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

Arrows

Let's start by talking about your arrows, they're looking quite smooth and confidently made, this helps to communicate the fluidity that these objects have as they move through the world. Your hatching is applied to the correct side of the arrow overlaps but it's technical application can still use some improvement, remember the principles of ghosting mentioned back in lesson 1, lines must have clear start and end points but some of your lines either end at arbitrary places or float in the middle of your arrow. Make sure your lines go from one end of your arrow's width to the other.

Sometimes your arrows are builging or narrowing suddenly, this is detrimental to the illusion we're trying to paint of these arrows: objects of a consistent size moving freely through 3d space. Keep in mind that with perspective, when something is further away it'll become smaller and if it's closer to the viewer it'll get bigger, if an object of consistent size suddenly has parts of it become bigger or narrow when the perspective would allow for it that disrupts the perspective of the scene and the tridimensionality of the object. To improve on this, instead of doing the second curve in one motion, you can try building it in segments with the ghosting method, this way you can check if the size of your arrow's segments are consistent before committing to a line.

After finishing your arrows, never forget to make use of extra lineweight, added on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.

Overall you've done well in this exercise but your arrows still feel pretty safe, they all have very similar rates of foreshortening, overlaps and twists applied to them. In order to improve when tackling this exercise again it's important to get out of your comfort zone more, you can also diminish the negative space between your arrow segments and add more overlaps to your arrows in order to really push yourself and experiment with several different kinds of twists and bends so you can develop your sense of spatial reasoning further.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves the original lines are looking pretty fluid, but once you start adding edge detail your leaves start to look a bit awkward and feel a bit stiff, this is because sometimes you redraw lines for your edge detail which takes away from the original confidence your lines had and makes it unclear to the viewer what the actual line that defines the edge detail is, redoing lines like this goes against the first principle of mark-making.

You're also falling in the trap of zigzagging your edge detail which is a mistake and it should be avoided.

You're also often skipping construction steps because you're not following the complex leaf construction method correctly, since for these structures you don't establish the primitive form of the leaf before capturing it's individual arms, this means that the structure ends up coming out looser than it could otherwise be, keep in mind that even though complex leaf structures contain many individual arms they're still part of a single structure, they all work as a unity and influence one another, as such these relationships should be considered when constructing the leaf by capturing it's overall form first.

You're drawing earlier phases of construction more faintly, be sure to keep the line thickness for each phase of construction roughly consistent, so as not to encourage yourself to redraw more than you strictly need to. Line weight itself can be added towards the

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

Another issue present in your work is that you're approaching all of your leaves by drawing them completely straight on, you're not considering how the center line is more than just a 2D mark, just like in the arrows exercise it establishes how a flat object moves across 3D space freely. In actual plant structures you'll find that it's very rare for leaf structures to be assorted in this manner, instead they'll be found in all sorts of rotations and can be influenced by all sorts of external forces such as the wind or their own weight pulling them down, so you should focus on drawing leaf structures that bend, twist and fold, making use of the entire tridimensional space available to you, and focusing on not only capturing how they sit statically within space, but also how they move across that space from moment to moment, otherwise your leaf structures end up feeling like flat stickers on a page, instead of real tridimensional objects that exist in a real space.

I've noticed that you added texture to your leaf structures, if you take a look at this demo you can find some extra notes on how to add texture to leaves, and here you can find a demo on how to design more dynamic, interesting shadow shapes.

Branches

Continuing on to your branches the instructions for this exercise weren't followed through, you're not establishing the minor axis first before constructing the edges of your branches, this makes it harder for you to keep your ellipses aligned to one another which causes your branches to feel less solid and tridimensional. It's good to see that you're extending your edges in segments most of the time, but you're drawing some of your edges with a single stroke which is a mistake.

By revisiting the instructions for the exercise we can see that we should start our branch structute with a minor axis each edge should start at one ellipse point, continue past the second, be extended fully up to the halfway point to the third ellipse, once that's done you'll repeat the steps, starting a new segment at the previous ellipse point, not where your line stops. The purpose of this is to get us used to this method of building up complex marks with individual segments, while having them still flow smoothly into one another.

The last problems you should address when tackling this exercise again in the future is that you're not always drawing through your ellipses twice, you should also take notice of the fact that your ellipses degrees barely change when they should due to how the ellipse degree shift works, as shown here. Remember that as a cylindrical form shifts towards or away from the viewer, the degree of the ellipses within that structure will also shift.

Plant Construction Section

For your plant constructions it's important to start by mentioning that I believe you could have paid attention more closely to the instructions laid out for this lesson, in the Homework section of the lesson it's clarified that you should submit 1 page of arrows, 1 page of leaves, 8 plant construction pages and that while you're allowed to submit your attempts at the demos alongside your homework, that they should make up less than half of your submitted pages. You submitted 2 pages of arrows, 2 pages of leaves, and for your plant construction pages only 2 of those pages are original constructions.

Moving on to your work your attempts at the demos are looking very well made, but be sure not to leave any gaps between your branch's edges and their ellipses, don't leave any arbitrary gaps between a leaf's flow line and it's outer edges either, they should connect in order to make sure your phases of construction are kept clear and specific.

• When drawing cylindrical structures such as plant pots or mushrooms, be sure to start your construction with a minor axis in order to keep their several ellipses aligned.

For this construction there's a couple of issues present which hold it back from it's full potential.

Firstly while you're drawing your branches around a minor axis, there are some branches that aren't constructed with the branch construction method, not are they constructed with the forking branches method when it would be applicable, for reasons similar to the ones stated in the branches section of this critique this leaves the branch forms inconsistent and flat.

From what I can see you have a tendency to draw your earlier phases of construction more faintly. This can lead us to think in terms of doing a "clean up" pass over our drawings, where the initial lines are less important than the refinement that comes later on, because you start with fainter lines, this encourages you to commit less to each individual mark and to not think as thoroughly over what your lines are meant to achieve, essentially treating Drawabox as sketching, but Drawabox is not sketching.

These exercises were created with the explicit purpose of helping you develop your spatial reasoning skills, in order for this to be possible Drawabox introduces to you different tools that will allow you to break down your reference in a way that helps you understand how it exists in tridimensional space. This is why it's important to make use of the construction methods as they are laid out, as well as treat each individual phase of construction as equally important for your artistic development.

For your attempt at the potato plant demo the camera angle's different from the one in the reference, and the shadows don't all line up, suggesting that you may be thinking that the filled black areas are some sort of arbitrary artistic choice, but keep in mind that they are cast shadows on the ground from the leaves beind so densely packed at the top of the plant that basically no light reaches the dirt underneath.

Final Thoughts

Overall there's not much to critique and analyze if you've understood the instructions for the exercises, while it seems that you're moving in the right direction from your pages, there's also lots of issues which severely hurt the quality of your work, many of them are because you're not following the instructions as closely as you should, based on that I believe that you'll benefit more from revisiting these exercises and tackling some concepts again before delving on more complex methods. I'm going to be assigning you some revisions.