Hello Mujin249, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.
Arrows
Starting with your arrows your lines have a lot of signs of hesitation present which hurts the quality of your arrows and stops them from looking as fluid as they could be. You're keeping foreshorting in mind while constructing your arrows which is good, as it allows you to make use of the depth of your page and 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, be carefully planned and executed. It's good to see that you're making use of added line weight but don't forget that this tool also has it's own rules for being applied. It must be added subtly, with a single mark superimposed on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth.
In general you are doing well when it comes to constructing the arrows, they look solid and believably tridimensional, but because your linework isn't smooth and confident it makes your arrows look awkward and stiff. Don't forget that above all else your marks must be confident and smooth, as this mistake will greatly impact all of your work.
Leaves
Moving on to your leaves your linework still shows some signs of hesitancy, but it's looking much better than in your other pages, which helps communicate the leave's fluidity and sense of energy, it's also 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, one thing you should keep in mind is the fact that you're sometimes drawing later marks with a thicker line weight, if that was intentional, just be 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.
Avoid hatching when working on leaf structures, hatching like any other tool has a specific purpose to achieve and in this case it ends up flattening and pushing whatever you're hatching back in space. While this is a result we may want in order to separate elements in a more complete and fully fledged out construction, in this case it just flattens the entire structure and should be avoided.
Branches
Moving on to your branches you are starting to move in the right direction as you're following the instructions for the exercise, you're drawing your edges in segments which allows you to maintain higher control over your marks and helps you create mote solid and organic looking structures, however your marks are way too wobbly which hurts the quality of all of your structures in this lesson. Don't forget to always draw your marks with confidence, from the shoulder and switfly in order to create smooth lines.
There are a lot of visible tails present in these branch structures, while this is a very common mistake it should be less of a problem once you start executing your lines with more confidence.
For your 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 generally turning out quite nicely. 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 this tridimensional space by drawing through each of your forms and thinking about the way each piece of your construction relates 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.
Your linework is looking slightly better in these pages, but it still brings issues, especially when it comes to your ellipses as they are looking particularly wobbly. This mistake happens because you're trying to be accurate when executing your ellipse, but this causes your ellipse to turn out wobbly and distorted. Instead you must execute it switfly and with confidence.
For this construction the smaller structures look a bit ambiguous, are they leaf structures of organic structures? They are thinner at the base and rounder at the ends, which makes them look like small leaves, but they are not drawn with a flow line, if they are leaves make sure to follow the proper steps for constructing them, if they're organic forms make use of a circle at the pokes or contours to communicate their thickness.
Or, and this relates to your question, if these are leaves with a certain thickness to them you must follow the proper leaf construction method and then make use of a contour along it's edges in order to communicate a plane shift/the edge of a form. You can see an example of this in this succulent construction.
And lastly let's take a look at your usage of texture, which can be improved as you're too focused on drawing it out explicitly, with timid, small marks and big areas of white but also huge areas of filled in black, which go against the idea of drawing things implicitly. There are also no focal points of detail in your work.
So let's revisit how texture in Drawabox is approached, by looking back on this page we can refresh our memory and see that texture through the lens of Drawabox is communicated through the use of cast shadows.
It is not used to make our work aesthetic or pretty, 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.
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 you are following the instructions and methods laid out in this lesson and to quite great effect, your structures are looking quite tridimensional as a result. However your linework severely impacts the quality of your work, don't forget that good line quality is emphasized at the start of this course for a reason - it will affect everything you make, and it's the most important thing to focus on.
I'm going to be marking this submission as complete as I believe you have understood the purpose of this lesson and your linework can be improved by making some minor changes in the way you're approaching mark-making, such as fixing your posture and executing your marks more swiftly, don't forget to revisit the lines section of Lesson 1 for more information on this.
Good luck in Lesson 4.
Next Steps:
Don't forget to add these exercises to your list of warm ups.
Move on to Lesson 4.
Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"
It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.
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