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

Arrows

Let's start by talking about your arrows, they're looking smooth and confidently made, this helps push the feeling of fluidity that arrows have as they move through the world. You're also making very good use of the depth of the page, which helps make your arrows feel tridimensional.

I can see that in here you do several passes over your lines, which makes me believe you were either attempting to add lineweight, or trying to redo a previous line. When it comes to extra lineweight, it should only be added on top of arrow overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.

Remember that part of the reason we do these exercises in ink is that ink doesn't allow us to be wasteful with our marks or hide our mistakes, when you put a mark down on the paper make sure to commit to it, regardless of how it turned out.

Your hatching is neat and tidy and correctly placed, this helps reinforce the perspective on your arrows, just don't forget to add it to your arrows as here you didn't add shading to two overlaps.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves, they're generally looking very energetic as the fluidity you had in your arrows translates nicely.

One thing that you should keep in mind when attempting this exercise are the concepts introduced in the arrows exercise on how to make flat objects appear tridimensional on a flat page, part of this is making sure that they're twisting and turning realistically. Some of your leaves don't follow this and as such are folding unaturally which is flattening their forms.

This leaf at the top isn't as solid as it could be because you skip construction steps by not establishing the overall leaf footprint before defining the individual arms of your leaf structure.

Your application of edge detail is looking good, just keep in mind that as with all other methods in this course, you should be working on your edge detail additively whenever possible.

Branches

For your branches they're coming out decently as you're often applying the instructions for the exercise, I'd like to offer you a couple of pointers that you can look out for in order to keep developing your skills and getting the most out of this exercise.

Firstly I'd like to point something that isn't quite a mistake, but did limit how much you got out of this exercise regardless, the size and thickness of your branches.

This isn't necessarily a mistake because it still allows you to apply the instructions for the exercise as well as fully engage your shoulder, but for most plant structures you'll find in this lesson their branch-like forms will usually be twice as small as the ones you've drawn here, as such drawing a bit smaller in this exercise and experimenting with different branch sizes would have allowed you more space to practice adequately as well as make the transition from drawing branches to constructing plants easier.

Moving on, it's good to see you generally extending the lines for your branches. This helps us achieve a smooth, more seamless transition between different marks. But make sure that when you're extending your lines that you're doing so for every mark as drawing edges in a single stroke is a mistake.

Onto your ellipses they're often coming out alright, but some of them are a bit stiff, remember to keep the concepts introduced in lesson 1 in mind, draw from your shoulder and with confidence.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's talk about your plant constructions.

They're often coming out well as you often apply the instructions and methods introduced previously in the lesson, you're clearly starting to grasp the concepts this lessons seeks to teach and developing a good sense of spatial reasoning. Good job.

Going forward, there are still a couple of points that if addressed will help increase the overall quality of your work, so keep an eye out for them.

The most important is that you pay close attention to instructions in the lesson material, your attempts at following the demos should make up less than half your homework submission, yet here they're the majority.

Keep the relationships between your phases of construction tight and specific, vagueness not only reminds the viewer that the marks on the page are indeed just 2d lines and not part of a window that allows then to look at the object you're trying to represent, but it hurts the solidity of your forms as their relationships with other forms are left ambiguous. As such don't leave arbitrary gaps between the flow lines for your leaves and your outer edges - they must connect - and don't leave gaps between the end of a line and an ellipse in your branches.

• Construct cylindrical structures such as mushrooms and flower pots around a minor axis in order to keep your various ellipses aligned. It's good to see that you've added a rim for the flower pot you've drawn, but since it's an ellipse it must follow the same guidelines and be drawn through ideally twice.

In your attempt at the pitcher plant demo you often undermine your initial construction by having your new lines cut back into your ellipses, remember to keep the relationships between your forms solidly defined, as well as remember the instructions for the branch construction method, when starting a new line segment, do so at the previous ellipse point, and extend it from there.

You didn't make use of the branch construction method in your attempt at the potato plant demo and it's generally drawn too small, which severely limits your ability to apply the construction methods required in this lesson. In your attempt the camera angle is different, the shadows also don't line up to the leaves and they have an arbitrary overall semi-circle shape. In the demo, the part that's filled in is basically so densely packed that the shadows fill up the dirt you can see between the gaps. This at least in part suggests that you may be misinterpreting that filled black area as some sort of arbitrary artistic choice.

It's not uncommon for you to outline shadow shapes and then leave them blank, which undermines your attempt at applying texture.

Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction. In a lot of ways they're the same concept, with construction being focused on the big and primitive forms that make up different objects, with texture simply being focused on conveying to the viewer the small forms that run along the s urface an object, if it's thick and rugged, or if it's smooth and sharp, essentially texture is a form of visually communicating to the viewer what it would feel like to run their hands across that object's surface.

None of this has to do with decorating any of our drawings, what we draw here is based on what's physically present in our construction. As introduced here in what are essentially the "principles" of texture in Drawabox and how it is used in the course, we can notice that we should focus on each individual form and how it casts a shadow on neighboring surfaces, understanding how each individual form sits on a 3D space, and closely analyzing all of this information present in our reference to be able to translate it to our study.

The shape of this 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, only after careful observation can we understand how to best design a shadow shape that best conveys the texture of an object and the form it's being cast on.

This approach is of course much harder than basing our understanding of texture on other methods that may seem more intuitive, but in the long run this method of texture is the one who enforces the ideas of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following these ideas and as you keep applying it to your work, you'll find yo urself asking how to convey the texture in the most efficient way possible, with less lines and ink, focusing more on the implicit mark-making techniques introduced in Lesson 2. Going forward here are a couple of final reminders of how texture in Drawabox is approached.

Final Thoughts

I believe you've shown yourself to understand the concepts shown here and be capable of applying them to your work. Sometimes the quality of your work is brought down as you don't apply instructions as carefully. Make sure to pay close attention not only to the exercises but also be attentive to the amount of homework requested.

I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.