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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your linework is looking smooth and confident which helps give your arrows a nice feeling of fluidity as they traverse through the world. While your arrows look clearly tridimensional there are quite a few of your arrows where the size of your segments is quite similar, which causes your arrows to feel pretty confined to the depth of your page, so make sure to push the size difference between your segments much further and explore with the different rates of foreshortening possible.

It's good to see that you're making use of hatching and added lineweight in your arrows, but they can be improved with a couple of changes, for your hatching keeping it neat and tidy will help you keep your work much cleaner, and will also help you with your mark-making skills, make sure to still follow the principles of mark-making and ghosting when applying your hatching, your lines must have a clear start and end point, they must be excuted with confidence and not stop at arbitrary points - instead they must go from one end of your arrow's width to the next.

When applying added lineweight to reinforce the depth of your arrows don't forget to do so subtly, with a single line superimposed on top of the overlaps.

Leaves

For your leaves there are a couple of things that can be improved here, your initial linework is quite confident which helps give a good feeling of fluidity to your leaves, but there are some unnatural folds found in your structures which flattens your work, such as in here and in here, keep in mind that leaves are very flexible objects, but they're not stretchy, when they move through space their size must be kept consistent, like a piece of paper folding.

Your addition of edge detail can be improved as well, as in this structure you're zigzagging your edge detail which is a mistake that goes against the third principle of mark-making from lesson 1. You also often cut back into your forms, make sure to put down your edge detail additively whenever possible, that is, always construct your edge detail on top of your previous structure, avoid cutting into the forms you've already drawn as that can cause us to focus too much on the 2d shapes on the page, instead of the 3d edges they represent in space.

Sometimes you're also adding your edge detail with a thicker line weight, such as in here, so just be sure to keep the line thickness for each phase of construction roughly consistent, so as not to encourage yourself to redraw more than you strictly need to.

It's really good that you're getting out of your comfort zone and tackling some more complex types of leaf structures which help test your skills and abilities, but there are many times where your structure could be kept a bit tighter by respecting your initial construction more closely. For example in this leaf structure is looser than it could be because the flow lines for the individual "arms" of the complex structure go past the boundary laid out by the previous phase of construction, the one where you establish the overall footprint for the structure. This bigger shape establishes how far out the general structure will extend - and so the flow lines for the later leaf structures should abide by this decision, otherwise it may as well not exist.

Branches

Moving on to your branches it seems you haven't followed the instructions for this exercise completely to the letter, more specifically in how your edges are to be laid out, while it's good that you're extending your marks up to the halfway point between ellipses, you're not always starting a new segment back at the previous ellipse point and superimposing your new lines on top of the previous one - instead you start your new marks where the previous one ended, which effectively removes the healthy overlaps between marks we wish to achieve in this exercise.

So make sure to revisit the instructions for the exercise, remember that you must start a segment at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully up to the halfway point between the third and second ellipses, with a new segment repeating this pattern from the 2nd ellipse and so on until your branch is complete. This helps us maintain higher control of our lines and allows for a healthier, smoother transition between marks.

For your ellipses it's good that you're putting in the effort to always draw through your ellipses twice, make sure to always treat your ellipse's outer perimeter as the defining edge of the form, in order to avoid accidentally cutting back into them and undermining your construction. And finally you seem aware of the ellipse degree shift, which is good.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions. Overall you're moving in the right direction, you're making use of the techniques introduced in the lesson and your work is coming along quite tridimensional as a result, you're certainly demonstrating that you'rr starting to understand the concepts this lesson seeks to teach and develop your spatial reasoning skills. However there are some issues present in your work which hold you back from your full potential, and it's important to address them so that you can start to get the most out of Drawabox.

An issue which is present in some of your pages and deserves to be brought attention to is the fact that you're sometines pre-planning the amount of constructions you want to fit on a given page before you commit to any of them. This is admirable as it shows you want to get the most practice out of each page, but unfortunately more practice does not equal the best practice, and by drawing smaller you limit your ability to fully work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise as we tackle these exercises.

For example in this page, due to the amount of flower structures present in the plant you're referencing you're unable to engage your entire arm when drawing, and that makes it harder for you to fully draw the petal structures in this construction, as such you end up skipping construction steps by not drawing the flow line for your petal structures, which is the most important part of leaf construction as stressed in the instructions for the exercise and in some cases you don't construct the petal structures at all.

All of this means your work is less specific than it could be, and you weren't able to fully work through the challenges presented in this page and fully engage your brain so that you could not only draw this structure in a way that feels tridimensional, but understand how it exists in 3d space, and how each of it's parts exist and relate to one another in that space.

So make sure to draw bigger, as big as it's necessary for you to be able to apply the methods to their full extent and engage your shoulder when drawing, when you finish your construction, if there is enough space left on the page for another drawing you should certainly add it in, but if not, it's completely okay to have a single drawing per page.

Another problem found in your work is that it's not uncommon for you to make use of an underdrawing, that is, drawing your initial phase of construction more faintly, then going over it with a darker, bolder lineweight.

Drawing earlier phases of construction more faintly can make one think of Drawabox exercises as sketching, where the initial lines are only building blocks for the refinement that comes later on. But Drawabox exercises are not sketching, they're drills created with the explicit purpose of helping you develop your spatial reasoning skills, it's important that you commit to your marks and respect the decisions and boundaries that they establish as they all contribute equally to the solidity of your structure. Otherwise you can end up undermining your previous phases of construction such as in here, where you drew some ellipses in order to start your construction for the fruit structures, but then you cut back into those ellipses and flatten your structures.

Lineweight itself can be added towards the

end of a construction, focusing specifically on capturing how the different forms overlap one another, as explained here.

Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, in this construction you did not draw where the stem attaches to the flower, you only drew the part that would be visible to the viewer. This limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise as not drawing throug your forms means relying on your observation skills, instead of engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and truly trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, where it comes from, what it attaches to.

You're applying texture to some of your plant constructions, and it's important to notice that it's leaning towards the explicit side.

You have several lines on top of your constructions, from what I can see it seems they're your attempt at capturing the texture present in your structures, but this is a very explicit way of approaching texture and doesn't follow the principles of texture that Drawabox uses as a learning tool.

Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction - in essence, they're the same concept, just at different scales, with construction focusing on the primitive forms that make up different objects and texture focuses on communicating the small forms that run along the surface of said subject. While construction tells the viewer what it'd feel like to manipulate that object with their hands, texture visually communicates what it would feel like to run their hands across the surface of that object.

Neither construction nor texture have anything to do with aesthetics or making a drawing visually interesting, what we draw here is based on what's physically present in our reference. As mentioned here when making use of texture, we should focus on how each individual form present on the surface of an object casts a shadow onto that same surface, and how that shadow would then be distorted by the surface it's being cast on. This means that the shape of this shadow is incredibly important as it 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 that enforces the ideals of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following them, 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.

Final Thoughts

In general a good submission that can be strengthened by putting more time into revisiting the instructions for each of the exercises in order to ensure you're always making use of them as they were intended and as they were instructed, as well as taking a bit more time with each construction in order to ensure you're always following the instructions closely and not rushing any step of the way.

Because you're struggling with following the instructions for some of the simpler exercises, as well as applying them to your constructions I'm going to be requesting a couple of revisions from you, so that you can have the chance to tackle these concepts again before moving on to more complex construction challenges later on. Please reply with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

2 plant construction pages.