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11:03 AM, Friday August 4th 2023
Hello AvaLovelace, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.
Arrows
Starting with your arrows your linework is looking confident and smooth which helps communicate the feeling of fluidity that arrows have as they move through the world. You're making really good use of the depth of the page and your arrows are looking fairly tridimensional.
It's good to see that you're making use of both well applied hatching as well as added lineweight on top of the arrow's overlaps, which helps reinforce the feeling of depth in your arrows.
The only thing you can do in order to take your understanding of arrows and 3D space further is by exploring the different ways arrows can move across the world, explore the different ways they can twist and bend and move across the world as well as experiment with the negative space between overlaps.
Leaves
Continuing on to your leaves they're looking pretty energetic, the fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely into these new structures.
Your application of edge detail is fairly well made, as you're not attempting to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, however make sure that when you're adding it in that the line thickness is roughly the same as the initial phase of construction, so as to not encourage yourself to redraw more than you strictly need to.
Your attempts at complex leaf structures are alright, although this leaf structure is looser than it could be, due to the flow lines for the individual "arms" of the complex structure going past the boundary laid out by the previous phase of construction (the one where you established the simple overall footprint for the structure). The bigger shape establishes a decision being made - this is how far out the general structure will extend - and so the flow lines for the later leaf structures should abide by that.
Your application of texture is also really good as you're sticking to the principles of texture which helps communicate a new level of tridimensional information to the viewer.
Branches
Onto your branches they're looking fairly decent as you're following the instructions for the exercise, especially in how your edges are to be laid out which allows you to create a more solid structure and a smoother transition between marks.
When working on your branches make sure to keep their sizes consistent throughout, avoid making them thinner on one or both ends.
It's good that you're always making the effort to draw through your ellipses twice, as that allows you to create smooth and solid looking ellipses. It's also good that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift and varying them throughout your branch's length as that helps sell the illusion of tridimensionality in your branches much further.
Plant Construction Section
And finally onto your plant constructions they're looking really well made, in general you're sticking to the instructions for the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson, all of which are helping you create structures that feel believable and tridimensional, you're clearly demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.
Of course, there's always a thing or two that we can improve, so here are some of the points that you can look for as you work on these exercises again.
- In your pages there are many constructions which were rotated or run off from the page, which leads me to believe that you were pre-planning the amount of constructions you wished to fit on a given page before committing to them, that's certainly admirable as it's clear you wish to get more practice out of each individual page, but some of your constructions such as your attempt at the potato plant demo and this venus fly trap construction would have greatly benefited from being in a single page as that would have allowed you to draw them bigger and tackle the tridimensional challenges present in them much more thoroughly.
Speaking of this venus fly trap there are a couple of things which would have allowed you to create a tighter and more specific structure if they were approached differently. Currently you approached the "body" or the "stem" of the venus fly trap as a sort of leaf shape, while this is a valid way to approach this structure it leans too heavily on the side of oversimplification for this part of the plant structure and makes the structure feel fragile and flimsy.
This part of the Venus Fly Trap is the stalk that joins the leaf to the stem; it's cylindrical in nature, but it's hidden underneath an additional leaf-y form, it's helpful to understand this because you can then simplify the forms by capturing this part of the structure as a cylinder ( and it make it more clear how the "trap" of the venus flytrap connects to the rest of the structure ) and afterwards build the rest of the structure with the leaf construction method, which will allow for a structure that feels less flimsy and much more solid.
In several of your constructions you opt to draw thinner branch structures as single lines, but this doesn't communicate any sense of form or volume - thus it flattens your work, reminding the viewer that these are just lines on a page, and it hurts how much you get out of the exercise because you're unable to properly understand how these single lines connect to other forms and exist in 3d space.
While this is something that's shown in the potato plant demo, this is one of the moments where some of the demos have become a bit outdated with the ever-changing nature of Drawabox as a course, so make sure to keep this in mind going forward.
For your [Jade plant]() there's a couple of contours lines which don't really convey much tridimensional information about the form you're drawing, those kinds of contour lines, the ones that sit on the surface of a single form, only serve to take a form that can already be interpreted as 3 dimensional, and clarify it. In truth, they're useful for introducing the concept of a contour line, but in practice their usefulness is somewhat limited.
Instead of making use of several contours along the width of the structure we can make use of a single contour along the length of the leaf structure which will communicate the thickness of the structure more clearly to the viewer, you can see an example here.
Don't ever leave your homework unfinished, it's possible to see that in this construction you've laid down several flow lines for different leaf structures but didn't finish constructing them, just like how single lines for branches don't communicate any sense of tridimensionality and can flatten your construction the same can be said for leaving your work unfinished, so just like how you must commit to every mark you've made, you must also commit to every construction you attempt and see it through the end, as that'll help you learn much more.
Final Thoughts
Overall your work is really well made and there are only a couple of problems and things that should be addressed, as they'll help elevate your work into the next level.
I believe you're ready for the challenges present in the next lesson, and as such I'll be marking this submissive as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.
Next Steps:
Don't forget to add these exercises to your list of warm ups.
Move on to Lesson 4.
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Staedtler Pigment Liners
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).