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

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 foreshorting in mind while constructing your arrows which allows you to make 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, be carefully planned and execute and not end at arbitrary points.

Still speaking of hatching, there are a couple of times where you've placed it incorrectly, making it seem like your arrow is getting bigger the further away it is, and getting smaller as it gets closer, which goes against the rules of perspective.

• Perspective works in the following manner: things that are further away from the viewer will look smaller, and as they get closer to the viewer they'll look bigger. The way this affects an object of consistent size and width that stretches across space is that certain segments of this object will look bigger and others smaller, either gradually or dramatically depending on the perspective of the scene, as such the bigger part of the arrow will always be the one that's closest to the viewer so the segment that's behind it should be the one receiving the hatching.

As a finishing touch to your arrows don't forget to make use of added line weight on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth.

Leaves

The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, but something to note is that the majority of your leaf structures don't fold or bend in any way, this is something to keep an eye on whenever you tackle this exercise again, as leaves are organic structures that are affected by all sorts of forces, from the wind to gravity to their own weight pulling them down, as such you'll find that in plant structures leaves will actually be oriented in a variety of different ways, and you'll improve much more by thinking about the way these objects look when they move through the world from moment to moment, instead of just trying to capture how they sit statically within it.

It's good to see that you've experimented with complex leaf structures but remember not to skip construction steps when approaching these more intricate structures.

These structures are looser than they could be, because you skipped construction steps and tried to capture the complex form of the structures right away, instead of constructing each individual arm with the leaf construction method and only then connecting them together. Even though leaves are single entities they can still made be made up of several parts, and constructing them in this manner will ensure that you're creating tighter and more specific looking constructions.

When it comes to your addition of edge detail you need to spend more time with the execution of each mark - because there are so many and they seem individually unimportant, you're putting less time into each one and so they do not properly rise off and return to the existing stroke - there are often gaps, overshoots, and zigzagging marks which is a mistake that goes against the third principle of mark making from Lesson 1. that could be avoided by putting more time into the work. No mark you draw is unimportant - if you decided it was worth adding, it's worth giving as much time as it needs to be done to the best of your current ability.

Moving on to your addition of texture it needs work, as it generally leans a bit too heavily towards the side of explicit texture because you are often outlining texture and using too many big areas of black. 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, take a look at this informal demo on how to approach leaf texture, and make sure to give these reminders on how texture works in Drawabox a read.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently made 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 which allows you to create some solid but still organic looking structures.

For ellipses it's good to see that you're making an attempt to always draw through them twice, but in general there are still a lot of times where you're not quite hitting the mark, this may be because you're drawing your ellipses quite a tad too small, which makes it harder to ghost through them, so don't forget to draw bigger.

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 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're also focusing 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 things that if kept in mind will help you take your work to the next level.

I think I made a mistake on the first 4 construction drawings. Construction #3 (Cactus) contains the spikes, which I think is a texture. I also think petals of the #1 (Daffodil) and #2 (White Rose) would count as detail and the tendril like appendages of #4 (Cape Sundew) would count as detail.

There's a difference between texture, which is the detail that should only be added to the last half of your constructions and further construction steps. Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction. In a lot of ways they're the same concept, construction focuses on the big and primitive forms that make up different objects and texture simply focuses on conveying to the viewer the small forms that run along the surface an object, if it's thick and rugged, or if it's 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.

Spikes, edge detail, added petal structures and entire appendages communicate structural information about your construction and so they should be added, textural information is the only optional step of construction.

This leads to my next point is the fact that you're not always making use of edge detail in your pages. Despite the name edge detail this is actually a bit of a misnomer, edge detail is another step of construction because it communicates how your structure sits in 3d space, by not adding your leaf structures are left very simple and you miss out on a great tool to help you further communicate the way your structures exist and move through space. Make use of edge detail whenever possible, and remember that only the last step of leaf construction - texture - is optional.

You're not drawing through the majority of your ellipses in your plant constructions which is a mistake that stiffens them, don't forget that in this course you must draw through every ellipse you make.

For your daffodil flower construction the way you're approaching it is a great first step towards starting to think of how to break down different structures since you make use of cylinder to communicate the shape of this flower, however it does end up accidentally stiffening the structure by not approaching it with the leaf construction method which naturally adds a sense of flow and energy to your work.

Despite the odd conical shape of this flower, it's petals are still very leaf-like in nature and should be approached with the leaf construction method. We can improve it by using a slightly tapered cylinder in order to construct the main body of the leaf shape, then afterwards make use of the leaf construction method, build it on top of the cylinder in order to capture the flow of the different sections of the petal structures and lastly connect them together, making use of edge detail in order to finish the complex structure. I actually put together a quick demonstration of how this would look like for a different student once and I believe you will find it helpful.

• Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions.

• For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its 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.

While this is something that you do generally respect we can see some spots on your cocoa pods construction where you have cut into your forms or tried to extend off of them, which has flattened the structure.

You can see here more information that talks about how to make use of organic forms to construct plants that aren't simple branches with leaf structures attached to them, and you can see here how you can construct on top of your preexisting structures with new organic forms.

And lastly let's take a look at your addition of texture to these structures, which needs some work as there are many large areas of filled in black to your work, which goes against the idea of drawing texture implicitly and can obscure the underlying construction, making your work harder to evaluate, there are also no focal points of detail which leave no places for your viewer to focus on or any areas of rest, there's no contrast and so everything competes to keep the viewer's attention.

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

I'm going to be marking this submission as complete, as I believe that in these pages you have demonstrated that you do understand the way these construction methods and techniques should be used and why they're important for your work, you just need to be more thorough to applying these concepts to your work in order to get the most out of this lesson. Good luck in Lesson 4.