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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your linework is very confidently made which helps push the sense of fluidity that arrows have as they move through the world. For your construction of the overall arrows there are a couple of points that can be improved, these are the size consistency of your arrows as well as the fact that many of your arrows are pretty confined to the space of your page and don't make full use of the tridimensional space available to them, fortunately both of these problems can be tackled with the same approach.

When we try to construct the second line that makes up our arrow's construction that requires a lot of muscle memory and control from us, thus it's incredibly difficult to execute a smooth and accurate line. By drawing this new line in segments, making use of the ghosting method to plan each curve and twist before drawing our line we can gauge it's accuracy and still maintain line confidence.

Your shading is tidy and neat and generally really well applied, it's great to see that you're sticking to the principles of ghosting from the first lesson. For the placement of your hatching sometimes you've added it to the incorrect side of the arrow's overlap which contradicts the illusion of depth you attempt to achieve.

• Perspective works by having objects appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when they're further away, even if they're the exact same size. Following this logic, the bigger part of the arrow is always going to be the one closest to the viewer, therefore the smaller part of the segment should be the one getting the hatching, this is also a helpful tip to keep in mind when constructing each segment of your arrow, you should experiment with the sizes possible and avoid making them too similar to one another, especially if you wish to construct an arrow in dramatic perspective.

Leaves

Continuing on to your leaves the sense of fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely into these new structures.

One problem in your constructions is that you're not always considering how the flow line is more than just a 2d line, it establishes how a leaf flows through space, almost as if it established the gesture of your leaf but also the basics for how your leaf structure will exist in 3d space. As such it's important that you focus on drawing leaves that are affected by outside forces such as the wind and gravity and that they bend and fold over themselves so that you can capture not only how they sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

This is especially important because when tackling actual plant structures you'll find that it's very rare that all leaf structures in your reference only face the viewer completely, so it's very useful to start tackling these kinds of leaves as early as you can, otherwise they start to feel like flat stickers glued to your page, instead of the tridimensional and free-flowing objects that they are.

Your application of edge detail is looking very good, you're generally avoiding capturing more than one piece of edge detail at a time, which allows you to maintain higher control over your marks and create a tigher, more specific construction. You're also making very good use of the complex leaf construction method, although for this leaf you didn't complete the edge detail, it's important that when you decide to add another phase of construction such as edge detail or texture that you fully commit to it, don't leave it unfinished or you'll remind your viewer that your work is just made up of lines on a page and it's not a window into a tridimensional world.

Your application of texture is generally moving in the right direction, I believe you'll improve even more if you take a look at these notes on how to think when approaching leaf textures.

Branches

Onto your branches it's good to see that you're sticking to the instructions really closely.

Although sometimes you deviate a bit from the instructions, you're not always starting your new edge segment at the ellipse point which leaves gaps in between your ellipses and your outer edges, this should not happen because when the original structure is ignored the construction is left more vague and less specific than it should be. Your new segments should always start at the ellipse point, touching and extending off of it in order to maintain the relationships between your phases of construction clear and specific.

You have many visible tails in your compound strokes, but this is completely normal, as you keep practicing the line extension method you'll notice that your accuracy will gradually improve.

Make sure to also pay close attention to the size of your ellipses, avoid big differences between them in order to keep the size of your branch structures consistent and solid. Still speaking of ellipses, it's good that you're generally aware of the ellipse degree and how it works, but some of your ellipses degrees are a bit too sudden or too consistent which hurts the illusion of solidity you aim to achieve, so don't forget to always think this through carefully when constructing your cylindrical forms.

Plant Construction Section

Now let's move on to your plant constructions. I'd like to start this by saying that you've done an incredible job with these exercises, your pages are looking great as your constructions look clearly tridimensional and solid. Of course there are always some things we can improve, so I'd like to mention some things that you're doing right, and things that you can tackle differently in order to get the most out of these exercises.

First things first, I've noticed that you submitted 14 pages of plant constructions instead of the 8 requested in the homework section of this exercise, I'd like to mention how it's commendable that you attempted all of the demos on your own, as they give a good frame of reference for how all of these techniques and methods can be used together in actual plant structures before you attempt your own. However Drawabox's affordable feedback is only possible because the course structure offloads as much responsibility as it can and puts that responsibility on the student, one way this is possible is by giving all of the students the same base amount of exercises to follow and submit for review.

