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

Arrows

Let's start this critique by taking a look at your arrows, your lines are confidently made and smooth, which helps sell the feeling of fluidity that arrows should have as they move across the world. You're also doing well with the execution of your hatching which is neat and tidy, as a finishing touch don't forget to make use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth, but remember that this lineweight should be added subtly, only on top of the overlaps - not the entire length of the segment.

Something important to point out is that your arrows are way too contained to the 2d space offered by the page, and don't have a lot of foreshortening applied to them. Remember that as a form moves closer to the viewer, it'll get bigger, and as it moves away, the smaller it'll become, the same concept applies to arrows - make sure to vary the sizes between segments in order to create the illusion of depth and perspective.

On top of that, remember that since the bigger part of the arrow will always be the one that's closest to the viewer, the segment that's behind it should be the one that you apply the hatching to, in order to signify that segment is further away.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves the fluidity present in your page of arrows translates nicely into these new structures, your leaves have a nice sense of flow and energy to them, you're not only capturing how they exist statically within space, but also how they move through it from moment to moment.

While your initial stage of construction is well drawn, your application of edge detail can certainly be improved, while it's good that you're breaking the pieces into smaller strokes, you end up undermining the initial stage of construction by not starting each line that captures a piece of edge detail at the outer edge mark of the leaf structure, drawing your edge detail form, then coming back down to that line and integrating into it seamlessly. By approaching your edge detail the way you do now - by not respecting previous phases of construction and by leaving gaps in between your marks you hurt the feeling of solidity that your initial construction had.

Your usage of texture also needs to be addressed as it feels unplanned and unfinished due to the large areas of filled in black which go against the concepts of drawing implicitly, and then the spots completely devoid of any new shadow forms around those areas. Make sure to take a look at these reminders on texture as well as this informal demo on leaf texture specifically.

Branches

Your branches are looking pretty decent, it's good to see that you're making use of the correct methodology and extending your edge segments halfway between ellipses before starting a new one, as that allows you to create a tighter, more specific construction, although sometimes there are gaps, times where you started your edge segment further up, instead of at the ellipse point, and places where there are more lines than there should be if you followed the instructions to the letter, which suggests you redid some lines which didn't turn out as well as you hoped.

Make sure to avoid all of these, start each edge segment at the ellipse point in order to ensure a smoother transition between marks, avoid gaps in between marks, and never redo a line.

Revisit the instructions for drawing forked branches and knots as you're not following the correct steps of adding two cross section ellipses in your branch, and then a third, wider degree ellipse which acts as the "knot" where new branches will stem from.

And lastly, still onto your ellipses it's good that you're drawing through them twice for the most part. It's also good that you seem aware of the ellipse degree shift, but you can still push this concept a bit further as some of your ellipses degrees don't have a lot of variation when they should as explained here. Remember that as a cylindrical form shifts towards or away from the viewer, the degree of the ellipses within that structure will also shift.

Plant Construction Section

And finally let's take a look at your plant constructions and how you've applied the concepts that you learned at the start of this lesson to actual structures.

Generally your work is moving in the right direction, you're making use of the methods and techniques introduced in the previous exercises and your work is starting to look tridimensional due to that - but there are a couple of things you do which hurt this solidity, so let's take a look at what the issues in your work are and how you can address those mistakes so that the next time you attempt these exercises, you'll be getting even more out of your practice.

Many of your pages, most notably the ones with flowers and non-mushroom constructions are looking messy and unclean, this is because you're breaking the first principle of mark-making introduced in Lesson 1, the idea that your marks must be continuous and unbroken.

For example, this page has lines that should be one continuous stroke, such as the outer edge stroke for this leaf structure broken into two lines, which leaves a small gap, and creates the feeling that the edge of the leaf is "crooked" - it goes against the idea that leaves should be organic objects that move through space in a fluid manner. You're also committing another mistake in this page.

The problem in question is that at certain points, such as in this flower structure you're making use of an underdrawing - you've drawn the initial phase of construction with fainter, harder to see lines, then ignored that construction and drew on top of it with thicker, bolder lines which don't stick closely to the original construction, cutting back into the silhouette of your work and undermining it's solidity.

