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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows, they're flowing nicely across the page and your linework is well executed for the most part, just keep in mind that you must always use the ghosting method for your lines and draw them swiftly once you feel confident about your mark.

The points that you can improve here are your use of hatching and your application of perspective and overlaps to your arrows.

• When adding shading to your arrows you often curve them or crosshatch. Hatching in Drawabox should be made up of straight, parallel lines that have clear defined end points. In this case it means the hatching for the arrows must run along the arrow's width, with no crosshatching and of course, applied with the ghosting method. You should also remember to add extra lineweight on top of your arrow's overlaps to help reinforce them.

• Considering how little arrows are present in the page, how only two of them have edges that overlap and how similar the perspective applied to them is you seem to be staying in your comfort zone too much. The only way we can improve is by challenging ourselves and attempting things even if we don't feel comfortable with them.

And lastly, don't doodle in your exercise page, as small or as amusing as they can be it's best to leave that to your personal work time.

Leaves

Your leaves carry a good sense of energy to them and they flow nicely across the space they occupy. However you're often falling into a couple of traps when it comes to the construction of your leaves. For example, here and here I can see that you're redoing lines.

A big part about improving is that we must face our mistakes head on, as such we must commit to our lines and our mistakes, if a line didn't turn out the way we hoped we just need to accept it and move on.

Another thing is that you're often skipping construction steps, for these leaves even though you originally mark down their boundaries with the leaf construction method you don't fully construct the smaller leaves as there's no flow line in the majority of them.

Other problems you face are how often you're applying edge detail subtractively when you should work additively whenever possible, as well as how you're skipping construction steps as you don't make use of the complex leaf construction method for your leaves.

It seems you would have greatly benefitted from paying closer attention to this exercise's instructions before attempting your page.

Branches

For your page of branches I can see that you're trying to follow instructions, but you're often skipping steps by not extending your lines fully halfway to the next ellipse, remember that extension lines for branches must be started at the first ellipse, drawn past the second ellipse, and then stopped halfway to the third, with the next segment restarting the pattern from the second ellipse until you finish the entire branch.

Sometimes you draw your branch in a single stroke which causes you to lose control of your line such as in here.

Another thing I've noticed is how little basic branches your page has. Forking branches should only be attempted once you've familiarized yourself with the basics and feel comfortable drawing them, this leads me to believe that you're jumping into complexity too soon.

Your ellipses degrees are changing a bit too suddenly which hurts the solidity of your forms, the degree shift of your ellipses in cylindrical forms must be a bit more gradual as the form slowly turns away from the viewer.

Plant Construction Section

Onto your constructions you've got some good work in here, for the most part your lines are very clean and your constructions are looking very solid, you're clearly demonstrating a good sense of spatial reasoning.

There are a couple of points that can be improved in here however:

Firstly you need to pay attention more closely to not only exercise instructions, but instructions for the course in general as the homework and exercises section for this lesson states that your attempts at following the demos must constitute less than half of your plant drawings, in your submission 6 out of 8 pages are from the demos.

Since you've shaded a sphere in your attempt at the Daisy demo it leads me to believe you might be misunderstanding how shadows are used in drawabox, the shadow in that sphere is a form shadow, in Drawabox we only work with cast shadows.

You should also stay away from filling in large areas of black in your drawings like this, it obscures the underlying construction, making it harder to evaluate your homework assignment.

Instead of relying on big spaces of black to differentiate between the various parts of your construction, it's best to use lineweight to clarify overlaps.

I can see moments where you're not completely following instructions even in the demos, such as in your Hisbiscus demo where you don't draw the petals using the leaf construction method due to how many broken lines can be seen, and in your Daisy attempt where you didn't completely draw the stem for the flower.

You're also not using the forking branches method for your non-demo flowers.

• The purpose of these exercises is to develop our sense of spatial reasoning through the use of exercises which are essentially drills, think of how an athetle might repeat the same set of exercises to train for the olympics, while they won't always execute it correctly or even perfectly, what's important is that the theory behind it is correct so that eventually they'll develop their skills. Otherwise, at best they could train themselves wrong and won't improve as fast as they might otherwise, and, at worst, they could hinder their own improvement or even injure themselves.

While you're generally going into the right direction with your Demos, even if they have a couple of flaws, your own constructions are where you struggle the most.

For example in your attempt at this venus fly trap you're getting too loose with your drawing, zigzagging your edge detail redoing lines, not constructing any forms and not drawing through previous steps of the drawing.

• The purpose of these exercises is to develop our sense of spatial reasoning through the use of exercises which are essentially drills, think of how an athetle might repeat the same set of exercises to train for the olympics, they won't always execute it correctly or even perfectly, what matters is that the theory behind it is correct so that eventually they'll develop their skills. Otherwise, at best they could train themselves wrong and won't improve as fast as they might otherwise and at worst they could hinder their own improvement or even injure themselves.

Final Thoughts

You have a lot of potential here, but you're falling into a lot of pitfalls as you skip or forget to apply concepts you've learned previously, especially when you attempt constructions on your own.

You must give each and every one of these assignments the time that they require, this includes revisiting previous lesson material whenever you feel unsure of what your next steps should be.

You also need to pay closer attention to the instructions for this course in general.

I'd like to make sure that you truly understand the instructions for these exercises and can show that you properly understand them by being able to apply them to your non-demo constructions before passing you onto the next lesson. Make sure to revisit any relevant lesson material mentioned here before attempting your next pages.

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

3 plant construction pages.