Hello Bichorarro, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.
Arrows
Starting with your arrrows you've done really well in this exercise, your arrows are looking energetic, smooth and confidently drawn, all of this helps convey the sense of fluidity that arrows carry as they move through space.
They also have a great use of perspective applied to them and a good use of the depth of the page.
Your extra lineweight is looking a little bit too thick sometimes. Lineweight should only be added on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce them and help separate it from the rest of the arrow. Lineweight should also be added with a single confident stroke on top of the preexisting line.
Your hatching is also correctly placed, but remember that as with all lines in this course the hatching should be executed using the ghosting method, going from one end of the arrow to the other.
Leaves
Your arrows fluidity is translating nicely to your leaves and they have a good sense of energy, what can be improved in their construction is that they look a bit too similar. When we encounter actual leaves, that is, leaves in plants or petals in the references that we'll be using as a base for our homework we can notice that leaves will never face only the viewer, with no overlaps or folds to them. Leaves and petals in plants come in a variety of shapes, angles, rotations and fold types, so it's important to challenge yourself by attempting these types of leaves in your homework.
Your use of edge detail is also quite nice, you're generally avoiding having a stroke define more than one piece of edge detail at a time, this is great.
It's important to maintain tight, specific relationships between different steps of construction. For example in this leaf you often go outside the boundaries initially established by your original flow line. The original flow line estabilishes your earlier decisions and so your next structures should abide by this boundary.
Branches
Your branches have noticeable divergences from the instructions for this exercise. You're not following the simple characteristics for branches - simple cylinders of consistent width, no detail, neither are you using the correct method for forking branches. From this page it seems you rely a lot on your observation skills in order to capture the look of the branches but don't try to alter the exercises from what's shown in the lesson material, these exercises have been created with specific goals in mind to help you develop your skills, by changing them you're not getting the most out of what they seek to teach you. In this case you sacrifice the solidity of your branches for their likeness.
You're also not extending your lines halfway to the next ellipse, which is forcing you to draw slower and causing wavering to the confidence of your linework, making it stiff. Remember that branches must be approached with the line extension method, that is you must start a segment at the first ellipse, draw your line with confidence and swiftness past the second, and then stop halfway to the third ellipse, with the next segment restarting the pattern from the second ellipse until you finish the entire branch.
Another thing is that you're not drawing through your ellipses twice and that sometimes the end of your ellipse that's closer to the viewer is drawn thicker. Don't add this extra lineweight to your ellipses, lineweight should only be used in order to differentiate between forms that overlap, other than that, all steps of the construction process must be given equal importance by being drawn in the same shade of black.
Based on all of these points, I believe your energy would have been better spent understanding and mastering the basic principles for this exercise before attempting more complex branches.
Plant Construction Section
Onto your plant constructions your work is often coming out quite nicely. Your plants are coming across as very organic, energetic and above all they look very tridimensional.
As with all things though improvement is still possible, here are some of the points that you should keep in mind when tackling your next plants and other constructions in this course.
First things first, you're drawing way too small.
Drawing bigger not only makes it easier to engage your whole shoulder, but it makes it easier to work through the spatial reasoning problems that arise when working through these exercises.
Draw through your forms, while you're generally following this step, I can see places where you skip it and don't draw through your petals such as in here and in here. We're not here to make aesthetic drawings, we're here to develop our spatial reasoning skills, as such it's very important that you follow all the instructions and construct each part of your plants thoroughly.
Draw pots and other cylindrical subjects such as mushrooms around a minor axis.
Sometimes you're drawing lighter, such as in your attempt at the potato plant demo, drawing lighter tends to make one think of drawabox exercises as sketching, but that's not what we're doing here. Drawabox is a course specifically designed to develop your sense of spatial reasoning and for this all steps of the construction process must be given equal importance by being drawn in the same rich shade of black, with extra lineweight being added only to differentiate where forms sit in space in relation to one another as demonstrated here.
You're not always following the instructions for how branches or leaves should be drawn.
To finish this off I'd like to delve into your use of texture. More often than not you're approaching them very explicitly, especially for your leaves and for your branches.
Texture in Drawabox is going to be approached very differently than in other courses as in, where in other courses texture will be used as a manner to "finish" or "polish" our drawings, texture in Drawabox is an extension of the concepts of construction and thinking about forms and how they interact with others within the same scene.
In a lot of ways they're the same concept, construction is just focused on the bigger and more primitive forms that make up different objects, while texture is preoccupied with conveying to the viewer what the small forms that run along the surface an object are like, if they're small and dense or big and sparse, if they're thick and rugged or smooth and sharp. Texture is the way we can visually communicate to the viewer what it would feel like to run your hands across an object's 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 in here, we can see 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 closely analyzing all of this information present in our reference before translating it to our study.
The shape of this shadow is also incredibly important as it's the shape that defines the relationships between the form casting it and the surface it's being cast on. Only after careful observation can we understand how to best design a shadow shape that best conveys the texture of an object, as well as how that shadow would be affected by the surface it's being casted on, as a shadow casted on a rounded will be rounded, while a shadow on a plain smooth surface will suffer less distortion to it's original shape.
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 and as you keep applying it to your work, you'll find yourself asking how to convey the 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
You have good work and you're showing a great deal of understanding of 3D forms and how to use them to capture a tridimensional object on your page. What's holding you back from your full potential are the mistakes mentioned above.
So make sure to pay close attention to the instructions in the course, as well as following them closely.
I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete, I believe you've understood the purpose of these exercises and were able to apply them well for the most part, just remember to be more attentive going forward as well as add these exercises to your warm up list.
Good luck in Lesson 4.
Next Steps:
Move on to Lesson 4.
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).
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