be improved in this lesson, your branches are looking stiff due to the hesitation in your lines.

Considering these points, I'm afraid that you didn't pay close attention to the exercise's instructions and that at some point, you revisited the exercise page and started applying the instructions more, but you're still falling short on this exercise. Pay close attention to the instructions before starting the exercises, if you're not sure, revisit the exercise page as many times as you need before starting a new homework assignment. You can also feel free to ask for clarifications in the appropriate lesson channel in the Discord Server.

Plant Construction Section

Moving on to your plants, you're often struggling to apply the concepts and methods introduced in this lesson. I can see that you're having trouble with the leaf construction method to your constructions such as in this plant here, using it as a tool to capture the likeness of your reference instead of using it as a base to construct your plants. The same is true for this plant where you're jumping construction steps by trying to capture the subtle bumps in your outer edges, but this ends up coming across as unconfident linework and causing your leaves to look stiff.

• Remember not to leave arbitrary gaps between your flow line and your outer edges.

Keep in mind the concepts introduced in the lesson and the instructions for the leaves exercises, your initial leaf construction must be smooth and capture only the overall footprint of the leaf, no matter it's complexity. You must also remember to maintain tight, specific relationships between your phases of construction, don't leave arbitrary gaps between your flow line and your outer edges.

Another problem in this construction and several others is that you're not using the branch construction method.

• When constructing any kind of cylindrical structure make sure to do so around a minor axis, this includes mushrooms, branches and flower pots.

  • You're doing well by drawing through all of your forms, good job - keep that up.

  • Make sure to draw through your ellipses twice as well as cap off the ends of your stems.

For your last construction, it isn't as solid as it could otherwise be since you don't connect the stem to the back of your flower. Yoy must also remember to maintain tight, specific relationships between your phases of construction, because if you're not respecting your initial boundary lines, they may as well not exist.

Your boundary lines are a decision being made, and as such must be followed.

And lastly on your addition of texture, you're often adding it explicitly to your work.

Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction. In a lot of ways they're the same concept, with construction being focused on the big and primitive forms that make up different objects, with texture simply being focused on conveying to the viewer 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 design a shadow shape that best conveys the texture of an object, as well as how that shadow would be affected by the surface it's being cast on, as a shadow cast on a rounded surface 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 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 yo urself 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.

Final Thoughts

You're on the right track, but you're struggling with many of these concepts and harming your progression by not following the instructions closely and possibly rushing through some steps. Remember to pay close attention to the instructions of each exercise, if you're not sure what the step forward is you can always revisit the instructions or ask for clarification in one of the lesson channels in the Discord server.

It's important for you to show that you understand these exercises and instructions by applying them to your work. As such I'm not going to be marking this lesson as complete, I'd like to make sure you can apply these instructions before moving you to the next lesson, so I'm going to assign you some revisions.