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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your lines are looking fairly confident and smooth, which helps communicate a nice sense of fluidity in your arrows as they move through the world. You're keeping foreshortening in mind while constructing your arrows which allows you to make really good use of perspective and the depth of your page, this gives a nice extra layer of tridimensionality to your arrows.

Your usage of hatching helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space and further your own understanding of the tridimensional space these objects occupy, but do remember that your hatching lines must still follow the principles of ghosting and mark-making, they must have clear end and start points, in this case that means one end of the arrow to the other.

You've done a good job on this exercise, what I'd like to tell you so that can keep getting the most out of this exercise is actually to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise, your arrows are all very similar in the way they move through space, so try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different rates of foreshortening, keep in mind that arrows are very flexible objects and can move freely across the world in all sorts of manners, so you should push yourself and explore the different possibilities.

Leaves

The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, it's good that you're not only trying to capture how these structures sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

It's good to see that you're also experimenting with some more complex types of leaf structures, and doing so by following the instructions, which allows you to create a much tighter and more solid looking structure that still feels flexible and energetic.

Your edge detail is looking quite well made, you're not attempting to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, and you're often approaching it additively - that is, constructing it on top of your preexisting structure, as well as putting it down with the same general line thickness as the rest of your construction, all of these are good things that help you construct solid and tight structures that still feel fluid and energetic.

Your addition of texture is starting to move in the right direction but there are still a couple of changes that should be made, there are many dots and timid marks in your work which look a bit explicit and there are no transitions from light to dark in your work.

There's much more going on than just a few stray marks implying veins and we can do much more to accurately communicate this type of texture, but first we must understand how shadows work. This diagram shows how the angle of the light rays hit the object at shallower angles the farther away they are from the light source, resulting in the shadow itself being protected farther.

This means that even if two forms are identical, the shadows they cast don't have to be identical shadows, and so we can carefully design them and control whether we want them to be longer or shorter without changing the nature of the texture being conveyed.

Following that this diagram

Branches

Moving on to your branches you're not sticking to the instructions for this exercise as closely as you should. While it's good to see that you're drawing your edges in segments you're not starting your new segment back at the previous ellipse point and superimposing it on top of the preexisting mark, you're starting your new segments close to where your previous mark ended, which partially removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve in these structures.

So remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully up to the halfway point to the third ellipse, afterwards you'll start a new segment, making sure to place your pen at the second ellipse and repeat this pattern until your entire branch is complete.

For ellipses it's good to see that you're making an attempt to always draw through them twice, as that allows for a smoother mark overall. When it comes to your application of the ellipse degree shift to your branches it can be improved, as it stands your degrees are too consistent and hardly change which is a mistake that flattens your structures. Remember that as a form shifts in relation to the viewer, so will the degree of the ellipses within that structure also shift.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are coming along quite nicely made. You're generally making use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in this Lesson which helps you create the illusion of tridimensionality in your work, you're not only trying to capture what these structures look like, but you also focus on how they work, how they exist fully in tridimensional space by drawing through your forms and thinking about the way each piece of your construction exists in relation to one another.

This is all very good and it's helping you develop a strong sense of spatial reasoning, there are only a couple of small things that if kept in mind will help you take your work to the next level.

For your question it's important to remember that Drawabox has specific purposes to achieve, it's necessary that you're always drawing through your forms and making use of your shoulder when executing marks.

This will naturally make it more difficult to execute thin and long marks, especially branches. So make sure that when constructing branches that you're placing ellipses closer together in order to make it mofe comfortable to ghost and execute your edge detail marks, as well as continue practicing all types of branches during your warm ups.

It's good to see that you're making use of a minor axis when constructing cylindrical forms such as cylinders, as that helps you keep your several ellipses aligned to each other more easily. It's also good that you're adding an inner ellipse to your vases as that helps communicate the thickness of your structure.

You're not always making use of edge detail in your pages, edge detail would have greatly helped you further communicate the form of your structures and how they move through space, but by not adding it they're left very simple, so make sure to add edge detail whenever possible, and remember that only the last step of leaf construction - texture - is optional.

And lastly let's take a look at your addition of texture to these structures, which needs some work as it's veering towards the explicit side.

So let's revisit how texture in Drawabox is approached, by looking back on this page we can refresh our memory on texture through the lens of Drawabox and see that it is not used to make our work aesthetic or good looking, instead every textural form we draw is based on what's physically present in our reference.

Our focus should be on understanding how each individual form sits in 3D space and how that form then creates a shadow that is cast onto that same surface. Only after analyzing all of this information present in our reference will we be able to translate it to our construction. This means that the shape of our 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, which is why we need to consider carefully how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic and communicates this tridimensional information.

This approach is of course much harder than basing our understanding of texture on other methods that may seem more intuitive or basing it on the idea that texture = making our work look good, but in the long run this method of applying texture is the one that enforces the ideals of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following these ideals, you'll find yourself asking how to convey texture in the most efficient way possible, with less lines and ink, focusing on the implicit mark-making techniques introduced in Lesson 2. Make sure to go over these reminders in order to solidify your understanding of texture further.

Final Thoughts

In general your work is good, you clearly understand the purpose of these techniques and exercises and you're making good use of them in your work, if you iron out on a couple of issues you'll be on the path towards drawing even more solid and believable tridimensional structures.

I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.