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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows they're generally looking smooth, although you do have moments where your confidence falters and causes wobbles and other signs of hesitation to show through in your linework, so remember to always engage your whole arm when drawing, make use of the ghosting method as many times as you need before executing your mark and once you do so make sure to execute it swiftly and with confidence.

The size consistency in your arrows can still be improved as you have segments that either bulge or narrow suddenly, only to get bigger or smaller again in a way that does not conform to the perspective of the scene - for example, if an arrow is completely moving away from the viewer, the parts that are further away should not suddenly get bigger at the bends and then smaller again, they should only gradually get smaller. Something that will help you with this problem is to plan your arrows and their curves more thoroughly with the ghosting method, instead of building the second line for your arrow in a single stroke you can start by using dots to plan out the general structure and then execute your marks, just keep in mind that all your marks should run smoothly into one another and that eventually we want to be able to draw these more complex curves with a single stroke.

Speaking of perspective the placement of your hatching is sometimes added to the incorrect side of the arrow's overlap, which contradicts the illusion of perspective you wish to achieve.

• Due to the way perspective works objects will appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when further away, even if they're the exact same size. The way this affects an object of consistent size moving through space means that parts of it will look bigger, and others will look smaller based on the perspective of the scene and how close each part of that object is to the viewer, according to this logic this means that the smaller part of the arrow segment should be the part getting the hatching.

In short, you're doing well and moving in the right direction, you only need to address some issues you encounter in order to start getting even more out of this exercise.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves the fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely to the way you approach leaves, for the most part they're flowing smoothly, one thing you can do to make sure that you're not harming the good flow and sense of energy your leaves have is to add texture and cross contours with the same level of confidence as your initial linework, in this leaf and this leaf structure your cross contours have more visible signs of hesitancy and wobble than your original construction, this structure also has a very thick flow line that was created by several passes over the original line which disrupts any flow the initial flow line might have had, this stiffens the structure.

Keep in mind the principles of mark-making from Lesson 1 and make sure to always execute your marks with confidence, and if your line doesn't turn out the way you hoped it would push through it - commit to your mistakes as trying to fix them will only make them all the more obvious.

Moving on to your addition of edge detail it's coming along pretty decently, generally you're avoiding capturing more than one piece of edge detail at a time which gives you higher control over your marks, but as stated in this section of the exercise page we'll want to work additively whenever possible, this is because cutting back into our forms can make us focus too much on their shapes, instead of the tridimensionam edges they represent.

I have noticed that you attempted to add texture to one of your leaf structures but the texture you've drawn is leaning towards the explicit side. You can find here

Branches

Moving on to your page of branches it seems that you have missed some core instructions for this exercise, let's revisit said instructions and see what you can change in order to approach branches correctly the next time.

As we can see in the instructions a fundamental part of this exercise is to draw simple branches which feel organic and alive in order to introduce to us an important tool when tackling actual plant structures. In order to construct these branches we need to make use of compound strokes which are several lines overlapped on top of one another in order to create a healthy and seamless transition between each segment.

You're approaching your branches by extending your line segments at the start, but once you finish a segment you start a new segment at the point where your previous line ended, instead of starting it at the previous ellipse point, this effectively removes the healthy overlaps we want to achieve in this exercise and cause you to focus too much on accuracy, which causes some hesitancy and a slight wobble to your lines, taking away from the solidity of your branches.

So keep in mind how branches should be approached, by drawing your branch's edge with compound strokes, each stroke will be a different segment, and the first segment will start at the first ellipse, you should extend it past the second ellipse and extend it 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 the pattern until your branch is complete.

Onto your ellipses it's good to see that you're generally making an attempt to draw through them twice, but you don't always follow through with this so make sure thag you're always drawing through your ellipses at least two times before lifting your pen. Another thing you should address is how some of your ellipses degrees barely change when they should due to how the ellipse degree shift works, 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 shift.

And lastly it might be very helpful to you when extending your line segments to also diminish the number of ellipses in your branches, there's a lot of them which means that the "halfway point" between ellipses is not far enough in order to allow you to extend your line well and to fully engage your shoulder when drawing these lines.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's review your plant constructions, your work here is looking decent and you're showing good potential as you're making use of the methods and the techniques introduced in the lesson which helps you creat solid and tridimensional objects. You're clearly moving in the right direction and starting to grasp the concepts this lesson seeks to teach.

There are some issues present in your work however which are holding some of your constructions back, I'd like to point them out so that in the future you can address them and start to get even more out of this exercise and these construction methods.

Firstly, for your flower constructions with edge detail you sometimes add your edge detail with thicker lines, making use of lineweight in this manner can often make us think of Drawabox work as sketching where the initial rough pass works as a guide for the refinement that comes later on, but Drawabox is not sketching and all phases of construction are equally important, as such make sure to keep your lineweight roughly consistent throughout your entire construction. Lineweight iself can be added towards the end of a construction, focusing on how the different parts of a structure overlap one another.

The problems present in your page of branches persist in these pages.

• Make sure to draw all cylindrical objects around a minor axis, such as mushrooms, make sure that you're also extending your minor axis far enough that you're able to ghost your ellipses for the mushroom cap around it as well.

For your mushroom construction you cut back into the form of the mushroom cap in order to capture the more complex form that can be found in these types of plants. But keep in mind mushroom caps are not flat like leaves, adding variation to their form's edge doesn't work the same way adding it to leaves does, in this case we want to treat any new pieces of detail or variation in the form of the structure we want to achieve as a form in their own right, think of it like adding pieces of clay to a sculpture, you can see here some more information on how this works.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that once you put down a form, do not attempt to alter it's silhouette. This is because th silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

You didn't draw the lilypads in this construction with the leaf construction method. Remember that the methods here should always be used in your work.

And lastly there are generally two things we must allow ourselves when approaching this course and it's exercises, they are time which focuses on taking our time with the lesson material in order to make sure we properly understand it and that we're working at a comfortable pace when drawing, and space.

While you generally seem to give yourself enough space for your attempt at the potato plant demo you drew it in the same page as your pitcher plant demo, which forces you to draw the potato plant way too small and doesn't allow you as much room to engagr your shoulder fully. So draw bigger and don't fall into the trap of artificially limiting the space of your page as that'll impede your progress and how much you get out of the exercises as it won't allow you enough room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises.

Final Thoughts

You're applying the concepts taught in this lesson well as for the most part your constructions are looking solid and tridimensional. Make sure to keep the points I mentioned here today in mind, going forward, make sure to also carefully apply the instructions for branches .to your work.

I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete as I believe you're ready to tackle the challenges present in the next lesson. Good luck in Lesson 4.