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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your linework is looking confident and smooth which helps sell the feeling of fluidity in your arrows as they move through the world. You're making really good use of the depth of the page with your addition of foreshortening which helps give your arrows a nice sense of tridimensionality.

It's good that you're making use of hatching to differentiate your arrow segments, as well as making use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps, all of this helps you reinforce the depth of your arrow structures.

The only thing you can do in order to take your understanding of arrows and 3D space further is explore the different ways arrows can move through the world, while your arrows certainly look tridimensional, they're a bit too similar to one another, explore the different ways they can twist and bend and move across the world as well as experiment with the negative space between overlaps.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves the fluidity present in your arrows is translating really nicely into these new structures. They have a nice sense of energy to them as you're not only capturing how these structures sit statically within space but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

Your application of edge detail is coming along nicely, but it can be made better. You're often adding it in with a thicker, darker lineweight than the rest of your construction, if this was intentional, just be sure to keep the line thickness for each phase of construction roughly consistent, so as not to encourage yourself to redraw more than you strictly need to.

While you're generally not trying to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, there are a couple of spots in your work where you're zigzagging your edge detail which is a mistake as it goes against the third principle of mark-making from lesson 1. You're also often cutting back into the silhouette of your forms, avoid this as much as possible, as cutting back into what we've already drawn can cause us to focus too much on manipulating 2d shapes on the page, instead of thinking of the 3d edges in space that those lines represent.

Your texturing work here is looking pretty well done, you're generally moving in the right direction when applying texture to your work, although there are some moments where you fill in large areas in black when they're not caused by cast shadows, you can find here some extra useful notes on how to think when adding texture to your leaf structures. You're also generally adding your shadows as very thin lines, which doesn't allow you to design your shadow shapes as dynamic, take a look at this demo for further information.

Branches

For your branches they're coming along really nicely made as you're following the instructions for this exercise and constructing some very organic and solid structures. There are only some small adjustments that can be made which will help you take your branches to the next level.

It's good that you're extending your edges in segments, but you're not always extending them fully to the halfway point between ellipses, either not extending them far enough, or extendong your lines past it. Another issue is that you don't always start your new segment line at the ellipse point, either starting it earlier, or later, which partially removes the healthy overlaps between marks that we wish to achieve in this exercise.

So make sure to follow the instructions more closely for this exercise, take your time with each mark and each form in order to execute it to the best of your current ability, on top of this you also have many visible tails present in your branches, but this isn't a big deal, as your accuracy will naturally improve with time.

Moving on to your ellipses, while it's good to see that you're putting in the effort to draw through them twice, you're not always doing so. Don't forget to always draw through your marks at least twice before lifting your pen. It's good to see that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift and making full use of it in your constructions, which helps these structures feel very solid and believable.

Plant Construction Section

Now let's take a look at your plant constructions which are generally coming along quite well made, you're often making use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson and you're certainly demonstrating a very strong sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

Of course, there are a couple of issues present in your pages which could certainly be improved upon, so here are some of the things you should look out for the next time you attempt these exercises so that you can take your constructions to the next level.

One of the issues that's present in many of your plant constructions is the fact that you're drawing earlier phases of construction with lighter, fainter lines, and then going over them with a much thicker and bolder lineweight afterwards.

This is an issue because it can make one think of Drawabox exercises as sketching, where the initial lines are only guidelines - building blocks for the refinement that comes later on. But Drawabox exercises are not sketching, they're drills created with the explicit purpose of helping you develop your spatial reasoning skills, it's important that you commit to your marks and respect the decisions and boundaries that they establish as they all contribute equally to the solidity of your structure.

Lineweight itself is a different tool that we employ and that should only be added towards the end of a construction, focusing specifically on capturing how the different forms overlap one another, as explained here.

• Don't forget that the methods and techniques introduced in this course aren't suggestions or guidelines, they're rules, or more specifically, they're tools that will help you tackle the spatial reasoning challenges we face throughout these lessons in a way that allows you to understand how these structures exist in a 3d space.

As such, you must always make use of them - don't choose when to apply them and when not to, one example of this is this construction where you do not draw the smaller stem structures with the branch construction method, and even though the structures are flowers, you don't draw their petal structures with the leaf construction method. Because of these issues, this construction is left particularly flat.

Drawabox is a course which has one very important goal: to help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning, in order for this to be possible you must go through the process of construction, making use of the tools introduced in the lesson material as they'll help you engage your brain and not only make you think about what your subject looks like, but truly help you understand how your structure fully exists in a tridimensional space, how each piece connects to one another and how they work alongside each other to make out your structure.

There are some places in your constructions where you're not drawing through your forms, such as in this construction where you're only drawing the parts of your petal structures which would be visible to the viewer, this doesn't allow you to fully engage your sense of spatial reasoning and it doesn't help you understand how your object fully exists in 3d space, so don't forget to always draw through your forms.

And lastly let's take a look at your usage of texture which is looking well made and it's certainly moving in the right direction as you're starting to consider the idea of communicating tridimensional information in a more subtle manner, however there are many filled in areas of black in your work, such as in here, and you should avoid this as much as possible. This is because not only can these areas obscure the underlying construction, making it harder to evaluate your homework assignment, but they also don't follow the principles of texture introduced in lesson 2.

Let's revisit how texture in Drawabox is approached, by looking back at this page we can refresh our memory and see that texture through the lens of Drawabox is not used to make our work aesthetic or pretty, 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, after analyzing all of the information present in our reference we'll be able to translate it to our study. This is why 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, this is why we should consider carefully how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic, as mentioned previously.

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. 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.