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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows they're looking confident and smooth, which helps push the fluidity in your arrows, although there are some small signs of hesitation in your lines, so remember to always ghost as many times as necessary before committing to a mark, and to always execute them swiftly and from the shoulder.

For your hatching you're adding it to the correct side of the arrow's overlap which helps reinforce the illusion of depth in these objects, but your application of it can be improved, remember that following the principles of ghosting our lines should have clear start and end points, they shouldn't float or end at arbitrary points, so in this case they should go from one end of the arrow's width to the other.

Overall you're doing well in this exercise and your arrows are looking very tridimensional, but make sure to push yourself out of your comfort zone more in the future, your arrows are looking very similar currently, so make sure to explore all the different ways arrows can twist, bend and fold as they move across the world, with different combinations of overlaps and negative space between them.

Leaves

Moving onto your leaves they're looking confident and smooth for the most part as you capture not only how these objects sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment - with the exception of here, where the leaf structure feels stiff and awkward because you attempted to capture the complex shape right away instead of sticking to a simple structure first, this not only hurts the solidity of your structure by itself, but also causes you to hesitate in the execution of your linework.

So remember how leaves should be approached even when it comes to complex leaf structures, it doesn't matter how complex the leaf may seem at first glance, you should always attempt to capture the overall structure first.

Your application of edge detail is coming along very nicely made, you're not trying to capture more than one "piece" of edge detail at a time which allows for you to maintain a greater amount of control over your lines.

I've noticed that you attempted to add texture to some of your leaf structures, you can find here some really useful notes on how to think when adding texture to leaves.

Branches

Continuing on to your branches the instructions for this exercise weren't followed through, specifically in how the edges are to be laid out, which hurts the quality of your work. You're drawing some of your edges with a single stroke which is a mistake and in the cases where you drew them in segments you did not use the methodology shown, starting your new segment at the place where your previous mark ended, which effectively removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve.

By revisiting the instructions for the exercise we can see that each edge should start at one ellipse point, continue past the second, be extended fully up to the halfway point to the third ellipse, once that's done you'll repeat the steps, starting a new segment at the previous ellipse point, not where your line stops. The purpose of this is to get us used to this method of building up complex marks with individual segments, while having them still flow smoothly into one another.

Moving onto your ellipses you're drawing through them twice which is great as this allows for you to execute smoother ellipses, but something you should address is the fact that currently the ellipse's degrees in your branches 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.

Plant Construction Section

Now let's talk about your plant constructions. You're starting to grasp and understand the concepts this lesson seeks to teach and as such you're starting to develop your sense of spatial reasoning. Your work is moving in the right direction, your potential however is being affected by a couple of issues present in your pages, as such I'd like to point them out so that when you revisit these exercises again you can start to get the most out of your practice.

First things first keep in mind that the methods and techniques introduced in this course are not guidelines or suggestions for how you can approach these exercises, they're tools and as such should always be employed as you go through this course, they're very flexible tools even if at points you'll find that you'll have to think for yourself on how to approach a certain construction or spatial reasoning challenge, but you should still make use of the methods introduced, that's because these are the methods that will allow you to understand your reference image, not only how it looks but how it exists as a tridimensional object and how each part of this object relates to the others in space.

Examples of you not making use of the construction methods introduced in the lesson can be seen here - where you're not making use of the complex leaf construction method for these small leaf structures, this heavily impacts their sense of fluidity and solidity - and in here where you don't construct your branch structures for the plant around a minor axis.

In a similar line of thought, an important point you must keep in mind is to make sure to keep the relationships between your phases of construction clear and defined, as such make sure not to leave any arbitrary gaps between your leaf's flow line and it's outer edges, they should connect. You must also respect boundaries established by previous phases of construction, we can see one example of this here where your petal structures extend out of the boundary you establish with the ellipse, this shape establishes a decision being made - this is how far out the general structure will extend - and so the flow lines for the later leaf structures should abide by that, otherwise it may as well not exist.

Another example of this can be found in this cactus where you cut back into your initial forms. 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, stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, this can be achieved by following a couple of rules that'll reinforce the illusion we're creating.

One of the ways we can do this is by never attempting to alter the silhouette of the forms we draw. 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.

So make sure to always work additively with your constructions, don't cut back into your forms or you'll risk flattening them.

When constructing cylindrical objects such as flower pots, do so around a minor axis, in order to keep your several ellipses aligned to each other. It's good to see that you haven't settled for only constructing the main form of the pot, but also included the rim present in many types of flower pots, this helps take the form of the structure further.

For the mushrooms in this page you approach constructing the complex shape on the edge of the cap in a way that resembles the leaf construction method, but since mushrooms are volumetric structures this happens to flatten their structure in a way that doesn't happen to leaves, instead of building complex forms in this manner, instead we should draw them as organics, building on top of what we've already drawn with new, solid forms.

For these structures you don't make use of the forking branches method introduced in the lesson for your stemming branches.

Moving onto your use of texture in this exercise it's pretty sparse, but you seem to be leaning towards the explicit side of drawing texture.

If we revisit how texture in Drawabox is approached, by looking back at this page we can refresh our memory and see that texture through the lens of Drawabox 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, after analyzing all of the information present in our reference we'll be able to translate it to our study. This is why 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, this is why we should consider carefully how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic as shown here.

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. Going forward here are a couple of final reminders of how texture in Drawabox is approached.

Final Thoughts

Overall you have a lot of potential and your work is only being held back by you not always making use of the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson as thoroughly as you should.

I won't be passing you onto the next lesson just yet, as I believe you need to internalize some principles of construction before facing more complex challenges, as such I'll be asking you for some revisions, please reply once you're finished.