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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your lines are looking fairly confident and smooth, which helps communicate a nice sense of fluidity in your arrows as they move through the world. However your arrows have little to no foreshortening, make sure to explore the size difference between arrow segments more in order to make better use of the depth of the page and push your understanding of tridimensional space further.

Your usage of hatching helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space and further your own understanding of the tridimensional space these objects occupy, it's also good that you're making use of added line weight in order to reinforce the depth of your arrows, but don't forget that it must be added subtly to your work, only once, on top of the overlaps.

In general you're doing well, so keep tackling this exercise during your warm ups in order to 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 starting to move ib the right direction but still needs some work, at times it has clear signs of hesitation, which goes against principles of mark-making from lesson 1. Remember to keep your linework smooth and confident in order to communicate the fluidity and sense of energy of your leaves.

It's good to see that you're also experimenting with some more complex types of leaf structures, and doing so by following the instructions, which allows you to create a much tighter and more solid looking structure that still feels flexible and energetic.

When it comes to your addition of edge detail in some of your constructions you need to spend more time with the execution of each mark - because there are so many and they seem individually unimportant, you're putting less time into each one and so they do not properly rise off and return to the existing stroke - there are often gaps, overshoots, and zigzagging marks which is a mistake that could be avoided by putting more time into the work. No mark you draw is unimportant - if you decided it was worth adding, it's worth giving as much time as it needs to be done to the best of your current ability.

Another thing to keep in mind in your structures is that when you put contour lines on your forms they don't really communicate any new information. Those kinds of contour lines, the ones that sit on the surface of a single form, only serve to take a form that can already be interpreted as 3 dimensional, and clarify it, while they're useful for introducing the concept of a contour line in practice it can be really hard to apply them incorrectly, if even 1 of your lines isn't in sync with the others the solidity of your structure will suffer. As such it's best to focus only on contours that communicate intersections.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently made as you're following the instructions for the exercise, you're drawing your edges in segments which allows you to maintain higher control over your marks and helps you create solid but still organic looking structures.

There are a lot of visible tails present in these branch structures, while this is a very common mistake we can attempt to mitigate it by limiting the amount of ellipses in our branches, by spacing them further apart we'll allow for a bigger length of runway between ellipses, and ensure a smoother, more seamless transition between marks.

For 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 overall. When it comes to your application of the ellipse degree shift to your branches it can be improved, as it stands your degrees are too consistent and hardly change which is a mistake that flattens your structures. Remember that as a form shifts in relation to the viewer, so will the degree of the ellipses within that structure also shift.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are generally coming along well made, as you're following the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson which allows you to construct really solid looking and believably tridimensional structures. I can see a good developing sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

However there are some issues present in these pages which are holding you back from your full potential. So here are the points you should keep in mind whenever you tackle these exercises again so that you can continue to develop your skills.

Always keep in mind that the construction methods and techniques introduced in this course must always be applied to your work, as they're tools which will help you construct much tighter and solid looking structures, there are times where you deviate from the construction methods by not drawing your branches with the correct method. Remember that they're not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.

Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that in some of your constructions you don't draw through some of your forms, such as leaves or branch like structures, this limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise. Not drawing through 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 not always making use of edge detail in your pages, edge detail would have greatly helped you further communicate the form of your structures and how they move through space, but by not adding it they're left very simple, so make sure to add edge detail whenever possible, and remember that only the last step of leaf construction - texture - is optional.

For your additional questions;

• For adding line weight, do I have to draw from the shoulder or can I draw from the wrist to be more accurate (since there isn't much distance that I have to weight)?

You should still aim to always draw from the shoulder.

For the Lady Fern, do I have to draw each individual leaf or is there a way to add/infer these details without the tedious work?

Drawabox is a course that aims to teach specific skills. It's fundamental that we're always making use of the construction techniques and methods we learn in our constructions.

At times, certain structures will be way too complicated and it's not feasible to draw them with the methods introduced, it is simply impossible to fully draw each individual leaf structure or branch structure in a plant such as this one while still following the instructions for this exercise, as such avoid picking plant structures that have too many leaves as a subject to study in this lesson.

For the Aloe vera, I treated them as drawing leaves. However, there is a bit of thickness to the plant. How do I make that thickness apparent? Is that something that's needed?

Rather than drawing several contour lines, just use one along the edge of the structure to communicate the thickness of the "leaf", such as in here.

For the Bottle Gourd, I realized I should have done the approach the same as the cactus where I create a "blob" and give it structure rather than do a very thick branch. Is there a general rule of thumb for when to do which approach?

You can find a general rule of thumb in this page.

Final Thoughts

I believe you've shown yourself to understand the concepts shown here and shown yourself to be capable of applying these methods to your work. Sometimes the quality of your work is brought down as you don't apply instructions as thoroughly as you should, so make sure to pay close attention to the instructions and take your time when going through these exercises.

I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.