This is a mistake because it essentially treats these construction exercises as sketching, where the initial phase of construction is only a guideline for the later lines that will come and "replace" the initial sketch, refining it further and erasing the original marks. But Drawabox exercises are not sketching, they're drills which have the explicit purpose of helping you develop your sense of spatial reasoning, in order for this to be possible you must treat lines as if they were the actual edges of forms, and you must treat each form you draw as part of an actual tridimensional structure. Respect each form and each structure that you draw, so that you'll be able to understand how each piece of a construction sits in 3d space.

Another issue to note, not only present in this page, but all of your pages is that you're not always keeping the relationships between your phases of construction tight and specific, not only because you're undermining your initial construction, but also because you're leaving gaps in between your outer edge marks and the flow line of your leaf structures, this should not happen - they must connect.

For this daffodil construction you're doing well by making use of a cylinder for the main body of the plant, as this shows you're not thinking in black and white terms, "leaves and branches", but more so considering how to break down different structures into the different forms which will best represent them, but we can still push this construction further as despite it's cylindrical form, the innermost part of the plant is still very leaf-like in it's nature, as such it should still be approached in a way that captures the energy and fluidity of leaves, something that a simple cylinder can't capture by itself, even with edge detail applied.

There are two ways you can generally approach it - either by drawing different sections of this structure with the leaf construction method, and afterwards connecting the different leaves together in order to build the complex shape, but this method can cause the leaf structures to be inconsistent with one another, or you can approach this plant by using a slightly tapered cylinder in order to construct the main body of the flower and then make use of the leaf construction method, building it on top of the cylinder in order to capture the flow of the different sections of the leaf structure, and lastly connect them together, making use of edge detail in order to finish the complex structure, a method which can end up stiffening the structure if used incorrectly, and takes more time to construct, but that creates a more solid and specific construction.

I actually put together a quick demonstration of how this would look like for a different student once, and I believe you will benefit from it.

In this plant construction you've only drawn the parts of your structure which are visible to the viewer, you didn't construct them in their entirety, which is a mistake. As small or as unecessary as you might believe certain parts of a structure to be, they don't stop existing when they become obscured by other forms.

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, and the walls cannot exist before the foundation, in that same vein tips of leaves or parts of a construction cannot exist by themselves, they still exist as full forms even when they're partially obscured by other objects. Therefore you should make sure you're always drawing forms in their entirety as this will help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning and make all of the relationships between the different phases of construction in your drawings much more clear and well defined.

On top of that, drawing plant pots around minor axis may help you keep your several ellipses aligned more easily. Going further, it's good that you've drawn an inner ellipse in order to denote the inside of the pot, but you can go even further and fully construct the rim that's present in many types of plant pots by making use of an additional cylinder around the border of the pot.

And lastly let's take a look at your usage of texture, which is leaning towards the explicit side as you have too many large areas of filled in black, which logically cannot come from cast shadows, which are what Drawabox focuses on in order to communicate texture.

Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction - in essence, they're the same concept, just at different scales, with construction focusing on the primitive forms that make up different objects and texture focuses on communicating the small forms that run along the surface of said subject. While construction tells the viewer what it'd feel like to manipulate that object with their hands, texture visually communicates what it would feel like to run their hands across the surface of that object.

Neither construction nor texture have anything to do with aesthetics or making a drawing visually interesting, what we draw here is based on what's physically present in our reference. As mentioned here when making use of texture, we should focus on how each individual form present on the surface of an object casts a shadow onto that same surface, and how that shadow would then be distorted by the surface it's being cast on. This means that the shape of this shadow is incredibly important as it defines the relationships between the form casting it and the surface it's being cast on, as such you should design your shadow shape in a way 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, but in the long run this method of texture is the one that enforces the ideals of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following them, 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.

Final Thoughts

In general your work is moving in the right direction, you're starting to understand the concepts this lesson seeks to teach, although you're facing a couple of bumps along the way which I believe might affect the way you approach the exercises introduced in the next lesson, as such I'll be asking you for a couple of revisions before marking this submission as complete, so you can revisit these concepts before moving on to a more complex lesson.

Please reply once you've finished rereading the relevant lesson material with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

2 plant construction pages.