Hello Aksaa13, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.

Arrows

Starting with your arrows, while your linework is often confident and helps give a great sense of fluidity to your arrows, the extra lineweight you add on top of the original construction harms this initial fluidity. Remember that lineweight should only be added on top of the overlaps.

You're making good use of the depth of the page, although your arrows are looking a bit too similar to one another, make sure to get out of your comfort zone and attempt different types of arrows as demonstrated in the example homework page, experiment with overlaps, twists and the negative space between the bends of your arrows.

Another thing you can improve is your application of hatching, it's looking a little bit messy, remember that shading should be neat and tidy, with parallel lines and going from one end of your arrow's width to the other.

Leaves

Continuing on to your leaves, they're often looking a bit stiff because your flow line is a straight line. By revisiting the instructions for this exercise we can see that it's purpose is to help us break down flat but tridimensional objects that move freely across the world, influenced by external forces such as gravity and the wind. By drawing so many leaf flow lines as a completely straight line, you're taking away the "gesture" of the leaf and flattening them, making them look like flat stickers pressed on a page instead of the tridimensional structures they are.

Another important point to mention is that this exercise is meant to prepare you for drawing leaf structures later on during your plant constructions. In actual plants you most likely will never see leaf structures oriented this way, so it's much more important to practice and understand how leaves look in all sorts of angles and rotations.

Another thing that causes your leaves to look stiff are the sharp points present in their overlaps, such as in here, leaves are pretty flexible lenght wise but they're not this flexible due to their constitution, if folded this way they would snap, curves are more realistic for the form you want to convey here.

Here you didn't use the leaf construction method in it's entirely as one of the outer edges doesn't connect to the other end of the flow line.

From what I can see your application of edge detail is pretty good, you're generally capturing only one piece of detail with individual strokes, this allows you to maintain more control over your lines.

Your use of texture is leaning towards the explicit side, when you should be approaching them implicitly. You can find here some extra notes on adding texture to your leaves.

Branches

For your branches there are a couple of issues which harm the solidity and believability of your forms.

It's good to see that you're generally extending your branches, but the extra lineweight you add on top defeats the purpose of drawing your edges in segments, creating too big of a constrast, and since some areas of added lineweight are thicker than the rest, the inconsistency only serves to go against the illusion of depth you want to give your branches.

Remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse, and stopping halfway to the third, with the new segment repeating the pattern from the 2nd ellipse 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.

Be mindful of how many times you draw through your ellipses, some of your ellipses look like they were drawn through three to four times which causes them to become too loose and messy, ideally you'll want to draw through them only twice. Another issue that heavily impacts the solidity of your branches is that your ellipses degrees don't change when they should have variation applied to them, as shown here. Remember that as a cylindrical form shifts towards or away from the viewer, the degree of the ellipses within that structure will also gradually shift.

Plant Construction Section

Now let's move on to your plant constructions.

Generally you seem to make use of the techniques and methods introduced in the lesson to construct your plants, you're definitely in the right track to start understanding these concepts and developing your sense of spatial reasoning, there are only a couple of things I'd like to bring to your attention, make sure to keep these points in mind going forward in order to get the most out of these exercises.

Firstly I'd like to mention one of the things that stood out the most to me right away, and is a very important thing that heavily impacts the outcome of your work, is that you're not giving your individual constructions as much space as they each require in order to be able to approach them in the most effective manner.

There are two things that we must give each of our exercises in this course in order to get the most out of them, they are time and space. In this case, due to how many of your pages have empty spaces, and often times more than three plant constructions, it's appropriate to say you didn't make the best use of your page. While it's admirable that you clearly wish to get more practice out of each page, ironically enough drawing more in this case means you'll be getting less out of each individual construction. The size that you're drawing at right now, doesn't allow you to apply the methods introduced previously to their full extent, in this construction, for example, the small size doesn't allow you to engage your arm, which doesn't allow you to extend your lines in your stem, which also doesn't allow you to draw through your ellipses. You're also unable to apply the leaf construction method and forget to draw through your forms.

So draw bigger, besides allowing you to fully engage your arm, this will also allow you more space to fully think through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises. Give each individual construction as much space as it needs, and only afterwards should you gauge whether or not there is enough space for one more construction, if there is, great, rinse and repeat until there isn't, but if there isn't any space it's completely okay to only have 1 plant construction per page.

Another thing to mention is that in a couple of cases you forget to draw through your forms. Remember that the purpose of these exercises is to help develop your sense of spatial reasoning, we only use plants, insects and other subjects as objects we can study, things that we can break down to their primitive forms for our artistic development, drawing through each form will help you understand better how each piece of your structure sits in space, as well as how that relates to other forms.

You have a bit of a tendency to trace entire parts of your construction with a thicker lineweight once you're finished. It also often encourages you to ignore the bounds and forms that your initial construction establishes. Tracing should be avoided whenever possible as it causes us to focus on following 2D lines on a page, instead of the 3D forms they represent, and drawing later stages of your construction darker can encourage one to think of exercises as sketching, but we're not sketching, we're constructing structures with solidity and volume to them and in order to maintain that, it's important that each stage of construction is given the same importance by being drawn in roughly the same line thickness.

Lineweight itself can be used at the end of a construction in order to clarify overlaps.

• When approaching cylindrical structures such as flower pots and mushrooms, make sure to construct them around a minor axis in order to keep your various ellipses aligned.

You skip construction steps here, here and here by not establishing the flow line for the individual arms of these leaf structures.

For this structure you zigzag your edge detail, which a mistake as outlined here.

While your use of texture is few and sparse, there are a couple of problems with it, firstly, don't add any kind of hatching to your flower pots, and secondly, try to stay away from filling in big areas of black in your constructions, black should be reserved for cast shadows only. Texture in Drawabox is based on them, which helps convey to the viewer what the small forms that run along the surface an object are, if they're thick and rugged, or if they're smooth and sharp, essentially texture is a form of visually communicating to the viewer what it would feel like to run their hands across that 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 here in what are essentially the "principles" of texture in Drawabox and how it is used in the course, 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 closely 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, only after careful observation can we understand how to best design a good shadow 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

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, this is very noticeable and it's significantly bringing down the quality of your work and what you're getting out of it.

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.