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

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. You're making good usage of the depth of the page by experimenting with the rates of foreshortening in your arrows, but your arrows do sometimes look a bit unnatural as it seems to me you become a bit unsure of how their edges should overlap. So don't be afraid of letting your edges overlap and to ensure that you're constructing a solid structure, try to construct your arrow in segments with the ghosting method, in this manner you can gauge whether your lines would look right and overlap the way they should before committing to a mark.

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 good that you're making use of added line weight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.

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 generally looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, but there are still some signs of hesitation present within your marks, so don't forget to always draw from the shoulder, with confidence and swiftly in order to get smooth marks.

You need to make use of edge detail more thoroughly in your work, because you're not always making use of edge detail in your leaves they are left very simple, edge detail is a great tool to further help you communicate the form of your structures and how they move through space. So don't forget that only the last stage of construction, texture, is optional.

In the times where you do make use of edge detail it is quite well made, you're not attempting to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, and you're often approaching it additively - that is, constructing it on top of your preexisting structure, as well as putting it down with the same general line thickness as the rest of your construction, all of these are good things that help you construct solid and tight structures that still feel fluid and energetic.

Branches

Moving on to your branches you're not sticking to the instructions for this exercise as closely as you should, you're not fully following the characteristics for simple branches: simple cylinders with no foreshortening, and some of your structures are left flattened as a result, when working on this exercise make sure that you have a solid grasp of the basic characteristics for branches before attempting structures that are a bit more complex.

While it's also good to see that you're drawing your edges in segments you're not starting your new segment back at the previous ellipse point and superimposing it on top of the preexisting mark, you're starting your new segments close to where your previous mark ended, which partially removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve in these structures.

So don't forget how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully up to the halfway point to the third ellipse, afterwards you'll start a new segment, making sure to place your pen at the second ellipse and repeat this pattern until your entire branch is complete.

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, but there are a couple of moments where you're drawing through them too many times which causes your ellipses to look a bit too loose, remember to aim to 2-3 passes at most to prevent this. It's good to see that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift and making use of it in your constructions, which helps these structures feel more solid and believably tridimensional, but don't forget the rules for how the degrees work as your structure shifts so that you don't accidentally flatten them out.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are coming along nicely. You're generally making use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in this Lesson which helps you create the illusion of tridimensionality in your work, you're not only trying to capture what these structures look like, but you also focusing on how they work, how they exist fully in tridimensional space by drawing through your forms and thinking about the way each piece of your construction exists in relation to one another.

This is all very good and it's helping you develop a strong sense of spatial reasoning, there are only a couple of small things that if kept in mind will help you take your work to the next level.

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 skipping construction steps and drawing branches as single marks and sometimes leaves as outlines, or trying to draw the outlines of branches which causes them to have inconsistent size and look stiff and flat. Remember that these are not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.

On top of that, make sure to always go through as much of the lesson material as possible, the informal demos page often has really valuable and sometimes the most up to date information on construction methods and techniques, your constructions with forked branches are less solid and specific than they could be because you're not using the forked branches and knots method for approaching this type of structure.

Avoid adding notes to your work, especially when there's a lot of them, it will distract you from your work and can shift your attention to something that actually isn't the main issue. Instead it's best to keep these notes in a separate page or add it to your work only after you've recieved your feedback and can more properly evaluate your work and what needs to be focused on.

I can notice in your work some places such as your leaves in here where you've tried to redraw your marks, going over them more than once. This is a mistake, remember that part of the reason we draw in ink is so that we can build confidence in our marks and a respect for them, we must carefully plan out each and every mark we want to make. If our planning happens to not have been as thorough as we expected, or we had a bit of a slip up when executing the stroke we must simply accept it and move on.

And lastly let's take a look at your addition of texture to these structures, which needs some work as it's looking very explicit as you confuse local areas of color with texture and your actual shadow shapes are very timid and small, they're not designed with a specific purpose in mind and so there are no focal points of detail in your constructions which leaves no places for your viewer to focus on or any areas of rest, there's no contrast and so everything competes to keep the viewer's attention.

So let's revisit how texture in Drawabox is approached, by looking back on this page we can refresh our memory on texture through the lens of Drawabox and see that it is not used to make our work aesthetic or good looking, 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. Only after analyzing all of this information present in our reference will we be able to translate it to our construction. 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 and communicates this tridimensional information.

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. Make sure to go over these reminders in order to solidify your understanding of texture further.

Final Thoughts

I'm going to be marking this submission as complete, as I believe that in these pages you have demonstrated that you do understand the way these construction methods and techniques should be used and why they're important for your work, you just need to be more thorough when applying these concepts to your work in order to get the most out of this lesson. Good luck in Lesson 4.