Hello Tomako, 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 keeping foreshortening in mind while constructing your arrows which allows you to make good use of perspective and the depth of your page, this gives a nice extra layer of tridimensionality to your arrows.

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, but do remember that your hatching lines must still follow the principles of ghosting and mark-making, they must have clear end and start points, they must be parallel to one another, be carefully planned and executed and not end at arbitrary points. It's good that you're making use of added line weight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.

Generally you're doing a good job with this exercise, I'd like to encourage you to keep experimenting and keep trying different types of arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different rates of foreshortening to them, keep in mind that arrows are very flexible objects and can move freely across the world in all sorts of manners, so you should keep pushing yourself in order to continue developing your abilities.

Leaves

The linework for your leaves is looking smooth 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.

For your addition of edge detail it's good to see that you're not attempting to capture more than one piece of detail at a time but you need to spend more time with the execution of each mark - because there are so many and they seem individually unimportant, you're putting less time into each one and so they do not properly rise off and return to the existing stroke - there are often gaps and overshoots that could be avoided by putting more time into the work. No mark you draw is unimportant - if you decided it was worth adding, it's worth giving as much time as it needs to be done to the best of your current ability.

Your addition of texture is starting to move in the right direction but there are a couple of places where it's coming along quite explicit as you outline your textures which leaves no transitions from light to dark in an attempt to capture the representation of what's going on with your structure.

This doesn't allow you to properly focus on the cast shadows present and thus your addition of texture is less specific than it could be. There's much more going on than just a few stray marks implying veins and we can do much more to accurately communicate this type of texture, take a look at this informal demo on how to approach leaf texture, and make sure to give these reminders on how texture works in Drawabox a read.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently made as you're following the instructions for the exercise, you're drawing your edges in segments which allows you to maintain higher control over your marks and helps you create solid but still organic looking structures.

Something else you should consider is limiting the amount of ellipses present in your branches, as it stands, at points you have too many ellipses in close proximity to one another which doesn't allow you enough of a length of runway to extend your marks, it also makes it harder for you to fully engage your arm when drawing. As a general rule of thumb, treat ellipses as indicators for when the form shifts noticeably, that way you don't end up with too many ellipses that communicate the same information to the viewer.

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

First I will start by addressing your questions.

For the first question while it's good that you're starting to think in terms of planes and the like, when constructing our branch like forms we should stick to the instructions as best as we can, we'll be drawing the outer edge of our branches first, the outermost edge of the form, so we won't really be accounting for plane shifts. I have put together a quick demonstration of how I would approach a curved branch structure such as this.

And yes, you must draw through all of your forms no matter what, but keep in mind that your two organic forms are not the same, as the one on the left is an organic form that is rounder, and the right is much more boxy in nature, both approaches are valid on this case, but it depends on what you require for a specific construction.

For your second question this is actually more tricky, because there are a couple of different things to consider, but the biggest is that when choosing what we're going to be constructing we need to be aware of the size of our page and the restrictions it provides, we also must keep in mind that the more we add to it the less space will be left for the other elements of our structure or other constructions.

In general it seems to me that you're trying to fit a lot of constructions with a lot of complexity and detail to your pages and unfortunately this actually hurts how much you're getting out of each individual construction, by trying to add a lot of drawings to your page rather than making them as big as you need them to be you artificially limit the amount of space your brain has to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises, you also make it harder to engage your whole arm when drawing.

So in the future stick with a single construction per page, especially if you are going to be drawing something that is very leafy and complicated, with several elements to it, you will find it way easier to construct more complicated structures when you're drawing bigger.

Now let's take a look at your plant constructions. 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 focus 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.

Ease up on your lineweight, it's thick, with several passes going over the same marks and jump from one form's silhouette to another, which smooths everything out too much. Almost as if you pulled a sock over a vase, it softens the distinctions between the forms and flattens the structures out somewhat.

Instead lineweight must be subtle, used only to clarify the overlaps between the forms that are being built up, as explained here.

And lastly let's take a look at your addition of texture to these structures, it is starting to move in the right direction as you make an effort to think about the cast shadows present in your structure, but you do end up confusing form shadows and local areas of color for cast shadows which clutters your work, such as your apple construction, and you add too many big areas of black to your work, your shadows are not always clearly 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

In general you are doing a phenomenal job, you're making use of the construction techniques and methods really effectively which has allowed you to construct structures that look very tridimensional and solid. I have no doubts that you understood the purpose of these exercises and as such I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.