Hello DryadMantis, 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 push the fluidity that arrows have as they move through space.

Sometimes the placement of your hatching is at the incorrect side of the bends which disrupts the illusion of depth you wish to create.

• Due to how perspective works, objects which are closer to the viewer will appear bigger, and smaller as they're further away. Following this logic, an object of consistent size that is moving away or towards the viewer must gradually change according to the perspective of the scene. As such, the bigger part of the arrow is always going to be the one closest to the viewer, therefore the smaller part of the segment should be the one getting the hatching.

As a finishing touch for your arrows, keep in mind that additional lineweight should be added with a single, confident line on top of the arrow's overlaps to reinforce their depth.

Leaves

Onto your leaves, the fluidity present in your arrows is carrying over nicely into these structures, this application gives them a great sense of energy and a good flow as you not only capture how they exist statically on the page, but also how they move across this world that they're a part of.

Be wary of unnatural folds in your leaves, while most of your leaves are folding well, I can see at least one case where your leaf structure is bending too much width wise, which is unnatural for leaves as most of their flexibility is present lenght wise.

For your addition of edge detail it's coming across very well as you generally stick to capturing each piece of edge detail individually.

Branches

Your branches are coming out decently, although there are a couple of issues that should be called out, as it seems you missed some of the instructions.

For each of your extended segments, keep in mind that each segment should start at the previous ellipse point, in your homework however you're approaching it by starting your new line around the place where your previous mark ended. This effectively removes the healthy overlaps we wish to achieve by extending our lines, and that's stressed in the instructions.

Remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse, extending it past the second ellipse and extending it fully 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 the pattern until your branch is complete.

Speaking of your ellipses, it's good to see that you're varying the degree shift of your ellipses, just remember to always draw through your ellipses twice.

Plant Construction Section

Onto your plant constructions your work is often coming out quite nicely. Your plants are coming across as very organic, energetic and above all they look very tridimensional as you're making good use of the methods and techniques introduced in this lesson.

Moving forward, here are a couple of things you can keep in mind which will help you take your work to the next level, and get even more out of these exercises.

It's really good to see that you're drawing through all your forms and making great use of the complex leaf construction method, but keep in mind that you should be drawing all phases of construction in roughly the same line thickness, as there are a couple of places where you have drawn parts of your construction that would either be more visible or that are applied later, such as edge detail, with a thicker lineweight. Drawing earlier phases of construction more faintly can make one think of Drawabox exercises as sketching, where the initial lines are only building blocks for the refinement that comes later on. But Drawabox exercises are not sketching, they're drills created with the explicit purpose of helping you develop your spatial reasoning skills, it's important that you commit to your marks and respect the decisions and boundaries that they establish as they all contribute equally to the solidity of your structure. Lineweight itself can be added towards the

end of a construction, focusing specifically on capturing how the different forms overlap one another, as explained here.

Your mushroom construction in page 1 is looking very well constructed, although some of the ellipses in it are looking a little bit wobbly, and you have more than one minor axis drawn for the mushroom body. Make sure to always draw your ellipses swiftly and from the shoulder, and to commit to each and every mark you put down, even when it didn't turn out as intended.

For your coca plant in your second page you're not varying the degree shift of the main stem, which ends up flatening the overall form. You're also not making use of the forking branches method.

For your venus flytrap you don't make use of the branch construction method for the stems, drawing them as shapes flattens the construction.

For this amaranth construction, overall you've approached it well, although there are a couple of things to mention. In these lessons there will be times where you'll find certain structures which aren't always suitable for the methods introduced in this lesson.

For example you'll find that trees often fit this category of unsuitable structures to use as reference, this is because their overall structure is incredibly complex, they have too many leaves and too many branches, which doesn't allow us enough room to capture all of these forms with the construction methods introduced in the lesson. Your amaranth also enters this category as it's an incredibly complex structure.

For your Amaryllis construction, you don't draw these structures in the filament of the stamen ( the inner stems of the flower ) with the branch construction method. This leaves their forms undefined and unclear, and this also ends up hurting the solidity of the overall construction as the form is inconsistent in it's size. There are also other places where you don't cap off a branch and don't make use of the forking branches method for it.

Final Thoughts

I believe you've shown yourself to understand the concepts shown here and be capable of applying them to your work, a lot of it is pretty solid and turning out very well, although you're encountering a couple bumps and hiccups along the way as you don't always apply the instructions as carefully as you should. I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.