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

Arrows

Starting with your 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 foreshortening in mind while constructing your arrows which allows you to make really 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, 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.

You've done a good job on this exercise, what I'd like to tell you so that can keep getting the most out of this exercise is actually to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise, try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different rates of foreshortening, keep in mind that arrows are very flexible objects and can move freely across the world in all sorts of manners, so you should push yourself and explore the different possibilities.

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.

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, in this structure you have skipped construction steps by not drawing the smaller leaf structures with a flow line, the flow line of a leaf is the backbone of the structure and must always be the starting point.

Your edge detail is looking quite well made, you're not attempting to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, and you're often approaching it additively - that is, constructing it on top of your preexisting structure. But remember to also put your marks down with the same general line thickness as the rest of your construction, to avoid redrawing more than you strictly need to.

Moving on to your application of texture it's starting to move in the right direction, however you can definitely push your application of it further, as you've got several small and timid marks and several big spaces of white which would communicate that the surface of your structure is smooth - which is the opposite of what leaf texture is like.

There's a lot more that we can do in order to more accurately communicate leaf texture as there's much more going on than just a few stray marks implying veins, 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 you are starting to move in the right direction as you're drawing your edges in segments which allows you to maintain higher control over your marks and helps you create solid but still organic looking structures, however this confidence is undermined when you then go over your marks again and again, remember the reason why we draw with ink, it's to instill in us a respect for all of the marks we make, if we disregard that our marks will become looser, messier, less confident. So only draw your lines once.

There are a lot of visible tails present in these branch structures, while this is a very common mistake we can attempt to mitigate it by limiting the amount of ellipses in our branches, by spacing them further apart we'll allow for a bigger length of runway between ellipses, and ensure a smoother, more seamless transition between marks.

For ellipses it's good to see that you're making an attempt to always draw through them twice, as that allows for a smoother mark overall, but for many of your ellipses you're actually drawing through them way too much, which causes your ellipses to become too loose and to look too messy and vague. Try your best to draw through only 2 to 3 times in your ellipses to keep them confident but tight and specific.

When it comes to your application of the ellipse degree shift to your branches it can be improved, it's good to see that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift and making use of it in your constructions, but there are some branches where 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 quite nicely made. 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.

This is all very good and it's helping you develop a strong sense of spatial reasoning, however there are a couple of issues present in your homework that are holding you back from your full potential.

First things first you have submitted more demos than your own plant constructions. Make sure to pay close attention to the homework section of the lesson page and any specifications made there, as mentioned in the homework page no more than less than half of your total pages should be made up of demos, in this case since 4 is exactly half of 8, and 3 is less than half of 8, only 3/8 pages should be made up of demos ( yes, it is a bit confusing. )

Demos are like training wheels, they help you learn and understand how these construction methods can be used together in a variety of ways in order to construct certain tridimensional structures, but just like with learning how to ride a bike, you won't know how much you know until you take the training wheels out - and then fall on your face. But it's okay, because the next time you try it it'll be easier because you already have an idea of what you should do.

However if you never take the training wheels out, you won't develop yourself to your full potential.

Ease up on your lineweight, it's thick, with several passes going over the same marks and jump from one form's silhouette to another, which smooths everything out too much. Almost as if you pulled a sock over a vase, it softens the distinctions between the forms and flattens the structures out somewhat.

Instead lineweight must be subtle, used only to clarify the overlaps between the forms that are being built up, as explained here.

Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that in your constructions you don't fully construct some of your forms, such as in here where you didn't connect the monstera plant's branches to the leaves, which makes some of them look like they're floating, make sure to keep the relationships between your different stages of construction tight and specific.

With this narcissus construction you're taking a great first step towards starting to think of how to break down different structures, but it does end up accidentally stiffening the inner structure a bit if you don't approach it with the leaf construction method which naturally adds a sense of flow and energy to your work.

One way in which we can approach this structure that ensures the petal structures are still flowing nicely and that all of the relationships between the different forms are tight and specific is 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 leaf structure, 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.

And lastly let's take a look at your addition of texture to these structures, which needs some work as it's looking very explicit because you're making use of generic hatching to communicate texture at points which is not allowed for this course, as well as big areas of filled in black which cannot logically be cast shadows which sometimes stick to the forms that cast them which is a mistake, they are also contrasted with open spaces of white, you also don't design your shadows with a specific purpose in mind and so there are not a lot of clear focal points of detail in your constructions.

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

Because you've drawn mostly demos it's difficult to fully gauge if you have understood the concepts and principles taught in the lesson, and as such I'm going to be asking you for some revisions before you can move on.

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

2 plant construction pages.