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

Arrows

Let's start by looking through your arrows, they're looking smooth and confidently made, this helps sell the feeling of fluidity these objects have as they move through the world.

You have a lot of things that you can focus on when approaching this exercise again, the biggest one being that you have several cases where you're afraid of letting your edges overlap, this is unnatural and flattens your arrows. When it comes to the shading you add to your arrows it's well applied, but your placement can definitely be better as sometimes you're adding it to the incorrect side of the bends which disrupts the illusion of perspective you wish to achieve in this exercise.

• Due to the way perspective works objects will appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when further away, even if they're the exact same size. The way this affects an object of consistent size moving through space means that parts of it will look bigger, and others will look smaller based on the perspective of the scene and how close each part of that object is to the viewer, according to this logic this means that the smaller part of the arrow segment should always be the part getting the hatching.

Another thing you should focus on is push the size difference between your segments, right now some of them are too consistent in size which means that while your arrows looks tridimensional, they're not making full use of the space your page gives you.

And lastly, after you finish your arrow, don't forget to always add lineweight on top of the overlaps, in order to reinforce them.

Leaves

Moving onto your leaves they're coming out a bit mixed, you have some good leaves present which demonstrate a good sense of fluidity but others are looking incredibly stiff. This stiffness happens because of three main issues, unconfident linework, static leaves and unconfident texture.

Starting with the first point, unconfident linework, we can see examples of where it's present here and in this image we can see that your addition of additional edge detail does not follow the principles of mark making from lesson one, more specifically the second principle of mark making which tells us that our marks should flow smoothly. Your marks are hesitant and their thickness is inconsistent, this suggests that you didn't make these marks completely from your shoulder and that you may have tried to go back over them more than once, both of these are mistakes.

If we look at the instructions for this exercise we can see that all the lines we execute for our leaf, including edge detail, should be added with the same line thickness and be executed with confidence. Draw from your shoulder, do it with confidence and do not zigzag your edge detail.

The second problem you face in this page of leaves is not necessarily an outright mistake, but it does hinder your improvement since it misses the point of the exercise and that's the fact that you're not thinking of the flow line as something that moves across a tridimensional space as well as something that establishes the "gesture" of the leaf, this causes most of your flow lines to be very straight, which doesn't allow you a lot of room to draw your leaves twisting and bending, this makes them feel like flat stickers on a page, instead of real leaf structures that not only sit statically in space, but also move across that space from moment to moment. So focus on how to make your leaves feel tridimensional and how they could twist and turn, because in actual plant structures you'll rarely find leaf structures that never bend, twist or fold.

Another important point that's flattening your leaves is the fact that you're cutting back into your initial construction when adding your edge detail. As explained here, edge detail is a step of construction that you'll generally want to approach additively whenever possible, this is because cutting back into previous forms we've already drawn can make us focus on the 2D shapes on our page instead of thinking of how those new lines represent a form's edge in tridimensional space.

And lastly you have your application of texture which often has hesitant marks, remember that texture just like all other marks made in this course should be confident and smooth. For more notes on texture you can look at this informal demo on how to think when applying texture to leaves.

Branches

Moving onto your branches they're generally coming along decently as you apply the instructions for this exercise, but it can still be improved. It's great to see that you're making use of line extensions for your branches but you're not always consistent with your use of this step, sometimes you draw small branch's edges in a single stroke, don't fully extend your segment up to the halfway point between ellipses, or seem to start your segment at the halfway point between ellipses, all of these hurt the healthy overlap between lines that we're aiming for in this exercise.

So keep in mind the instructions for drawing branches, by starting your initial segment at the first ellipse mark, then extending it past the second ellipse and fully up to the halfway point between the second and third ellipse before stopping your mark. Afterwards you'll start your next segment, back at the second ellipse point and extend your line from there, rinse and repeat these steps until you finish your entire branch.

Your ellipses are looking good since you're making an effort to draw through them twice, although you're not always doing this for your smaller ellipses, so make sure that you're always ghosting your ellipses as many times as necessary and doing your best to execute them with confidence. It's also really good to see that you seem aware of the ellipse degree shift and that you're making an active effort to apply it to your branches, although some of your branches do have ellipses which are very similar in their degrees and have barely any change, so keep this in mind going forward as a realistic and well applied ellipse degree shift can greatly help in making your forms feel tridimensional.

Plant Construction Section

Now let's move on to your plant constructions. You're showing huge potential and a great sense of spatial reasoning in your work, but the quality of your work is often times being affected by a couple of issues, these mistakes stem largely from two reasons: not allowing your constructions as much space as they each individually require before moving onto a new construction, and not using the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson material to their full extent.

