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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your linework is looking confident and smooth which helps sell the feeling of fluidity that arrows have as they move across the world. You're also making good use of the depth of the page with your use of foreshortening, and your well applied and correct placement of the shading helps solidify the illusion of depth you wish to achieve in this exercise. One thing you can keep in mind when finishing up your arrows is to always make use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce them and to always apply it with only a single, confident line superimposed on top of the previous one.

You've done a good job on this exercise, what I'd like to tell you so you 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

For your leaves you're doing alright, your initial construction is looking confident and smooth which helps communicate the energy these objects have as they move through the world. As you continue your leaf construction onto the edge detail step however, you don't seem to be putting as much thought behind each of your strokes, this leaves gaps, overshoots, tails, marks that cut back into your initial construction and even some lines that seem to have been reattempted. All of these undermine your construction and contradict the solidity of your forms.

When adding edge detail it can be easy for us to go back to zigzagging our marks or to think our lines are more important as a whole, and thus neglect them individually, not giving them as much time and planning as we should, keep in mind that your edge detail should be ghosted and carefully planned before being added in, it should seamlessly integrate with the outer edges of the leaf in order to leave the edges of the forms clearly defined.

Still speaking of edge detail make sure that you're not trying to add it in with a thicker lineweight than your initial construction, this is present across all your leaves and its something you'll want to avoid as it can encourage us to think in terms of doing a rough sketch and a clean-up pass (where the earlier lines aren't heavy enough to stand for themselves). So for example, the bottom left drawing on this page had you redraw your leaf's top edge when it should have been able to stand for itself, instead of requiring you to trace back over it. Tracing in general is something to avoid when possible, because it tends to make us focus more on how we're following a line on a flat page, rather than how that line represents an edge in 3D space.

Be wary of unnatural folds in your leaves.

I have noticed that you've been adding texture your leaf structures, the texture you've drawn is leaning towards the explicit side and the shadow shapes aren't dynamic. You can find here some notes on adding texture to leaves, and here you can find notes on creating dynamic shadow shapes.

Branches

Moving onto your branches they're coming along pretty decently as you're generally making use of the instructions for the exercise, there's only one thing you can address in order to help these structures feel more solid, at some points such as in here and here you accidentally cut into your ellipses which undermines the solidity of the forms previously established.

Remember the instructions for the exercise, each edge starts at an ellipse point, continues past the second, and stops halfway to the third. You should always start your new segment at the ellipse point, not just close to your ellipse but at your ellipse's edge, furthermore, always treat your ellipse's outermost perimeter as the defining edge of a form.

For your ellipses you can also push yourself further, it's good to see that generally you're making an effort to draw through your ellipses, but you don't always draw through them two full times so going forward you'll like to pay a bit more attention once you execute your ellipses.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly for your plant constructions, your work here is coming out very well executed, you're making use of the techniques and methods introduced previously in the lesson which is helping you develop a very strong sense of spatial reasoning.

You're already doing very well on these exercises, but I'd still like to offer you a couple of pointers so you can start to get even more out of the lesson material.

Firstly, one thing I've noticed is present in many of your pages are little notes or observations about your work, this is something that is discouraged because as we go through these lessons we don't possess the appropriate understanding of what the lesson material seeks to teach and what mistakes to look out for, noting down observations about your work in these cases can reinforce bad habits or make you focus on a different problem than the one that actually should be fixed, as such it's best to trust your critiquer and allow them to be the one to point out what are the issues present within your work.

When constructing cylindrical objects, do so around a minor axis in order to help you keep your ellipses aligned to each other, and going further make sure to also draw mushroom caps around a minor axis, not just their bodies.

I've noticed that you attempted to draw a spore cloud in one of your pages, keep in mind that Drawabox focuses on a single, specific goal which is to help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning through exercises and drills. In this course we're introduced different tools in order to help us achieve this goal, those tools are the construction methods taught in each lesson which help us break down and construct different objects by focusing on their basic forms first and gradually building up complexity, a spore cloud is not made up by a big, definitive main form, a spore cloud is made up of thousands or millions of spores that together create the cloud, capturing these small forms by themselves is not possible, this means that considering the methods taught in Drawabox these kinds of subjects should be avoided.

There are some cases when you attempt constructing flowers where you lay down a boundary ellipse in order to help you decide how far out the general structure of the plant will go, but in one case the petals extend a bit further than that boundary, admittedly this isn't a big issue present in your work as most of your flower constructions respect the boundaries you laid previously very well, but it's still good to mention it as a reminder to always respect the boundaries you establish in your constructions.

I'd like to bring up a previous point in my critique, one that was brought up in the branch section of this critique and show you a moment where you cut back into your forms and as such, slightly hurt the solidity of this cactus structure. The way we're working in Drawabox means we have a lot of freedom to be able to make any marks we choose to lay on our page, but it jus so happens that a lot of these marks will contradict the illusion of form and solidity that we wish to create, and remind the viewer that they're just looking at lines on a page.

So 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 as shown here

Moving onto your use of texture in this exercise we have a big improvement from the texture that you first applied to your leaves, but there's still some things which can be improved. Let's start by talking about filled in areas of black, whenever possible you'll want to avoid them such as in here. This is because not only can they obscure the underlying construction, making it harder to evaluate your homework assignment, but they also don't follow the principles of texture introduced in lesson 2. For this page of mushrooms you often fall into the trap of drawing form shadows instead of only cast shadows.

Let's revisit how texture in Drawaboc 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 mentioned previously.

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 your work here is pretty much fantastic, you're making use of the leaf construction method and the branch construction method to great effect, this helps your work immensely and makes it look very tridimensional. You're clearly developing and demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning and I've got no doubt that you understood the purpose of this lesson and what it seeks to teach, as such I'll be marking this submission as complete.

In the future, perhaps attempt to add less drawings to your page, while you're making great use of the methods and most of your work doesn't seem to have been affected by the size you drew in, some of your constructions were a bit too squished, which limites your ability to focus and work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arised as effectively. It's great to see that you clearly want to get more practice out of each page, but if your page is already full, be it with 1 or 3 plants, even if there is some space left, if that space is not enough to allow you to draw from your arm and have ample space to solve the spatial reasoning challenges that will come up, it's completely fine not to include that drawing.

With that being said, I wish you good luck in Lesson 4.