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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows you're doing a very good job of drawing them with confident and smooth lines which reinforce the fluidity these objects have as they move across the world. They also have a good sense of perspective to them as you're making good use of the depth of the page, but do pay close attention to the placement of your hatching lines, there are some places where you added your shading to the incorrect side of the arrow bend which hurts the illusion of depth wish to create in your arrows.

According to how perspective works objects will appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when further away, even if they're the exact same size. The way this affects an object of consistent size that stretches across space means that sections of this object will look bigger, and others smaller according to the placement of that object's section in space, so the bigger part of the arrow is always going to be the one closest to the viewer, this means that the smaller part of the segment should be the one getting the hatching in order to communicate to your viewer that that segment is behind the other.

You do have one instance of an arrow where you were afraid of letting your edges overlap. Don't forget that this flattens your arrow, always think carefully about how your arrow is bending in space and make use of the ghosting method in order to plan your arrow in segments and be able to gauge what line might make this object feel the most concrete before committing to a mark.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves your marks are fluid and smooth which is a great first step for creating solid looking leaf structures. It's also good to see that you're experimenting with folds - although you can still push this concept further - as leaf structutes in actual plants will rarely face only the viewer, as such it's important to practice all the different types and orientations of leaf structures that you may find.

Your approach of the complex leaf construction method though can still use some improvements, first things first for [this leaf structure]() you skipped construction steps by not capturing the overall primitive form of the leaf first, by going for the more complex form of the structure right away you struggle with keeping the form solid and make it unclear and flat. The leaf ends up feeling more like a flat sticker on a page, rather than a real tridimensional object that exists freely in 3D space.

While complex leaf structures have many individual arms and have a complex form, they still exist as a single entity, parts of a bigger structure, they're all influenced by one another, as such it's important to gradually build your structure, starting with simple forms and slowly building complexity in order to create a tight, specific leaf construction that still flows through space in an energetic manner.

For this leaf your construction is looser than it 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.

Your use of edge detail is quite nice, you're generally avoiding having a stroke define more than one piece of edge detail at a time, this is great.

I've noticed that you added texture to your leaves, but it's looking pretty explicit. You can find here some extra notes on how to think when approaching leaf textures.

Branches

For your branches it seems that the instructions for the exercise weren't always followed through, specifically in how the edges are to be laid out, which hurts the quality of your work and holds you back a bit. While you're extending some of your edge segments you don't always extend it completely up to the halfway point between ellipses, in some cases, it seems you've started a new segment around the point where your previous line ended, instead of back at the ellipse point, which effectively removes the healthy overlaps between marks that we seek to achieve in this exercise.

By revisiting the instructions for the exercise we can see that each edge should start at one ellipse point, continue past the second, be extended fully up to the halfway point to the third ellipse, once that's done you'll repeat the steps, starting a new segment at the previous ellipse point, not where your line ends. This is to get us used to this method of building up complex marks with individual segments, while still having them flow smoothly into one another.

Make sure to keep the size of your branches consistent throughout their lenght.

For your ellipses it's good to see that you're making an effort to always draw through your marks, although some of your ellipses are still a bit wobbly, don't forget to execute your marks from your shoulder and with confidence as wobbles are caused by hesitation. While it's good that you seem aware of the ellipse degree shift you should also take notice of the fact that some of your ellipses degrees barely change when they should. Remember that as a cylindrical form shifts towards or away from the viewer, the degree of the ellipses within that structure will also shift.

Plant Construction Section

Let's start this section of your critique by talking about your very first construction - this palm tree. It's important to keep in mind that Drawabox as a course isn't interesting in teaching you how to draw anything in specific, instead Drawabox uses several different subjects in order to introduce tools that will allow you to break them down and draw them as solid, more believable structures as you develop your spatial reasoning skills through these drills.

But this does mean that in some cases even though a subject could technically fit into a lesson, it can't be approached with the correct construction methods introduced in the lesson and thus, they aren't as helpful as objects of study. This is the case with tree-like structures, they aren't very appropriate to use as reference in this lesson because of their sheer size and amount of leaves and branches, which can make the drawing cluttered incredibly fast and force you to skip construction steps, in this case it causes you to simplify the form of the palm tree leaves too much, and you don't draw the extra branches with the branch construction method, which leaves your construction less specific, the relationships between your forms less defined, and you gain less from the exercise because this type of structure doesn't allow you to engage your brain and think through how these forms would fit together in a tridimensional space.

The same mistake can be seen in this sunflower, where the extra stems aren't drawn with the branch construction method, and in this plant construction, additionally another issue present in these pages is the fact that you're not making use of the forking branches method for establishing the relationships between forms for stemming branches.

• Your page of mushrooms is looking well constructed, keep in mind that you can make use of a minor axis in order to help keep your several ellipses aligned when approaching cylindrical objects such as these.

Something I've taken notice of that's present in your page of leaves but is missing in your actual homework pages is your usage of edge detail, by taking a look back at the instructions for the leaves exercise we can see that despite it's name, edge detail is actually another phase of construction that should be added to your work, and only the fourth step of drawing leaves, texture, is optional. I've also noticed that in here essentially the only place where you added edge detail to one of your leaves on your plant constructions you ended up cutting back into your original construction and zigzagging this edge detail, both things that should be avoided.

Considering the size of your lilly flower construction, it would have been possible to draw the inner stems of the flower with the branch construction method without much trouble, this would have allowed you to once again keep the structure much more solid and tridimensional.

I've noticed that there were some times, such as in here where you attempted to add some incredibly thick lineweight to your work, keep in mind that line weight itself should be added towards the

end of a construction and focus specifically on capturing how the different forms overlap one another, as explained here, it should also be added with a single, confident stroke superimposed on top of the previous line, areas of black filled in like this should be reserved for cast shadows only in order to convey texture.

Final Thoughts

Overall your work here is moving in the right direction, although you have a couple of issues that are holding you back, such as not focusing on drawing leaf structures that fold as much in your plant constructions which feels unnatural as most plant structures - including some of yours - will have leaves that are folding or twisting in some way because these leaves should be affected by outside forces such as the wind, gravity and their own weight, not considering these factors and drawing almost all of your leaf structures straight on makes them feel like flat stickers on a page instead of real tridimensional objects that are a part of a real structure.

You're also skipping some instructions and not following them as closely as you should, I believe that you'll benefit more from revisiting these exercises and these concepts one last time before moving on to more complex structures. Please revisit the relevant lesson material and then reply with your revisions.