The more pages that need to be reviewed, the more effort and time it's required of the one reviewing that work, but the amount you pay and the amount Uncomfy and the TAs are paid for that review is always the same. So make sure to only submit the requested amount of pages, if your reviewer believes that you need more to spend more time practicing these exercises before moving on they will ask you for some revisions before marking your work as complete, but if you wish to submit your attempts at the demos alongside your original constructions make sure that it makes up less than half of your total construction pages.

Looking through your work you seem to have a tendency to trace over precious phases of construction with an overall darker and thicker lineweight. In general, tracing is something to avoid whenever possible, because it tends to make us focus more on how we're following a line on a flat page, rather than how that line represents an edge in 3D space.

Lineweight also tends to smooth everything out too much and makes certain parts of your structure pop out too much and separates it from the rest of the construction, while in certain contexts this can be useful, when trying to construct a believable structure we want to create the illusion that all of these forms exist in the same space together.

Instead, focus on using line weight only to clarify overlaps between the forms that are being built up, as explained [here] (https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes/1/lineweight).

It's really good to see that overall you stick to the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson which helps you create more solid and believable structures, although as mentioned before there are some moments where you don't stick to your initial construction as closely as you could have, such as leaving gaps in between your ellipses and outer edges for branch-like structures or how in this page you deviate from the basic leaf form when establishing the boundary for the complex leaf construction, it's important that the boundary also flows with the energy of a leaf structure.

In this page I've noticed that, at some point your mark become less defined, and the forms of the structure you wished to capture were left unclear and the relationships between those forms wasn't established. This is most likely due to the sheer task you took upon yourself, perhaps unknowingly when choosing this plant as a structure to draw, but due to the small forms contained in this plant as well as the size of the reference picture you choose you faced some challenges that weren't necessarily worth the trouble.

It's important to remember that Drawabox is a course that focuses around developing one very important, fundamental skill to drawing structures that feel solid and tridimensional: your sense of spatial reasoning. In order for us to develop this skill it's important that we make use of the techniques and methodd introduced in the lesson material as well as follow a couple of general rules, such as establishing the relationships between each form we draw as well as always drawing through our forms and drawing said forms in their entirety, at some point in this page you defined those relationships in some way, such as in here where you make use of lines to establish how most of these small forms attach to the main branch, but in here almost half of these forms don't have such a relationship established, even when they're not being heavily obscured by other forms.

When approaching these exercises we need to remember that they're just that: exercises, drills that will help us develop our artistic skills. As such the most important part is the process where we break down each piece of a plant with a form and think through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when thinking of objects not as things, but trying to understand how they exist fully as a tridimensional structure in space. So if a structure is too big or too complex in order to be captured with the construction methods shown in the lesson, don't alter the methods or techniques and don't skip construction steps, instead choose a better reference or a different structure altogether.

This can also be applied to your page of narcissus flowers, where due to the size you're forced to skip some important steps for the construction of these structures and might not get as much insight as you would have otherwise by scaling down on the size. I've actually put together a demo for a different student that focuses on how to construct these same types of flowers and I believe you might found it helpful.

• As a general note, make sure that you're always adding edge detail to your constructions, despite it's name edge detail is actually a different phase of construction, and only the last step - texture - is optional.

Speaking of texture your application of it is pretty sparse, but you're generally going in the right direction, you just need to push yourself further and focus a bit more closely on the cast shadows present in your reference, and the forms that cast them.

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. I recommend looking over these reminders before you decide to tackle texture again in your exercises, as well as this demo that demonstrates how the shape of our shadow is important for communicating texture and how it should be designed carefully in a dynamic way. You can also see here these concepts applied in the context of a leaf texture.

Final Thoughts

You're already doing incredible in this lesson, clearly you understand the purpose of each exercise and how to apply it to your work in order to create a solid, believable structure v that looks and feels tridimensional. I believe you've shown a very strong sense of spatial reasoning in these pages, you're clearly ready to face the challenges present in the next lesson, so I will be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.