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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows you're drawing your marks with a great deal of confidence which helps solidify the feeling of fluidity that arrows posses as they move through all the three dimensions of the world they exist in. You're making really good use of the depth of the page with your application of foreshortening to your arrows.

I'm happy to see that you're making use of some really nicely applied hatching to your work, as this helps you clarify how your arrows twist and turn in 3d space. It's also good to see that you're making use of added lineweight on top of your overlaps in order to clarify their depth.

In general you're doing well, so keep tackling this exercise during your warm ups in order take your understanding of arrows and 3D space further, experiment with the different ways arrows can twist and bend and move across space, try different rates of foreshortening and experiment with the negative space between overlaps, all of these will help you challenge yourself and develop your skills further.

Leaves

The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, it's good that you're not only trying to capture how these structures sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

Your addition of edge detail is generally looking good, as you don't usually attempt to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, and that you generally construct your edge detail additively. You're also keeping the line thickness between your phases of construction roughly consistent, all of which is very good and helps you create a tighter, more solid construction that still feels fluid and energetic.

It's good to see that you've experimented with complex leaf structures such as in this leaf, but remember not to skip construction steps when approaching these more intricate structures.

This structure 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 simple overall footprint 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 leaf structures should abide by that, on top of this, make sure the later arms of the structure are also constructed with the characteristics of a simple leaf - one flow line and two smooth curves for their edges.

Onto your application of texture it's starting to move in the right direction, but it can definitely be pushed further, as you often add big areas of black to your leaves, as well as leave big areas of white present in them, this goes against the idea of drawing implicitly, and does not consider how we can use texture to create focal points of detail in order to catch the attention of our viewer.

Keep in mind that Drawabox focuses on cast shadows in order to communicate texture, and there's a lot we can do to more to accurately communicate this type of texture, take a look at this informal demo on how to approach leaf texture, and make sure to give these reminders on how texture works in Drawabox a read.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are generally coming along decently as you're following the instructions for the exercise which allow you to create some solid but still organic looking structures.

One thing you should keep an eye on is the fact that you have a lot of visible tails in your compound strokes, but this is completely normal and a mistake we all make, as you continue practicing your accuracy will naturally improve, however in order to mitigate this issue you may attempt to place your ellipses further apart from one another, in order to provide a good length of runway between your overlaps.

It's good to see that you're following the instructions for drawing knots and forking branches correctly. For your ellipses it's good to see that you're making an attempt to always draw through them twice, as that allows for a smoother mark and it''s good to see that you're generally aware of the ellipse degree shift but be careful, as there are times where your ellipses' degrees don't change when they should, or get wider when they should be thinner, and thinner when they should be wider, if the rate of change in your degrees is not in line with the rules of perspective you will end up flattening your structures by accident.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions. You're making use of the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson material, you're drawing through your forms which means you're not only trying to capture what these structures what these structures look like as shown in your reference, but carefully thinking about the way they exist fully in 3d space and how the different parts of your structure exist in relation to one another.

This is all very good and you're demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning in these pages, but there are a couple of things that can be tackled differently which will help you create even tighter, and more specific constructions.

While you are generally drawing through your forms in these mushroom constructions you're not always drawing the body of the mushrooms in their entirety for the ones that are in the background, only drawing the parts that would be visible to the viewer sometimes - this is a mistake, if you wish to add a structure to your construction then it must be drawn in it's entirety.

In this rose construction you're not always drawing the petal structures by following the basic leaf shape introduced in the exercise page, this kills the flow of some of your structures, you must always make use of the construction techniques as they're laid out, as they are very flexible and can be applied to a wide variety of structures, but deviating from the instructions can harm the solidity of your structures.

I've noticed that you often add notes to your work, this is generally discouraged, as it can cause students to start self critiquing and focus on the wrong aspects of their work, as well as distract the one giving them feedback, however I would like to talk about this note in the page with the rose construction: "think about imaginary guidelines".

There seems to be a misunderstanding in this note as you're thinking about imaginary guidelines, but there are two issues here: first, nothing we do in this course is from imagination, we're not "imagining" or trying to visualize anything in our "mind's eye" and then drawing it onto our page, instead we're focusing on things that are more tangible: specific construction methods, clear steps and techniques, as well as reference pictures, even for things that we draw without reference such as boxes first we learn how to make confident marks, the rules of perspective, how to draw a box, and then we do it 249 more times, analyzing our mistakes and attempting to mitigate them in your next boxes.

The second comes with the idea of guidelines, thinking in terms of guidelines can make one think of Drawabox exercising as sketching, where the initial marks we lay down are only guidelines that we can then build upon and change as we see fit, where the end result is more important than the guidelines we've laid down. But Drawabox is not sketching, think of it as building a house, the foundation the engineer and construction workers lay down is not a guideline for the house, it's a structure that must be followed specifically, lest they ignore it and the rules of physics will cause the entire house to collapse. In that same vein, all methods and techniques in Drawabox are tools with specific tools, no mark you draw is unimportant, if you lay it down, it must be respected as if it was an edge for an actual solid and tridimensional structure - otherwise, your structure will be less solid and less specific than it could be.

Your attempt at the potato plant demo came along quite nicely when it comes to the structure, you re following the construction techniques introduced and even fully construct branches that in the outdated demo were drawn as single marks, good job - what I would like to focus on here is the way you've filled in the areas of black in the demo, as well as how you did it in your page of mushrooms.

In the actual potato plant demo, that part that's filled in is basically so densely packed that the shadows fill up the dirt you can see between the gaps - but here the camera angle's different, and the shadows don't all line up and aren't all completely filled in, this, along with how ypu've filled in the areas between your mushrooms suggests that you may be misinterpreting that filled black area as some sort of arbitrary artistic choice.

Instead these areas of black are actually cast shadows, which leads me into the next talking point - your usage of texture, and how it can be improved, because even though at points you are thinking of cast shadows, you're still largely confusing them for local color and form shadows, often leaving large areas of white around your black marks.

In general, avoid filling in large areas of black in your work when making use of texture, not only does it obscure the underlying construction, making it harder to properly evaluate your homework assignment, it also goes against the principles of drawing implicitly.

Let's revisit how texture in Drawabox is approached, by looking back at this page we can refresh our memory and see that texture through the lens of Drawabox is not used to make our work aesthetic or pretty, instead every textural form we draw is based on what's physically present in our reference. Our focus should be on understanding how each individual form sits in 3D space and how that form then creates a shadow that is cast onto that same surface, after analyzing all of the information present in our reference we'll be able to translate it to our study. This means that the shape of our 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, which is why we need to consider carefully how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic.

This approach is of course much harder than basing our understanding of texture on other methods that may seem more intuitive or basing it on the idea that texture = making our work look good, but in the long run this method of applying texture is the one that enforces the ideals of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following these ideals, you'll find yourself asking how to convey texture in the most efficient way possible, with less lines and ink, focusing on the implicit mark-making techniques introduced in Lesson 2.

Final Thoughts

I believe you have understood the purpose of this lesson and the concepts it seeks to instill in Drawabox students, as such I believe you're ready to face the more complex constructional challenges present in the following lessons, I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.