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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows they're looking quite smooth due to the confidence which they're drawn, this helps push the feeling of fluidity which arrows have as they move through the world. You're making good use of the depth of the page with your use of perspective.

Your addition of hatching is pretty neat and tidy, as well as correctly placed.

Don't forget that in the last step for this exercise, your lineweight should be added with a single confident stroke, superimposed only on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves they're often initially coming out fluid and energetic, as you capture not only how they sit statically within space but also how they move across the space they occupy. However, by tracing over your initial lines and adding very thick lineweight, you lose this original confidence and fluidity, stiffening your leaves.

Tracing is something to avoid whenever possible, because it tends to make us focus more on how we're following a line on a flat page, rather than how that line represents an edge in 3D space.

Your edge detail is looking good, you're generally avoiding trying to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time and roughly putting it down with the same line thickness as the rest of your construction.

It's good to see you attempting your hand at the complex leaf construction method, but there are a couple of points you should keep in mind when making use of it, the first is that you should capture the overall structure of the leaf, and later build upon that the individual arms of the leaf, as outlined here. As even though complex leaf structures are complex and can have several elements, they still exist as part of a whole and are bound by the limitations of the main "spine" of the leaf, which will affect all of the individual pieces of the structure, this is why this leaf is looser than it could be.

Your addition of texture is looking pretty explicit as you sometimes draw the representation of the leaf texture, instead of the cast shadow shapes, this generally goes against the principles of texture in Drawabox. Here are a couple of notes on adding texture to leaves.

Branches

Onto your branches they're turning out quite decent as you follow the instructions for this exercise, there are a couple of things you should look out for however.

Make sure that when you extend your lines, that you extend it fully to the halfway point between ellipses. This helps us maintain more control over our marks and reach a smooth, more seamless transition between lines.

Onto your ellipses, make sure that you're always drawing through them twice and to vary your ellipse's degrees across your branch's lenght, as of now they're too similar to each other which is a mistake as introduced in the organic forms with ellipses exercise.

Plant Construction Section

Now let's move on to your plant constructions.

Starting with your mushroom, you're generally adhering to the construction methods which is helping with the overall solidity of the drawing. However you take some actions which contradict this solidity, such as here where there's a thicker line which cuts into the previous construction.

As mentioned before, tracing should be avoided whenever possible. Drawing earlier phases of construction more faintly can make one think of Drawabox exercises as sketching, where the initial lines are less important than 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, don't cut back into your forms, as that only cuts the relationships between your forms, and flattens them. All stages of construction must be drawn in roughly the same line thickness. 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.

In a similar manner that you must respect the decisions made by the forms you drew previously, you must also respect boundaries, for example for your daisy demo attempt the petals are looser than they 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. It's just easy to forget that when these previous shapes don't actually define forms as much as spatial boundaries/scaffolding for us to use.

Remember not to trace over your initial construction, lineweight should only be used in key areas to clarify overlaps.

In this construction the thick lineweight flattens the construction, the thinner and leaf like structures could also have been constructed more clearly if the leaf construction method was used.

Many of your pages have empty spaces that could have been better used by drawing bigger, in a couple of constructions, for example in the apple construction you're unable to apply the branch construction method to it's full extent due to the size of the drawing. Drawing bigger will not only allow you more room to work through the spatial reasonings that arise when tackling these exercises, but also give you enough space to fully engage your whole arm.

Your application of texture is moving in the right direction, although there are some points where it's coming out quite explicit. 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.

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, 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 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, 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 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 it's good, there are only a couple of issues that if addressed will take the quality of your work into the next level. I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete. Good luck in lesson 4.