Thank you to those who offered critique and tips on the Draw a Box discord and thank you Uncomfortable for offering these lesson and critiques at an affordable price! Looking forward to receiving feedback.
References for non demo submissions here if needed: https://imgur.com/a/CkTSriB
Good stuff! As a whole you've done a pretty great job applying the principles covered in the lesson, and to great effect.
Starting with your arrows, you're doing a good job of establishing how they flow through space. I can see that you're visibly trying to get the rate of perspective compression being applied to the positive and negative space of your arrows to be consistent, and for the most part it is working fairly well. The only thing that becomes a little visually confusing is that the hatching lines you're drawing tend to be slanted relative to the surface of the ribbon - that is, they tend to run diagonally across the surface rather than straight across, which throws off one's visual understanding of how it's twisting and turning. Try and get those hatching lines to run perpendicular to the flow of the ribbon in 3D space.
Moving onto your leaves, the sense of fluidity and flow from your arrows comes across fairly well here, and as a result you're doing a good job of capturing how the leaves move through the space they occupy, rather than focusing entirely on how they sit statically within the world. You're also very mindful of building up your construction step by step - your more complex edge detail builds right off the simpler edge from the previous phase, and so it feels quite solid and believable. Often students will treat the previous phases more loosely, resulting in a lot of contradictions in their drawings.
One thing I do want to mention is that there are places here where you instead of treating the lines along the surface of your leaves as contour lines (just things that describe how that surface deforms through space), you try to use them to convey texture/detail like the veins of your leaves. There are two key issues with this:
I'm not sure if you're using reference imagery to inform the details you're trying to capture. You may well be, because at least the leaf towards the lower left with veins seems to follow a reasonably realistic pattern, though I think the top right one seems a bit more erratic. Always use reference when adding detail to a drawing
You're totally forgetting about the concepts covered in Lesson 2, as far as how we capture texture and detail. That is, understanding that the detail is the result of actual 3D forms present along the surface of the object, with the lines we draw actually being shadow shapes. So, we shouldn't be drawing them as lines as you've done here - we should be focusing on the shadows those forms cast, capturing those in order to imply the presence of the form.
Your branches are largely done pretty well. There are some visible "tails" where your segments don't quite flow seamlessly into the next segment. This is pretty normal, but one thing you can do to help with this is to use the last bit of those segments as a "runway" for your next segment. That is, overlapping it directly instead of drawing where the previous segment ought to have been, and then shooting off towards the next target. This forces you to contend with those mistakes, rather than being able to ignore them and move forwards like they didn't occur.
All in all, your plant constructions are quite well done. As a whole, you're very mindful of stepping through all the phases of your constructions without skipping steps, and you're mindful of capturing the proper flow of your leaves and petals. I have just a few things to point out:
With the potato plant demo, you matched some of the full black shapes between forms that I drew there. This was largely to simulate the idea that there are so many cast shadows being drawn that it just covered that whole space. You neglected to draw the cast shadows for your other forms, which makes the areas you filled in look a bit strange. You don't want to give the impression that you just filled in the negative space between your leaves (since this would flatten out your drawing into a series of graphic shapes), so make sure that if you're going to dig into cast shadows like this, that you apply them for all the major forms present.
On your stargazer lily's petals, specifically the edge detail, you ran into this issue.
Don't zigzag your edges back and forth. Draw them with individual lines that rise off and return to the simpler edge, as though you're taking the edge from the previous phase and just pushing or pulling it slightly in 3D space.
In your succulent garden, you filled in the negative space within the pot. Since this isn't a situation like the potato plant where you'd ostensibly get so many forms casting shadows within this enclosed space, here it's very clear that it was just negative space being filled in. Remember that cast shadows all bear relation to the form casting them - they're not liquid, and don't fill in containers. The great thing about shadows is that they can tell us a lot about the form that casts them and their relationship to that surface, so you don't want to end up missing that.
I think in your corpse flower and your lemon tree drawings, you get a little heavy with the cast shadows to the point that you may be confusing them more with just trying to shade the leaf. Remember that form shading is not something we get into with these drawings, so always think about how the shadow you're drawing relates to the form that is casting it. Also, keep a general sense of where your light sources are so you don't end up with cast shadows that suggest that the main light source is in different locations.
So! With that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work, and watch out for those shadows.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.
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