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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows you're drawing your marks with a good deal of confidence which helps solidify the feeling of fluidity that arrows posses as they move through all the three dimensions of the world they exist in. However your arrows have little to no foreshortening, make sure to explore the size difference between arrow segments more in order to make better use of the depth of the page and push your understanding of tridimensional space further.

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 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.

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, however you also have some unnatural bends present in your leaves. Keep in mind that even though leaves are very flexible structures, that mostly applies to their length and not their width. They're like a piece of paper, not a piece of rubber, they can fold and bend in a lot of ways, but they can't stretch or compress, and if you try to force them to they'll simply rip apart.

Your addition of edge detail is generally looking good, as you don't usually attempt to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, and you generally construct your edge detail additively. But don't forget to also keep the line thickness between your phases of construction roughly consistent so as to avoid redrawing more than you strictly need to.

Branches

Moving on to your branches you're not sticking to the instructions for this exercise as closely as you should, as you're not drawing your branches around a minor axis which is a mistake. You're also not always 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 starting with a minor axis and laying down your ellipses along that minor axis, and only afterwards starting your outer edge segment 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.

Don't forget to always draw through your ellipses twice as this will create a smoother and more confident look in your marks. 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, where it's very noticeable right away that you've drawn some structures several times over and over. This can be considered grinding and is not as helpful to your development as tackling a structure over and over again without receiving feedback first will not help you find the points in your work that need to be addressed, it's much more likely that you will simply continue to repeat the same mistakes, as such it's best to attempt different structures as that will force you to face different tridimensional puzzle challenges and force you outside your comforf zone.

Other than this 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.

When approaching cylindrical structures such as plant pots and mushrooms make sure to start with a minor axis in order to keep your several ellipses aligned to each other more easily. Going further don't forget to construct the outer rim that's present in most types of plant pots, and make sure to add a ground plane to your structures, this line is necessary when constructing plant pots because otherwise your structure will look like it's floating in mind air, which breaks the illusion of the construction.

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 as you make use of hatching and big areas of black in your work.

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're on the path to understanding 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.