Hello RichyKing46, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.

Arrows

Let's start this critique by talking about your arrows, your linework is confident and smooth which helps sell the feeling of fluidity that arrows have as they move across the space they occupy.

Your shading is looking neat and tidy, although remember that it should always go from one end of the arrow's width to the other, and still speaking of hatching, make sure to always carefully think through your placement of it, you've added it to the wrong side of the bend sometimes which contradicts the illusion of depth you wish to achieve.

• Due to how perspective works, objects that are closer to the viewer will always appear bigger, and get smaller as they're further away, even if they're the exact same size. Following this logic, an object of consistent depth that is moving away or towards the viewer must gradually change according to the perspective of the scene. As such, the bigger part of the arrow is always going to be the one closest to the viewer, therefore the smaller part of the segment should be the one getting the hatching instead.

While your arrows are looking tridimensional you're not always making full use of the depth of the page available to you because you're not applying much perspective to your arrows, you should vary the size between each arrow segment either gradually or dramatically, otherwise your arrows will be pretty limited to the space of the page. In order to plan out the size difference between your segments you can make use of the ghosting method in order to construct your arrow in chunks - this will also help with the slight size consistency problems present in your work - although eventually you should aim to execute the second line in one single motion.

After finishing your arrows you should always make use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth and to always apply it with a single, confident line superimposed on top of the previous one.

Leaves

Moving onto your leaves your lines are looking confident and smooth which helps give a good sense of energy to your leaves, however there are a couple of issues that should be addressed with the way you're approaching this exercise.

While you're making use of the simple leaf structure you're not always sticking to it, such as in here where you attempted to capture the complex bumps and curves of the leaf structure right away, instead of building them up later, this causes you to lose control over your structure and doesn't allow it to be as tight and specific as it could be, the linework you add on top of it afterwards is also detrimental to the fluidity of the leaf structure because it's thick and has some wobble to it, making the form feel stiff and awkward.

These two structures have similar problems because while you establish the simple shape of the leaf you don't respect it during later phases of construction as much as you should. For this leaf you're skipping construction steps because you don't make use of the complex leaf construction method and you don't establish the individual, smaller arms of the leaf with their own flow lines and edges which would allow you to essentially build up this complex form by breaking it down into simpler, more manageable steps, by jumping into complexity right away you make it harder for you to construct a solid but energetic leaf structure.

For this leaf you're also skipping construction steps in a similar way, although while in the previous leaf you don't establish the individual arms for the structure, in here, you establish them partially. The biggest problem here is that the construction is looser than it could be, because you don't establish a boundary for the flow lines for the individual "arms" of the complex 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.

Because you're not building up your constructions from more simple forms before gradually adding complexity another problem present in this page is that you often zigzag your edge detail which is a mistake that should be avoided.

Branches

For your branches they're turning out decently as you're generally following the instructions for the exercise, but they can still be drastically improved if you change a couple of things and start to follow the instructions much more closely.

First things first, while it's good to see that you're drawing your edges in segments, you're not always doing so with the method outlined in the instructions, sometimes you draw an edge with a single stroke which is a mistake as it causes you to lose control of your lines more easily.

Another problem is that sometimes when you do extend an edge, you [extend it further than it should, extending it past 2 or 3 ellipses]() which also causes you to lose control of your lines, keep in mind that your lines should only be extended up to the halfway point between the second and third ellipse, only after you've gotten comfortable with these instructions should you focus on executing longer extension lines.

Something that helps with this problem as well is that if you feel like your ellipses are toob far apart, you can start to diminish the distance between your ellipses in order to make it easier to execute your marks, you want them to be distant enough so that you're able to execute them from your arm, but not so far that you're struggling with your accuracy too much.

Another thing you must address is to refresh your memory and look over the forking branches construction method because you're not following the steps for this technique as you don't establish the knot from where your branches will stem from with an ellipse first, which leaves the relationships between your forms unclear and unspecific.

This branch is unfinished.

It's good to see that you're drawing through your ellipses twice.

Plant Construction Section

Moving on to your plant constructions unfortunately your work is coming out quite poorly because you're not making use of the methods introduced previously in the lesson and I believe you might be rushing your work, I'm going to be walking you through the major issues present in your pages so you can address them and start to get the most out these exercises.

