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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows, they're flowing nicely across the page and have a great sense of fluidity to them due to your well executed linework. The sense of perspective in your arrows is also coming along pretty well.

There are some things you can improve in this exercise when tackling it again, one of those things is the size consistency problems in your arrow's segments by ghosting and planning your lines more before committing to them. Sometimes your arrow's bulge or narrow suddenly, when they should have only a gradual change in their size based on the perspective of the scene.

Another thing you can look for is the fact that in some parts of your arrows you're afraid of letting your edges overlap which causes distortion and unnatural bends in your arrows, this flattens the object. This is also an issue that can be fixed by planning more and using the ghosting method to build your arrow in segments, making sure that each of them overlaps when needed.

And to finish this section never forget to [draw through your forms]() and that lineweight is a great tool to help make your arrows look more tridimensional, but that it should be added on top of arrow's overlaps only, not the entire segment, in order to reinforce the depth present at the bends.

Leaves

Your page of leaves is well executed, the sense of fluidity present within your arrows is carrying over nicely into these new structures.

Your edge detail is executed nicely, although there are some cases where you're working subtractively with your edge detail when working additively would have achieved a similar - if not better - result. As mentioned here you'll want to approach this step of construction additively whenever possible, since cutting back into your previous phase of construction can not only flatten it but also make us focus too much on following 2d lines, instead of the edges they represent in a 3d space.

It's great to see you making use of the complex leaf construction method and to great effect already, in order to make your construction even tighter and more specific make sure to capture the overall structure of the leaf before defining the individual arms of the structure and how they move.

Moving onto your use of texture in this exercise you're moving in the right direction, but your texture is still leaning towards the explicit side. Make sure to look over these notes on how to approach leaf texture.

Branches

Moving on to your branches, it's great to see that you're making an attempt to follow this exercise's instructions, but you're falling short in a couple of points, mainly drawing your branch in segments, but not extending your lines for those segments up to the halfway point of the next ellipse.

Remember how branches should be approached: by starting your segment at the first ellipse mark, then extending it past the second ellipse fully up to the halfway point between the second and third ellipse. After these steps have been taken you'll start a new segment at the next ellipse point and continue until your entire branch is complete.

For your ellipses it's good that you're drawing through them twice, but you don't always do this for the smaller ellipses, make sure you're always ghosting and executing your ellipses from the shoulder. It's good to see that you're varying the degrees of your ellipses, although this change is too harsh in a couple of places, so try to be more subtle and gradual.

Plant Construction Section

Onto your plant constructions you're clearly starting to understand the concepts this lesson seeks to teach, you're making good use of the techniques and methods introduced here which is helping your constructions turn out very tridimensional and solid.

I'll be offering you some points on things you can focus on when tackling these exercises again so you can continue to get the most out of these lessons.

• Construct cylindrical objects such as flower pots around a minor axis, in order to keep your several ellipses aligned to each other.

Make sure to always make use of the methods and techniques introduced in these lessons, such as using the forking branches method for the branching stems in this plant structure and others. In that same vein don't forget to keep extending your lines in your branches, even for your plant constructions.

Don't leave arbitrary gaps between your leaf's flow line and it's outer edges.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

• For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

This is something that you end up doing for this cactus which flattens it's construction. Instead we should focus on building things up gradually, always respecting the initial forms we draw and adding to them, instead of taking away, as shown here.

Your use of texture is looking a little bit on the explicit side. 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

Your work here is showing a lot of potential as it's already looking pretty solid and well constructed, if you address some of the points brought up here you'll continue to improve.

You've shown a great understanding of the concepts taught in this lesson and as such I believe you're ready for the next lesson. Good luck in Lesson 4.