Hello kirowen, 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. You're keeping foreshorting in mind while constructing your arrows which allows you to make really good use of perspective and the depth of your page, this gives a nice extra layer of tridimensionality to your arrows.

It's good that you're making use of hatching in your arrows, as that allows you to establish how your arrows are oriented in space and helps you reinforce your own spatial reasoning skills. As a finishing touch to your arrows, don't forget to always make use of extra lineweight on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth.

Generally you're doing a good job with this exercise, I'd like to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise in order to keep pushing yourself. Try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different rates of foreshortening, keep in mind that arrows are very flexible objects and can move freely across the world in all sorts of manners, so you should push yourself and explore the different possibilities.

Leaves

The initial linework for your leaves is looking smooth and confident 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.

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.

Something that you should keep an eye on is your application of edge detail, which can be greatly improved. As it stands there are a couple of issues with the way you approach your edge detail.

• Your marks are too close to the outer edge mark, they don't carefully lift off from the outer edge mark, establish the new form on top of the structure and then come back down to it, integrating seamlessly into the preexisting mark. Because they're too glued to the original marks they seem timid, unplanned and unconfident, and that brings down the fluidity of the overall structure.

• You're working almost exclusively by cutting back into your structure. In general it's best to work on edge detail additively, constructing new forms on top of the preexisting structure. We should avoid cutting back into the marks we've already drawn, as that can cause us to focus too much on manipulating 2d shapes on the page, instead of the edges they represent in tridimensional space.

Branches

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

There are some visible tails present in your branch structures, but this is a very common mistake and your accuracy will naturally improve the more you practice this exercise. You may find that by limiting the amount of ellipses in your branches and spacing them further apart you'll allow for a bigger length of runway between ellipses and find it easier to 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 really well made. For the most part you're sticking to the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson which allows you to construct some really solid looking and believably tridimensional structures, you're demonstrating a strong, developing sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

Of course, there are always things we can improve, so here are some of the points you should keep in mind whenever you tackle these exercises again, so that you can continue to improve your skills.

The addition of edge detail in your pages is few and far in-between. Edge detail would have greatly helped in communicating the form of your structures and how they move through space they occupy, but by not adding it they're left very simple - which is not a mistake, but stops you from honing down your skills and taking your construction even further. So make sure to add edge detail whenever possible, and remember that only the last step of leaf construction - texture - is optional.

• When working on a construction keep in mind that all elements you add must be thought of as tridimensional structures with form and volume to them in order to maintain the illusion that all the structures within your page are real objects that exist in their own world. As such when constructing cylindrical structures such as plant pots makes sure to start with a minor axis and draw through your forms to ensure your structure reads as tridimensional and that all of your ellipses are aligned to each other.

Ease up on your line weight, you are going over most of your lines in your constructions - such as in here - this is not necessary. Just like with all other techniques we use in this course, line weight is also a tool with specific uses and should only be used to clarify the distinctions between overlaps, it must be added subtly. It shouldn't jump from one form's silhouette to another, as this tends to smooth everything out too much, kind of like pulling a sock over a vase, it softens the distinctions between forms and flattens the structure out somewhat.

And in order to finish this critique, let's take a look at your application of texture in these pages, which can definitely use some work.

As it stands your application of texture looks a bit haphazardly made, as if you didn't spend enough time carefully analyzing each shadow structure present in your reference, understanding it, then breaking it down into a shape and applying it to your work. It also seems that you are confusing local areas of darker color and form shadows for cast shadows, the latter being what Drawabox actually focuses on in order to communicate texture.

Because of this your usage of texture is left explicit and it looks cluttered, with no focal points of detail.

So 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 communicated through the use of cast shadows.

It 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. 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.

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

In general your work is moving in the right direction, you're usually following the instructions to the exercises and your work is starting to look tridimensional do to that.

I believe you're ready to tackle the spatial reasoning challenges found in the next lesson, as such I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.