Hello FalseQuill, 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 foreshorting 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 good 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, but do remember that your hatching lines must still follow the principles of ghosting and mark-making, they must have clear end and start points, be carefully planned and executed and not end at arbitrary points. It's good that you're making use of added line weight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth, but don't forget that it must be added subtly to your work, only once, on top of the overlaps, and the ends of the lines must taper seamlessly into the lines underneath.

In general you're doing well, so keep tackling this exercise during your warm ups in order to take your understanding of arrows and 3D space further, experiment with the different ways arrows can twist and bend and move across space, try different rates of foreshortening and experiment with the negative space between overlaps, all of these will help you challenge yourself and develop your skills further.

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.

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, as well as putting it down with the same general line thickness as the rest of your construction, all of these are good things that help you construct solid and tight structures that still feel fluid and energetic.

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.

This structure is looser than it could be, because you skipped construction steps and tried to capture the complex form of the structure right away, instead of constructing each individual arm with the leaf construction method and only then connecting them together. Even though leaves are single entities they can still made be made up of several parts.

Branches

Moving on to your branches, you’re deviating from the exercise instructions, specifically in how the edges of the branch are meant to be constructed. It’s good that you’re drawing the edges in separate segments, but you’re not extending each segment all the way to the halfway point between ellipses. This prevents the overlaps we intentionally aim for, which are essential for building smooth, seamless transitions along the branch’s length.

So remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, 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 entire branch is complete.

Additionally, be mindful of foreshortening when drawing your branches. In this exercise, the goal isn’t to explore dramatic perspective or depth, but to practice maintaining consistent widths and smooth, controlled edge transitions. If your ellipses get smaller too quickly or if the branch’s length compresses visually, the structure begins to appear foreshortened, which works against that goal. To avoid this, keep your ellipses consistently sized (unless you’re intentionally tapering) and spaced evenly, maintaining a clear, steady rhythm as the branch moves through space.

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 your ellipse degrees also require attention. The degree of an ellipse should change gradually and logically based on the branch’s orientation in 3D space. As a cylindrical form rotates toward or away from the viewer, its ellipse degree opens or closes accordingly. In your work, some degrees shift abruptly or contradict the branch’s implied direction, which breaks the illusion of solidity. Focus on ensuring that each ellipse’s degree flows smoothly from one to the next, reflecting a natural, incremental rotation rather than sudden jumps. This will help maintain the sense that your branches exist as solid forms moving coherently through 3D space.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are coming along quite nicely. 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 demonstrating in these pages that you're developing a strong sense of spatial reasoning, there are only a couple of things that should be kept in mind going forward, so you can get even more out of these exercises.

First things first, an issue that hurts your work without you even realizing is the fact that you're pre-planning the amount of constructions you want to fit on a given page before you've even committed to any of them. Because of this your pages have big empty spaces that could have been better used not by adding more drawings to your page, but instead by limiting them, which would allow you not only more room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises, but also give you enough space to fully engage your whole arm.

As it stands your constructions are too small and you have also chosen some very complex structures which has limited your ability to make use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in your work.

Always keep in mind that the construction methods and techniques introduced in this course must always be applied to your work, as they're tools which will help you construct much tighter and solid looking structures, there are times where you deviate from the construction methods by not starting constructing your leaves with the correct leaf construction method. Remember that they're not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.

Technically another example of you skipping construction steps can be seen in this tree construction, where you haven't constructed each individual leaf structure with the leaf construction method - however this is not really a mistake, due to the nature of this course and how it teaches certain skills it's fundamental that we're always making use of the construction techniques and methods we learn to our constructions.

But certain structures are just way too complicated and it's not feasible to draw them with the methods introduced, it is simply impossible to fully draw each individual leaf structure or branch structure in a plant such as this one while still following the instructions for this exercise, as such avoid picking trees and similar structures as a subject to study in this lesson.

And lastly, let's take a look at your textures, where your textures are looking very explicit as you're covering the majority of your constructions with too many big areas of black, which goes against Drawabox's ideals of drawing texture implicitly and creating dynamic shadow shapes.

So remember that in Drawabox, texture isn’t about making your work look pretty or aesthetic. Instead, it’s about accurately representing what’s physically present in your reference. The goal is to understand how each form exists in 3D space and how it casts shadows on surfaces. By analyzing the reference closely, you'll be able to translate it into your construction.

The shape of the shadow is important because it shows the relationship between the form and the surface it’s on. We need to think carefully about how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic and communicates 3D space effectively. It’s harder than just focusing on making your work look nice, but this method will help you strengthen your spatial reasoning skills. This also means that by considering the tridimensionality of the form we must consider the transitions from light to dark that your texture would have as the form shifts away in space and if affected differently by the light.

As shown in this diagram, depending on how far the form is from the light source, the angle of the light rays will hit the object at shallower angles the farther away they are, resulting in the shadow itself being projected farther. This gives us the logical grounds to say that despite two forms being identical, they don't have to cast identical shadows - and therefore we can control where we want shadows to be longer or shorter, without changing the nature of the texture being conveyed.

By following this approach, you’ll focus on conveying texture more efficiently, using fewer lines and less ink, while sticking to the mark-making techniques from Lesson 2. Take some time to review the reminders to solidify your understanding of texture.

Final Thoughts

You're moving in the right direction but because you've covered a big part of your constructions in black, it's difficult to truly gauge how much you have absorbed from the lesson material and whether you truly applied the construction techniques to most of your constructions.

I'm not going to be passing you onto the next lesson yet, these concepts will be highly important in the following lessons, make sure to revisit any relevant material mentioned here, once you're finished please reply with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

2 plant construction pages.