I'd like to start by talking about the inconsistency in your usage of the methods and techniques introduced in this lesson. Let's use this construction and this construction as an example, for them you make use of the leaf construction method and the branch construction method respectively, but you don't apply it to the other plants in the page which are similarly structured. Drawabox seeks to develop your skills through the use of exercises and drills. As such it's important to [follow all instructions as they are written,](https://drawabox.com/lesson/0 /3/gettingthemost) otherwise you won't be getting the most out of each study session.

There are two things we must allow ourselves when approaching these exercises, the first of them is time. The fact that you use these methods constructing some plant constructions but skip it for similar plant structures suggests that you're in part aware of why the leaf and branch construction methods should be used, but by not always applying it, it suggests you're in part rushing your pages, and not giving each individual construction the time it requires in order to be made to the best of your current ability.

Whenever you're approaching a construction it's important to remember that the methods and techniques introduced here are not guidelines, they are not suggestions, they are tools with the explicit purpose of helping you deconstruct tridimensional objects in order to reconstruct them in your page and have it look solid and believable. These methods and techniques are definitely very flexible, and they will help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning in an effective manner, but only if you're using them in order to engage your spatial reasoning skills, so it's still important to try your best to use them in your work, which as mentioned before you've demonstrated you know you should do, but decided against it because you're rushing.

So remember the instructions for the leaf construction method and for the branch construction method, you should always start your leaves with a flow line, and your branches with a minor axis, with ellipses building up on top of it afterwards.

Another incredibly important issue which heavily impacts the quality of your work and how much you're getting out of it is that you're preplanning how many drawings you can fit into your pages beforehand, which artificially limits the amount of space you allow yourself when working on your constructions, as such you're drawing way too small for all of your constructions, which hinders your ability to fully apply the instructions and methods introduced in the lesson, as well as making it difficult for you to engage your entire shoulder when drawing.

The second thing we must allow ourselves when approaching these exercises is space. It's certainly admirable that you wish to get more practice out of each page, but in the long run it's more beneficial for us to start our pages with the goal of making one construction to the best of our ability, making it big as we need it to be, and only then, after we're finished with this construction, gauge whether or not our page has the space available for one more drawing, drawn as big as it needs to be, if yes, we should certainly add it in and then do the same until our page doesn't have more space left, but if there isn't it's completely fine to only have one construction per page.

Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that in several of your constructions you don't draw through some of your forms, such as leaf structures, this limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise as not drawing throug your forms means relying on your observation skills, instead of engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and truly trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, where a form comes from and what it attaches to.

• When approaching cylindrical structures such as flower pots and mushrooms, start it around a minor axis in order to ensure that your several ellipses will be kept aligned to each other.

You have not constructed any of these mushroom structures, I heavily recommend that you check out and attempt to follow along with the king oyster demo as it outlines how to approach plant structures which don't posses your typical leaves or branches, but still using fully constructed forms in order to ensure your structure is fully complete and fledged out. The cactus demo is another valuable demonstration for these concepts.

Try not to fill in large areas of black in your constructions, not only does it obscures the underlying construction, making it harder to properly evaluate your homework assignment, it also goes against the principles of texture in lesson 2.

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that.

Final Thoughts

Your work is coming out poorly because you're not investing enough time into each individual construction, quantity does not equal quality when it comes to these exercises, even for the 250 boxes exercise you're not only going to be drawing 250 boxes aimlessly, you have a method that is introduced and then a way to check for your mistakes, afterwards you must attempt to fix those mistakes on your nexf page, for this lesson you have methods which are introduced and you must use them to construct your plant structures.

While it's discouraged to take notes on your homework pages you should still be analyzing your work and trying to find issues that are mentioned in the lesson material, such as visible tails in your branches and attempting to address them in your next page, you might also find that the Drawabox Discord Community is a very helpful group which can help you as you go through the lesson by giving you real time feedback on your homework before you move on to the next page, and help you address mistakes that you might not have noticed.

I'm going to be assigning you some revisions, I heavily recommend that you look over all of the relevant lesson material, and that you try your hand at following all of the demos presented in this lesson, making sure to include your attempt at the mushroom demo in your revisions, but all of your other pages should be original constructions.

Please reply once you're finished.