I'll be showing you today some of the points that you can focus on when you tackle these exercises again so you can take the quality of your work to the next level, and start to get even more out of these exercises.

Something that I've noticed in your work is that you don't always draw through your forms, such as in here and in here, this is not helpful because it goes against the instructions and it also goes against what Drawabox seeks to teach you, so draw through all of your forms and construct them fully otherwise you limit your ability to work through the tridimensional puzzles here as it becomes harder to truly understand how the object you're drawing works, where a form comes from or what it attaches to.

So draw through all of your forms, as small or as unecessary as you might believe them to be, forms don't stop existing when they become obscured by others parts of a construction. Think of it as building a house and having a full X-ray view of the building, it's a tridimensional puzzle that cannot exist before the foundations are laid out, the roof cannot exist before the walls, the walls cannot exist before the foundation, and the furniture cannot exist before the building, and just because there's a wall that stops you from seeing everything inside the house that doesn't mean those objects don't exist anymore.

When constructing any structure you want the relationships between all phases of constitution to be kept tight and specific, so don't leave any arbitrary gaps between your leaf's flow line and it's outer edges.

From what I can see this mushroom wasn't constructured at all - it doesn't follow any of the methods that Drawabox has introduced and there are no visible construction lines.

Keep in mind that the methods and techniques introduced here are not guidelines, they are not suggestions, they are tools with the explicit purpose of helping you deconstruct tridimensional objects in order to reconstruct them in your page and have it look solid and believable. These methods and techniques are the ones which will best help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning and as such they should always be followed, keep in mind that we're here to learn, we're not here to draw pretty pictures, while some may find the results that Drawabox's construction methods produce very aesthetically pleasing results the most important thing is that we're working through these exercises not worrying about the end result, but what we're getting out of it as we practice and train our brain to think in 3D.

You're planning how many drawings you wish to fit on any given page before committing to any individual drawings and this is hurting your ability to use your shoulder, as well as artificially limiting how much space you allow yourself when going through these exercises. This is very admirable as it's clear you want to get the most practice possible out of each page, but unfortunately this is a bit counterintuitive and only serves to harm you and impede your progress, and that's because in this case - that being, Drawabox homework - quantity does not equal quality. Think back to the box challenge and how we had a recommended amount of boxes per page, this was because if we didn't we wouldn't be able to engage our shoulder when drawing and wouldn't be able to extend our lines far enough to be able to tell if our lines are converging or not.

This is the same principle, drawing really small boxes wouldn't be as helpful, and preplanning how many constructions you want to fit on a page isn't as helpful either. When it comes to construction we really want to draw them as big as we can, this is because drawing smaller will make it more difficult to apply some of the techniques introduced in the lesson.

So don't be afraid to give yourself as much space as you need by drawing your initial construction in the size you require, start each page with the goal of one construction made to the best of your ability and only after you're finished with that drawing should you gauge if there's enough space left for another construction, if there is, you can start another drawing, but if the answer is "no, there's not enough space" then there's no problem in leaving your page with only a couple, or even just a single drawing in it.

Avoid huge filled in areas of black whenever possible as they obscure the underlying construction, making it harder to evaluate your homework assignment, and they also don't follow the principles of texture introduced in lesson 2. Speaking of texture your work is definitely leaning towards the explicit side of using texture as you try to capture form shadows and local colors alongside your cast shadows which clutters the image and does not follow Drawabox's texture principles.

Keep in mind that when we talk about texture in the context of this course we're really talking about an extension of the concepts of construction, where construction focuses on the primitive forms that make up different structures and texture focuses on communicating the small forms that run along the surface of an object, essentially texture is a way of visually communicating to the viewer what it would feel like to run their hands across that surface.

Texture is not used in order to make our work more aesthetic or pleasing to the eye, every textural shadow we draw is based on what's physically present in our reference. By revisiting this section of the lesson once again, we can see that 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, and then after analyzing all of the information present in our reference we'll be able to translate it to our study. This also leads into another important point, which is that 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 shown here.

This approach is of course much harder than basing our understanding of texture on other methods that may seem more intuitive or on the idea that texture = making your work look good, 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, you'll find yourself asking how to convey 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

You have good work here and you're showing a good sense of spatial reasoning, your work where you follow the instructions for the lessons are the most well defined and strong, especially your attempts at the demos such as the king oyster mushroom demo. It's only when you try to deviate from said instructions that your work starts to suffer as a result.

You have a lot of potential and you can take your work into the next level by simply addressing the points I've mentioned in my critique today, but also, not only that, but making sure that you're giving each individual construction as much time as it requires in order to be done to the best of your current ability. Considering that your work has some fundamental problems I won't be passing you onto the next lesson just yet. Please revisit the relevant lesson material mentioned here and then reply with your revisions.