Hello Farhanthenerd, hope you are well.

Before I get into the meat of this critique. I noticed that some of your pages aren’t lying flat, or your hand is in the photo to hold it flat. While this isn’t much of a problem for me, it may have been a problem for you while working on your homework. What I’m trying to say is that if your paper is curled up at the middle of your sketchbook and wrinkled at the edges it makes your job of doing these exercises much more difficult than it needs to be. I’d recommend using printer paper and a clipboard to make sure you have a smooth flat surface to draw on. Comfy talks about paper here https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/4/paper and also in this video here https://youtu.be/Egxv9dycg5Q?t=944 I suggest watching it to the end, as he also talks about how to set up your desk and chair in a suitable way. You’re free to continue with your current setup, of course, these are just suggestions and things to check that may make things easier for you moving forward.

Starting with your arrows, your lines have a great sense of confidence and fluidity to them, well done. You have also grasped the idea of having one end of the arrow wider than the other. I confess I’m having a hard time parsing out individual arrows due to the sheer number of them that you’ve drawn on top of each other and that there are yet more arrows bleeding through from the other side of the page. Overlapping your arrows is fine, and so is drawing on both sides of the paper, but in this particular case it has made my life difficult. From what I can tell looking at your work, I think sometimes you let your edges overlap, and sometimes you do not, see the notes here https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/4/overlap Sometimes you are able to get the width of your arrows to increase consistently along their length to give an illusion of one end being closer than the other, sometimes your arrows bulge wide-narrow-wide in unpredictable and unexpected ways that break the illusion of depth. I can’t really say much more than that. If you want a more helpful critique on you arrows please submit a page with fewer arrows drawn on top of each other and nothing bleeding through from the back of the paper (you can use the back of the paper for warmups afterwards) I’d rather see a page with just 3 arrows on it than something that’s too confusing for me to help you with.

Moving on to your leaves exercise, you’re on the right track with this one https://imgur.com/a/ZdPkxVv on the others it looks like you didn’t quite understand that the sides of your leaves are meant to join up with the central flow line at both ends. I can see from scrolling through your plant constructions that this is something you picked up on and learnt as you progressed through the lesson. While your page of leaves misses the mark a bit, when you draw leaves in your constructions you’ve done a better job. You have maintained those confident flowing lines from your arrows and applied them to your leaves, making them appear to flow through space. For the most part you’ve done a good job of keeping the sides of your leaves simple, then adding complexity and edge detail to them later if necessary, without jumping ahead or skipping steps, well done. I think this page https://i.imgur.com/pxPF6RX.jpeg shows an example of you starting simple and adding complexity on step at a time, and this page https://i.imgur.com/34xUix7.jpeg shows some leaves (or petals) where you jumped ahead into adding a lot of complex wiggles to the sides of your leaves in the first pass instead of drawing them simply first and building up. From the lesson page "Enclose the leaf with simple curves. I don't care how complex this leaf is, capture the core of it, its essence, in just two curves. No waves, no jagged edges, no complexity whatsoever. Focus on the flow of the shape, and construct it around that center line. Don't treat that line like some kind of a suggestion - it is a rule. Build your leaf around it.”

Continuing to your branches exercise, the branches on the right hand side of this page https://i.imgur.com/WXpqsLj.jpeg are missing their central flow line. This is the very first step, it’s important, don’t skip it. https://drawabox.com/lesson/3/2/exercisebranches You’re going to have an unnecessarily difficult time aligning your ellipses to the central flow line if you’re just imagining it instead of drawing it on the page. The good news is that your ellipses look smooth and confident and you remembered to draw through them 2 full times before lifting your pen, so good job with that. Remember that the central flow line of your branch will represent the minor axis of the ellipses you draw on it. Line them up so that the flow line cuts them into two symmetrical halves. I can see some evidence of you varying the degree of your ellipses but I’m unsure if this was a deliberate attempt to show the branches’ orientation in space or by chance. Looking at the edges of your branches, I can see you picked up and followed the idea of building them in overlapping segments, well done. There are some cases where you’re not entirely conscientious about going fully half way to the next ellipse before stopping each segment but you do have the right idea. Also a reminder to "Absolutely NEVER leave a tube open-ended, even if your image cuts off there. Always cap it off with an ellipse.” This infers that you shouldn’t be running your branches off the edge of the page, give them a planned and controlled endpoint with an ellipse on the page.

