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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your linework is looking smooth and confident which helps create the idea of flow and fluidity that arrows have as they move through space. Your arrows have some minor size consistency problems and bulge or narrow suddenly when they shouldn't, make sure to keep an eye out for this.

It's good that you're adding hatching to your work in order to separate the arrow segments from one another, but be careful about it's placement, as you've sometimes added it to the incorrect side of the arrow's segment which disrupts the illusion of depth you want to achieve.

• Due to how perspective works, objects closer to the viewer will appear bigger, and smaller as they're further away. Following this logic, an object of consistent size that is moving away or towards the viewer must gradually change according to the perspective of the scene. As such, 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.

As a finishing touch, don't forget to also apply extra lineweight on top of arrow bends in order to reinforce their depth.

Leaves

For your leaves they can certainly be improved as even though the fluidity present in your arrows translates well into these new structures, you have many issues in your work which are holding you back from your full potential.

For example, one of your leaves is folding unnaturally.

This maple leaf is stiff and not very solid because 1. You don't make use of the leaf construction method correctly because you make a circular shape with the outer edges, which doesn't possess a great feeling of flow and gesture, while the more triangular shape shown in the exercise pages captures both of these.

And 2. You're skipping comstruction steps because you're jumping into the complex form of the leaf structure, instead of breaking it down into simpler steps as shown in the complex leaf construction method. This way you can maintain the solidity and gesture of the structure while breaking it down into simpler steps that you can recreate.

Your application of edge detail is decent, as you're generally not trying to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, although sometimes you do zigzag your edge detail, which goes against the third principle of mark-making from lesson 1, so don't forget to always execute your lines carefully in order to construct a solid structure.

Another thing to note is that you must not construct earlier phases of construction lighter, make sure to keep your line thickness roughly the same between your different phases of construction, lastly, make sure to always construct your edge detail additively, rather than subtractively, avoid cutting back into your forms as that can make you focus too much on the shapes on the page, instead of the tridimensional forms on the page.

You're starting to move in the right direction with your use of texture, but you're still relying somewhat on outlining certain forms instead of only focusing on the cast shadows those forms represent, in this demo you can learn more about how to approach leaf textures, and really texture in general when you draw.

Branches

Moving onto your branches they're looking pretty decent as you're generally following the instructions to the construction method which allows you to create much tighter and solid looking cylindrical structures, but there are a couple of changes that you can make in order to get the most out of this exercise.

It's great that you're extending your edges in segments which allows you to maintain higher control over your lines, this allows for a smoother transition between line segments, however, you still have some visible tails present in your compound strokes and that's because your ellipses are placed too closely together which doesn't give you enough of a length of runway to use your shoulder as well as integrate each line seamlessly into the next.

You're often accidentally cutting back into your ellipses, while this is normal and your accuracy will improve with time, make sure that when you start your next edge segment that you do so at the point furthest away from the center, at the outermost edge of the ellipse in order to avoid undermining the solidity of your original forms.

It's good that you're making the effort to draw through your ellipses twice, although you don't always do this for your smaller ellipses, so don't forget to always draw through your ellipses at least two times before lifting your pen.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly for your plant constructions they're coming along really well made as you're making use of the construction methods for the most part and in a really effective manner as well, this allows you to create really tight and solid looking constructions with a great feeling of tridimensionality to them, you're clearly developing a strong sense of spatial reasoning as you go through these exercises.

Of course there's always a couple of things we can improve, I'll be pointing out some problems you should look out for the next time you attempt these exercises so that you can continue to get the most out of Drawabox.

You're pre-planning the space you give each plant construction and nowhere is that the most obvious than in your fifth page of plants where you divided the page in half and didn't allow any aspect of each construction to "interfere" with the other half, even when that came at the cost of not making full use of the construction methods introduced, and leaving forms open ended, which undermined some of the solidity of your work.

There are two things we must allow ourselves as we go through this course, they're time and space and often go hand in hand with one another. When you set arbitrary constraints for you to work with in your page your artificially limit how much space you're allowing your brain to use as you work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise as we go through these exercises, and it limits your ability to make use of the techniques introduced and make full use of your shoulder.

In general it's always better to draw bigger, not smaller, even if that may mean a lesser amount of individual practice, it also means that each page by itself will have a higher quality of practice as you're able to work to your full potential and do the work to the best of your current ability. Whenever you start a new page, go in with the idea that you'll only draw a single construction, only after you're finished should you gauge if there is enough space on your page for another construction, if there is you should certainly add it, but if not that's perfectly fine.

• It's great that for the plant pot in this page you went beyond the basic structure of the pot and started constructing the rim around the border, but we can push this even further with another ellipse underneath and then two lines connecting both ellipses to each other, constructing a sort of wheel form around the border which clearly shows it's thickness much more clearly. Lastly, this will all become way easier if you construct these ellipses around a minor axis.

Keep your constructions contained to the inside of your page, when you let forms run off from the boundaries of your page you make it impossible for you to fully construct them and thus, fully understanding how those forms would exist in a tridimensional space.

In this flower construction you didn't make use of the leaf construction method, instead you jumped into complexity too soon and didn't make use of the brach construction method to connect the stem of the leaf structure to the main stem of the flower.

Keep in mind that these methods and techniques are not guidelines or loose suggestions, they're tools which will help you break down your structures into simple to understand 3d masses and volumes and through this you'll understand how the entire structure exists in space and develop your sense of spatial reasoning along with it, when you don't make use of the methods and techniques, not only does your work come out flat and less solid, but you get less out of the exercise page.

Lastly let's take a look at your application of texture throughout the lesson.

In general you're leaning a little bit too heavily on your usage of blacK areas, such as in here and in here where there's big areas of black, but not any apparent forms within the surface of that object which should cast those shadows.

Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction. In a lot of ways they're the same concept, just in different scales, wiith construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, if it's big and thick or thin and small. With texture we're communicating to the viewer what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating tridimensional information.

Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, 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 can then design an appropriate shadow shape that would come from this form. 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. Make sure to go over these reminders in order to solidify your understanding of texture further.

Final Thoughts

In general your work is looking good and you're moving in the right direction, you're starting to understand how these concepts work and showing that by applying it to your work, however at a couple of points you're facing a couple of struggles and roadbumps that affect your work, and you need to apply the instructions more thoroughly sometimes.

I believe you're ready to tackle the construction challenges in the next lesson, good luck in Lesson 4.