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

Arrows

Your arrows are looking pretty fluid due to the confidence which they're drawn, this helps push the feeling of fluidity that arrows have as they move through the world. You could push the perspective in your arrows more, as there is not much perspective applied to them as of now. You need to push yourself outside of your comfort zone and vary the sizes between your arrow segments in order to apply foreshortening to your arrow.

• Perspective works by having objects appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when further away, even if they're the exact same size. Following this logic, an object of consistent size moving through space will have segments that are closer to the viewer should be bigger, and segments that are further away should gradually get smaller.

Keep in mind that hatching should only be added to one side of your arrow's overlap, otherwise that contradicts the illusion of depth you wish to achieve, and don't forget to add extra lineweight on the overlaps to reinforce their depth.

Leaves

The fluidity present in your arrows is carrying over nicely into your leaves, they're flowing well and have a great sense of energy to them, you're not only capturing how these structures sit statically within space but also how they move across the world they occupy.

Your edge detail is generally looking good as you're only capturing one piece of edge detail at a time. When adding your extra details, sure to keep the line thickness for each phase of construction roughly consistent, so as not to encourage yourself to redraw more than you strictly need to.

Branches

Onto your branchee there are a couple of things that are holding you back during your execution of this exercise.

While it seems you are extending your lines sometimes, it also seems that you have a tendency to draw edges in a single stroke, which is a mistake as well as start your next segmemt around the halfway point between ellipses, which effectively removes the overlaps in your lines.

Remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and extending it fully to the halfway point to the third ellipse, once that's done you'll start a new segment, making sure to place your pen at the second ellipse point and repeat the pattern until your branch is complete. This helps us maintain control of our marks and allows for a healthy overlap between them, which helps to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition.

Onto your ellipses it's good to see that you're generally varyind the ellipse's degrees across your branch, this helps reinforce the tridimensionality of your forms. Make sure not to forget to always draw through your ellipses twice.

Plant Construction Section

Continuing on to your plant constructions, you haven't submitted the 8 pages requested in this lesson. Make sure that as you go through these exercises, you pay close attention to the amount of pages which are required.

Now let's focus on your work, you have some good work here and it's clear that you're starting to grasp the concepts this lesson seeks to teach, however there are a couple of points which need to be addressed in order for you to get the most out of these exercises.

Something that stood out to me immediately, while not exactly a mistake, is how many re-attempts you seem to have at the exact same plant. For example the bunny cactus, the pitcher plant and the king oyster mushroom were all drawn by you twice. This leads me to believe you may have been grinding in an attempt to get better at capturing these specific plants, but there are two things you should keep in mind.

The first is that as explained in this part of the FAQ, grinding is heavily discouraged. You're not expected to do these exercises perfectly, and by drawing the same construction over and over before you get feedback on it, you'll only be committing similar mistakes and hit diminishing returns very quickly.

The second thing to keep in mind is that this isn't a "How to draw X, Y or Z" course. Drawabox is a course designed to focus on some of the most bare and fundamental parts of drawing which can often be overlooked. Even though we make use of things like plants, insects and vehicles in this course, we're not learning how to draw any of these structures, we're using them as objects of study which we can use as a base for a tridimensional puzzle where we can apply the instructions and methods introduced in the lesson in order to develop our spatial reasoning skills. It's not necessary that you accurately depict any of these plants.

For your king oyster mushrooms they're looking very well constructed.

In your pitcher plants, there is a part where you haven't drawn the obscured pitcher plant to it's full extent.

• Drawabox seeks to develop your skills through the use of exercises and drills, think of how an athlete trains for the olympics, the goal is not to execute things perfectly from the get go, but to train efficiently so that they'll consistently develop their skills. As such it's important that you draw through all of your forms, no matter how much it would be logically obscured by other parts of the construction or obscure said parts. This allows your brain to work through these spatial reasoning challenges to it's full extent.

In that same vein, make sure that you're drawing all of your stages of construction in roughly the same rich shade of black. As of now, you have a tendency to draw later stages of construction with a thicker lineweight. Drawing earlier phases of construction more faintly can make one think of Drawabox exercises as sketching, where the initial lines are less important than the refinement that comes later on. But Drawabox exercises are not sketching, they're drills created with the explicit purpose of helping you develop your spatial reasoning skills, it's important that you commit to your marks and respect the decisions and boundaries that they establish as they all contribute equally to the solidity of your structure. Lineweight itself can be added towards the

end of a construction, focusing specifically on capturing how the different forms overlap one another, as explained here.

Your pages feel unfinished, this page for example has three leaves in the same construction with different levels of detail. Remember that these exercises should be a reflection of your current ability, don't rush, it's important that you give your best by taking time with each individual construction, making sure it's fully finished and fleshed out before you move on to your next plant.

Many of your pages have empty spaces that could have been better used not by adding more drawings to your page, but instead by limiting them, this would allow you not only more room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises, but also give you enough space to fully engage your whole arm. Draw bigger, as big as it's necessary for you to be able to properly engage your brain and arm when drawing, only after you're done with your construction should you gauge whether there is enough space left for one more drawing, if yes, great, you can proceed until you finish and afterwards ask yourself if there is enough space on the page for more constructions. If not, it's completely okay to have only a single construction per page.

Be sure to maintain tight and specific relationships between your phases of construction, in your pitcher plant constructions there are a couple of places where you undermine the solidity of your construction by not adhering to the marks you've made previously and leaving gaps between ellipses and edges, or cutting back into ellipses.

Your use of texture is looking a tad explicit at times. Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction, with construction being focused on the big and primitive forms that make up different structures and texture focusing 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.

None of this has to do with decorating any of our drawings, what we draw here is based on what's physically present in our construction. As introduced here, we can notice that we should focus on each individual form and how it casts a shadow on neighboring surfaces, understanding how each individual form sits on a 3D space, and analyzing all of this information present in our reference to be able to translate it to our study. The shape of this 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, 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 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

Overall, you're starting to understand what these exercises want to teach you, but I'm afraid that sometimes you're rushing your constructions and not applying the methods as thoroughly as they ought to be used, as well as believing you're not allowing yourself enough space to fully work through these exercises. It's also incredibly important that you read the instructions carefully and give your exercise pages more time, as much time as they need in order to be finished to the best of your current ability.

I'm not going to be passing you onto the next lesson, these concepts will be highly important in the following lessons and you need to show that you truly understand them before moving forward. Make sure to revisit any relevant material mentioned here and then please reply with your revisions.