Hello Minaray, I'm your neighborhood mushroom guy and today I'll be looking over your homework.

First things first, congratulations on finishing the Lesson! I hope you've had fun with this lesson as it's the one who finally takes the building blocks we learned over the last 2 lessons and 1 challenge, then teaches us how to put all of this knowledge to the test and draw an actual subject.

Without further ado, let's get into it.

Starting off with

Arrows

You didn't submit your required 1 page of arrows.

Leaves

When it comes to your leaves there are definitely some very good ones which feel like they flow and move across their 3d environment well, such as Leaf 5, 8 and this one but most of your leaves don't fold naturally, as a result the leaves end up feeling more flat, as though they're pressed against the page instead of moving through three dimensions freely.

When going into edge detail you cut back into your shapes quite often by zigzagging the edge detail. When adding detail to a leaf it should be done with the third rule of mark marking kept in mind, each stroke consists of only one trajectory.

It should also be kept in mind that when working with leaves you should always do so additively not subtractively and you should also never skip steps, which happens sometimes when you attempt complex leaves with holes in them by skipping the flow lines completely.

https://drawabox.com/lesson/3/8/complexleafstructures

Branches

Moving onto your branches for many of them it seems instructions haven't been followed closely, as you opt out of drawing them in connected strokes and attempt to draw them in a single line such as here and in here, while in other attempts you draw more than one line, but don't properly connect them such as here where the tail end of these lines stops suddenly and isn't superimposed by the next one.

The reason we approach branches with multiple but smaller strokes superimposed over one another is to maintain higher control over our lines as explained here in the instructions for the exercise. I'll also address the fact that you don't follow the proper instructions for forking branches either.

Another thing that stands out to me is that your mark making is largely unconfident and sloppy, seems like the ghosting method isn't being used, at least not to it's full potential, as chicken scratching appears to be used instead to draw this pot and the details on this plant.

Your ellipses degrees are also looking incredibly similar, remaining too consistent which flattens the form. If we look back on Lesson 2 and it's principles, when it comes to cylindrical-like forms we can see here, here and here that as the end of a cylindrical form turns away from the viewer the degree of the ellipse will increase and that drawing all of the ellipses with the same degree is a mistake.

And lastly I would like to remind you to draw through your ellipses twice as to get them looking smooth, right now your ellipses are coming out wobbly and unconfident since they're only drawn through once. This includes the ellipses in your flower pots and your mushrooms.

Plant Construction Section

Moving onto your plant constructions, there's definitely a good improvement from your first pages to your last ones as you start to apply more Drawabox principles to your work such as the correct leaf and branch construction methods, but there's still a lot that can be worked on in this section as the problems I've mentioned before show up in this part of your homework as well.

• Starting off small with your flower pots, remember that when approaching cylindrical objects we must start with a central minor axis line, which helps us in aligning the various ellipses of our construction, this also goes for your king oyster mushrooms.

Now, I would like to discuss two major important concepts when approaching our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of it. They are space and time.

While I don't know how much time you've spent into each of these constructions I do believe you could spend more time with them as a lot of them feel unfinished, as if you've spent more time in some than others. For example this plant has a lot of details on it's leaves and your actual leaves page has edge details and texture added to it, but your mushroom page completely skips out on detail as you don't add any texture to it, instead only adding a couple of vertical lines which don't convey to the viewer properly what the texture of this mushroom is and none of your other constructions have any kind of complex leaf edge detail.

Uncomfortable mentions that when it comes to space we shouldn't artificially limit how much space we allow ourselves to use on a page, which you do by separating your page in the middle and by deciding to put a construction in each side, or sometimes, two constructions in a side. An A4 sheet is already quite small, so this only makes it harder not only to engage your whole arm, but it also makes it more difficult for your brain to have ample space to work through spatial reasoning problems.

Uncomfortable also suggests that the best approach we can use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a page is given as much room as it requires and only when that drawing is finised should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, great! We can definitely use that so we don't waste paper and then we can assess again if there's more space, but if there isn't it's more beneficial and completely okay to just leave one drawing on the page.

• In these three first pages no concepts introduced in the lesson are applied, leaves and petals aren't drawn using the correct method and branches are either approached as single lines or thin tubes that weren't constructed.

• When attempting to change the silhouette of any subject that isn't flat, remember to add new forms that wrap around the first ones, since simply adding new 2D forms will flatten your previous construction, this is a mistake that you make when attempting the cactus, it's also exacerbated by the fact the cactus is drawn too small, which doesn't allow proper additional masses to be drawn wrapping around the initial forms.

• Here is a demo on adding lineweight and shadows to differentiate between your forms by user weijak.

It would've been nice to see more variation in your plants, as a majority of them are leafy plants in pots.

Final Thoughts

Overall, it seems that you're headed in the right direction by the end of the lesson, but by not following the instructions carefully your constructions and exercises suffer for it.

I've also looked over your messages in the drawabox discord server and you haven't shared your pages as you've worked on them in there, so I reckon most of the problems you've faced in this lesson are due to working in a vacuum and not getting proper guidance or advice as you worked through the exercises, since many of your struggles could easily have been addressed in the Lesson 3 channel.

I heavily recommend that for your revisions as well as any pages you make moving forward that you post and ask for help in one of the Lesson Channels in the drawabox discord.

I'm going to assign you some revisions for this lesson, please read over the Lesson 2 arrows exercise and the entirety of Lesson 3, then reply with:

• 1 page of organic arrows exercise from Lesson 2.

• 1 page of leaves.

• 1 page of branches, don't focus in forking branches for now. Instead I want you to get used to and comfortable to drawing regular branches and arraging your edge segments correctly first, as per the instructions linked to you to in this critique.

• 3 Plant construction pages. It would be really nice to see you make the best use of the page by drawing only one plant in each, as well as attempting different types of plants as well. Don't add texture to these, instead focus on the construction and separating the forms with proper lineweight.