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

Arrows

Let's start by talking about your arrows, they're looking quite smooth and confidently made, this helps to communicate the fluidity that these objects have as they move through the world. Your hatching is neat and tidy and it's applied to the correct side of the overlap for the most part, you do have one instance of adding it to the incorrect side here which disrupts the illusion of depth you wish to achieve with these objects.

• 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 stretch across space is that certain segments of the 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 that you apply the hatching to, in order to signify that it's behind the bigger segment and thus, farther away.

Don't forget to finish your arrows by always adding lineweight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth and don't be afraid of letting edges overlap, this is present in some of your arrows which flattens them, this can be addressed by building your arrows in segments with the ghosting method, instead of trying to draw the second curve in a single stroke, although we're aiming to reach that point in the future.

I've seen two cases where it seems you redrew a line after the first didn't turn out the way you hoped it would, as always don't forget to keep the principles introduced in Lesson 1 in mind, and respect each and every single one of your lines.

Overall, you've done well in this exercise, don't forget to keep practicing arrows during your warm ups.

Leaves

Moving on to your page of leaves they're looking incredibly well constructed and tridimensional, you're not only capturing how these structures sit statically within space but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

For your addition of edge detail it's looking pretty good, but there are a couple of different things to call out here, the first is that in a couple of places it seems you draw your original construction fainter, then add your edge detail darker and trace some parts of your initial form, this often can make us think of doing a "clean-up" pass where one phase of construction is replaced by the other, but the purpose of Drawabox is to help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning by fully constructing objects in a way where all phases of construction are equallymportant, so make sure to keep the line thickness for your phases of construction roughly consistent, in order to not encourage you to redraw more than you strictly need to.

Another thing you need to keep in mind when adding edge detail is to not zigzag your lines, this is something that's very present across your leaf structutes, keep in mind that this is something to avoid as it goes against the third principle of mark-making from lesson 1.

This isn't something that's present in this page, but you're making use of the complex leaf construction method very effectively, save for your tendency to draw later phases of construction darker and zigzag your edge detail.

Your texturing work is very well done in here as well, although there are some moments where you fill in big areas in black when they're not caused by cast shadows, you can find here some extra useful notes on how to think when adding texture to your leaf structures.

Branches

For your branches they're coming along very well made as you're following the instructions for the exercise, which allows you to create really solid kooking structures.

I am seeing some cases though where you didn't fully extend your line up to the halfway point between ellipses, or extended it past that mark, so don't forget how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse, 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 branch is complete. Drawing slightly smaller ellipses for your branches and spacing them farther apart might help with allowing you to execute this step more easily.

Some of your ellipses are a bit too loose as you draw through them too many times, which makes accidentally cutting back into our construction more easy, so try to draw through your ellipses twice at most, another way you can remedy this is to treat your ellipse's outer perimeter as the defining edge of the form in order to keep all of your stray marks contained within the form itself.

You're aware of the ellipse degree shift and you're applying it pretty well to your branches, this greatly helps to solidify their forms.

Plant Construction Section

Now let's move on to your plant constructions, you're doing really well in these exercises as you make use of the construction methods introduced in the lesson to great effect, which greatly helps with giving your constructions that sense of volume and tridimensionality, you're already showing a strong sense of spatial reasoning.

I hope that the pointers I give you today will help you take your work from great to incredible as you address some problems and issues present in your work.

First things first, something very important to keep in mind is that you must keep in mind is that you must always draw through your forms, not only the part that is visible to you, but the form in it's entirety. I've noticed that in this page you don't draw through many of your forms, this limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise as not drawing throug your forms means relying on your observation skills, instead of engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and truly trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, where it comes from and what it attaches to.

• It's incredibly important for you to draw through all of your forms because forms don't stop existing when they become obscured by other forms. Think of it as building a house and having a full X-ray view of the building, it's a tridimensional puzzle that cannot exist before the foundations are laid out, the roof cannot exist before the walls, the walls cannot exist before the foundation, and the furniture cannot exist before the building itself, in that same vein tips of leaves or parts of a plant construction cannot exist by themselves, they still exist as full forms even when they're partially obscured by other objects. Therefore you should make sure you're always drawing forms in their entirety, this will help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning and make all of the relationships between phases of construction in your drawing clear and defined.

Another big thing that impacts how mich you're getting out of these exercises is the fact that you're drawing way too small because you're pre-planning how many drawings you want to fit on a given page, this artificially limits how much space you allow your brain to use when drawing, and it also limits your ability to engage your full arm when drawing. It's certainly admirable that you wish to get more practice out of each individual page, but this is actually counterintuitive to the development of your skills.

• In this course there are generally two things we must allow ourselves in order to get the most out of our practice time, those things are time and space. Your pages would have greatly benefitted if you were to focus on making the best use of the space on the page by first drawing your initial construction as big as it needed to be, and only after that, gauging whether your page had enough space left to add any more drawings.

So draw bigger, drawing bigger will not only allow you to work through the spatial reasoning problems that arise when tackling these exercises more easily but also give you enough space to fully engage your entire arm when drawing.

• 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 here.

• While this is something that you do generally respect we can see some spots in your page of mushrooms where you did extend off existing forms' silhouettes, or cut back into them slightly.

Another thing that you should focus on is the fact that you're often outlining entire lines and forms, often leaving thick patches of lineweight, but this is unatural as filled in areas of black should only be reserved for cast shadows, lineweight itself should only be used to clarify overlaps and be executed with a single, smooth pass superimposed on top of the previous line.

In this page the construction is looser than it could be, due to the flow lines for the individual "arms" of the complex structure going past the boundary laid out by the previous phase of construction (the one where you established the simple overall footprint for the structure). The bigger shape establishes a decision being made - this is how far out the general structure will extend - and so the flow lines for the later petal structures should abide by that.

Due to the Drawabox construction methods requiring us to draw all of our forms fully, it's inevitable that more complex structures will naturally feel more cluttered as you add more elements to it, by drawing bigger you will allow yourself more space to add more details in your construction before the details start to feel overwhelming.

Your usage of texture in this lesson is really well executed although you have some moments such as in your page of hibiscus and your banana where you make use of very similar hatching lines, keep in mind that texture in Drawabox is based on cast shadows, none of this relates to making our drawings look aesthetically pleasing, instead we focus only on forms that are physically present in our construction, and we should be understand how each individual form sits in 3D space and how that form then creates a shadow that is cast onto that same surface, after analyzing all of the information present in our reference we'll be able to translate it to our study. This means that the shape of our shadow is important as well as it's the shape that defines the relationships between the form casting it and the surface it's being cast on, this is why we should consider carefully how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic as shown here.

Final Thoughts

Overall your work here is great, the only problem that greatly hurts it is the fact that you're not drawing them big enough which limits how much you're getting out of these exercises and making some of your work feel "cluttered".

Considering how solid your work is and how you're making usage of the methods I believe that you're ready for Lesson 4 and wouldn't benefit much from revisions simply because you have drawn - but I'd like to greatly stress that in the future you allow yourself as much space as your construction needs before thinking about adding anything else to your page. Good luck in Lesson 4.