I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.
Arrows
Your arrows have a good use of perspective and good overlaps, good job! You do have some minor size consistency problems, where your arrows either narrow or bulge too suddenly for the perspective they are in, but this is something that you'll get better at with practice, you might find it easier to build your arrows in segments.
Your linework can be improved though, your marks aren't as confident as they could be, with some slight wobble to them, remember the markmaking principles from lesson 1 lines must flow smoothly and be confidently drawn, remember to engage your shoulder when drawing lines and to use the ghosting method as many times as necessary before committing to a line.
Your shading is also correctly placed, but remember to add the extra lineweight on top to reinforce it.
Leaves
Your leaves are looking a little bit stiff even though you make use of the leaf construction method due to your linework. Also remember to respect the initial boundaries you estabilish in your first phase of construction as you go outside them in the biggest leaf on the right.
You also don't make use of the method for building complex leaf structures. You go into complexity way too soon here instead of starting with simple forms.
Branches
You're generally following the instructions for this exercise, but there are still a couple of things that can be improved. Firstly some of your branches have a bit of foreshortening applied to them, but this isn't correct, branches must be simple cylinders with no foreshortening.
On top of your unconfident linework, your ellipses are also looking a bit shaky. Remember to use the ghosting method and draw fast, wobbling is caused by our hesitation when drawing, which causes our hand to course correct our mistakes as we draw which results in crooked marks, by drawing faster we don't allow our brains the time to hesitate. You should also remember to always draw from the shoulder, including small ellipses, and to draw through your ellipses twice.
You have visible tails in your compound strokes, this is completely normal, as you revisit this exercise try to superimpose your next segment on top of the last line, even if it diverges from it's intended path.
You're also doing a good job of varying your ellipse's degrees, but sometimes you end up drawing them with no variation like here, ellipse degrees that are too consistent flatten your construction. If we look back on Lesson 2 and it's principles, when it comes to cylindrical-like forms we can see here, here and here that as the end of a cylindrical form turns away from the viewer the degree of the ellipse will increase and that drawing all of the ellipses with the same degree is a mistake.
Plant Construction Section
Before anything else I must mention that you didn't submit the 8 pages required for this section, you've only submitted 5 pages.
Continuing onto your plant constructions, you're doing well by attempting to employ the construction methods for the most part, but you have a couple of key problems that are bringing down the quality of your work.
The biggest problem is that you're skipping drawabox principles such as in this page where the stems of the plants are drawn without the use of the branch construction method and the leaves aren't drawn using the leaf construction method.
You also don't employ the forking branches method for this page.
The purpose of these exercises is to develop our spatial reasoning skills through the use of drills. We're not looking to make clean or nice looking drawings, as such all the methods and principles introduced in the course should be considered and followed when approaching your homework pages.
Many of your pages also have empty spaces that could have been better used not by adding more drawings to your page, but instead by limiting them, which would allow your brain more room to work through the spatial reasonings that arise when tackling these exercises, and on top of that give you enough space to fully engage your whole arm when drawing.
Another big flaw in your work is the fact that you're skipping steps and not drawing through all of your forms, such as in here where you didn't draw the branches through the petals of the top flower and you didn't draw all of the petals of the bottom flower with the leaf construction method, instead relying on drawing them as shapes which flattens your construction, you also didn't draw a minor axis for the stem of the rose.
Even if only a part of the subject we want to draw is visible, all forms should always be constructed fully to allow our brains to work through these spatial reasoning problems properly, it's not about having a good or clean drawing, it's about developing our skills. If a construction has too many parts overlapping one another, we make use of lineweight as outlined here to define where the forms sit in space in relation to one another.
Don't fill in large areas of black in your exercises like you did here it obscures the underlying construction, making it harder to properly evaluate your homework assignment, it also goes against the principles of texture in lesson 2, remember that texture in drawabox is based on the cast shadows, not local value, color, or any kind of hatching or shading technique, all texture applied should be drawn implicitly.
Final Thoughts
You're starting to understand the concepts from this lesson, but I believe that you're rushing your homework and not being careful as you didn't submit all of your pages. This along with your tendency to draw too small is hurting your ability to properly work through the spatial reasoning problems that you encounter in your study session.
Based on this I'm going to assign you some revisions. I'd like you familiarize yourself with all of the Lesson 3 demos before tackling your revisions, more specifically the daisy, hibiscus and potato plant demos as you struggle with drawing through your forms and employing the branch drawing method, these will be the ones that will teach you the most in regards to this. Make sure to read over any other relevant lesson material as well.
Next Steps:
Please reply with:
1 Page, half of leaves, half of branches
4 Plant construction pages, only 1 plant per page.
This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.
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