Right, moving on to your plant constructions, your work here is largely quite well done. I can see you using the tools you’ve been learning (leaves, branches and organic forms) to build up your drawings step by step and piece by piece. Most of the time you’re drawing through your forms, meaning that where two things overlap you drew both of them completely then clarified which one is in front using line weight. And as a result I think your drawings look pretty solid, well done. That’s not to say there aren’t things you can work on though. In addition to aaalll the feedback I have already given you for leaves and branches which applies here too I would remind you to always draw through every ellipse you freehand in any Drawabox exercise. I can see you draw through them sometimes, but not always. I would also advise you to plan how big your drawing will be and what you will include. By this I mean try to avoid situations like this https://i.imgur.com/lZW89x3.jpeg where your drawing is escaping off three sides of the paper. This might be partially down to you trying to replicate a reference where some of your subject is off the edge of the photo but I’m pretty sure that for this one https://i.imgur.com/VphcXtN.jpeg all 3 flowers were inside the frame of the photo. In situations like this you could choose to make one flower smaller, so it fits on the page, or to not draw it at all.

I want to remind you of this section of lesson 0 https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/3/gettingthemost most notably to only complete the work that is assigned. While your enthusiasm and energy is certainly admirable, lesson 3 asks for 8 pages of plant constructions and you submitted 15?? Once you have a lesson marked complete you’re welcome to practice the exercises and constructions during your warm ups, and if you’re excited about drawing plants you can draw them in any way you choose as part of your personal 50% time. From Uncomfortable "Do the work to the best of your current ability (even if that's awful) only for the assigned number of pages. Any more than that without specifically being assigned revisions by someone else would be grinding.”

You mentioned in your submission being frustrated with having to wait for critiques. I found your work from Elodin’s spreadsheet, so I can see that you’re making use of the critique exchange system to get feedback. I’m grateful that you uploaded your work to Imgur, it does make it easier for me to scroll through your work instead of having to open individual thumbnails on google drive. I’m also thankful that you took the time and effort to share your reference images, as that helps too. Something else you can do to make your work easier to critique (and therefore less likely to get skipped over) is to rotate your photos so that they’re the right way up before you upload them. It doesn’t really matter for technical exercises (leaves, arrows etc) but for your plant constructions (and in the future, your insects and animals) it just makes things that bit harder to critique when they’re sideways or upside down. If you take the time to upload in the correct orientation, it shows that you respect your work and other students will be more likely to be willing to critique it.

I’m going to be asking you for some revisions. Please reread/rewatch the instructions for each exercise carefully before doing each page. Please take at least 24 hours to do your revisions. I want you to take the time to fully absorb all the information that has been presented to you in this critique.

Please complete the following:

(optional) 1 page of arrows, avoid drawing lots of arrows on top of one another, or going off the edges of your page, and no other arrows showing through from the back side of the page. This is so I can see what’s going on and give you extra help if you want it.

(required) 1 page of leaves. Your flow lines were good but I need to see you close the sides of your leaves to form a complete shape. Use reference, this will help you to add variety and edge detail (edge detail is a separate step, keep the sides simple when you first draw them in)

(required) 1 page of branches. Remember to construct these around a central flow line. Try to align your ellipses to the flow line, try to vary the degree of your ellipses. Follow the sequence for building the sides of the branches in overlapping strokes carefully, as instructed.

Thank you for taking the time to read all this. If you have any questions please ask and I’ll do my best to answer clearly.