Hello Mspurrr, 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, this helps to communicate the fluidity that arrows have as they move across the page.

Your base arrows are pretty good but there are some things you can do in order to take them to the next level, the first being the execution of your shading as well as it's placement, and to not forget to add extra lineweight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.

When it comes to hatching/shading in Drawabox there's an important thing to remember and that's the fact that hatching is also made up of lines, so they should be given the same treatment as all other lines we execute in this course and given the same amount of care and effort put into them, regardless of how many there are. So make sure that when adding hatching not only to arrows, but other forms as well, that you're doing so from the shoulder, and making use of the ghosting method, make sure that your lines have clear start and end points, in the case of arrows this means your lines should go from one end of your arrow's width to the next and not end at arbitrary places.

For the placement of your hatching, sometimes you've added it to the incorrect side of the arrow bend, which contradicts the illusion of depth you wish to achieve.

• Due to the way perspective works objects will appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when further away, even if they're the exact same size. Following this logic, an object of consistent size moving through space should have parts of it grow bigger, and others become smaller based on the perspective of the scene, so the bigger part of the arrow is always going to be the one closest to the viewer, therefore the smaller segments should be the ones getting the hatching.

Leaves

Continuing on to your leaves you're starting off strong, the fluidity present in your arrows is carrying over nicely into them, you're not only capturing how these objects sit statically within space but also how they move across that space from moment to moment.

Your use of edge detail is sparse but in general very well made as you capture each bump with it's own single stroke, this allows you to maintain tighter control over your lines and allows for your structure to be more solid as all of it's phases of construction are clearly defined.

Speaking of clearly defined, there is one case where the construction of your leaf structure is less tight than it could be, and that's because you miss a step of the complex leaf construction method, even though complex leaf structures will have many individual arms or pieces to their structure they still often function as one entity, one leaf, with all the sum of it's parts working together to create the whole, in this manner it's important to start by establishing the overall footprint of the complex leaf, this will help you maintain the relationships between the individual arms of the leaves more solid and consistent.

Branches

For your branches it seems you have missed some core concepts found in the instructions for the exercise, as such you're not following the method to the letter which brings down the quality of your work as well as how much you're getting out of it. Currently for your branches you're drawing your edges in a single stroke, which is a mistake as outlined here, since it basically removes the healthy overlap between segments we seek to achieve in this exercise and makes it easier for you to lose control of your lines. In the cases where you're not executing your entire edge in a single stroke you're still not following the instructions fully because you end your segment at the ellipse point, when you should be extending it.

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.

It's good to see that you're drawing through your ellipses twice, as well as making a good effort to vary the ellipse degree change between you ellipses. This is something that will greatly help with making your branches feel and look tridimensional.

Plant Construction Section

Now onto your plant constructions - we have a lot to talk about. Unfortunately it seems that by and large, you have not followed the processes introduced previously in the lesson, this heavily impacts your work and causes leaves to look stiff and awkward, stems to lack solidity and spindly and the overall constructions to look flat, instead of feeling like real, actual objects which have volume and are believable and structurally sound, not existing on a flat page, but instead in their own tridimensional world where our page acts as a window into that dimension.

I'm going to be walking you through some of the issues present in your work and how you can address them in the future.

The first problem is that you're not using the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson, even though in your leaves page you show a good understanding of how leaves should be approached, in this page, this page, and this construction and others there are places where you're not approaching your leaves with the correct leaf construction method because you're not drawing through your forms and sometimes attempting to capture the complex bumps on the leaf's form instead of starting with a basic structure, this in part suggests you have either not paid as much attention as you should have to the instructions for these exercises, or that you rushed your later work.

Regardless of the reason we should approach the problem with the same solution, pay careful attention to the exercises and methods introduced, these methods and techniques are not guidelines, they are not suggestions, they are tools. Tools who serve a very specific goal of aiding you as you work through these exercises because they're techniques that force you to engage your sense of spatial reasoning, they force you to think not only about how these structures look, but also how they work and exist in a tridimensional space, how each form not only exists by itself, but how it's influenced by the other forms it attaches to. Not following these methods and techniques means you won't be engaging this part of your brain, and as such, won't be developing the skills that this course seeks to teach.

Another thing that you must keep in mind is that you should always draw through your forms, draw not only the part that is visible to you, but draw the form in it's entirety. I've noticed that in several of your constructions you don't draw through many of your forms, in some cases you don't draw through any of your forms, this limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise as not drawing throug your forms means relying on your observation skills, instead of engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and truly trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, where it comes from and what it attaches to.

• It's incredibly important for you to draw through all of your forms, as small or as unecessary as you might believe them to be, forms don't stop existing when they become obscured by other forms. Think of it as building a house and having a full X-ray view of the building, it's a tridimensional puzzle that cannot exist before the foundations are laid out, the roof cannot exist before the walls, the walls cannot exist before the foundation, and the furniture cannot exist before the building itself, in that same vein tips of leaves or parts of a plant construction cannot exist by themselves, they still exist as full forms even when they're partially obscured by other objects. Therefore you should make sure you're always drawing forms in their entirety, this will help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning and make all of the relationships between phases of construction in your drawing clear and defined.

This page and this page are some of the places where you're skipping construction steps by not drawing the stems for the flowers with the branch construction method which as explained before leaves their relationship to the rest of the flower structure vague and unclear, it also flattens your work. This is also a problem for this parsley and this mother of thousands where you start to zigzag your edge detail, which is a bit worrying as you have shown yourself to be capable of building your edge detail really nicely before, so this sudden haphhazard edge detail definitely suggests some level of rushing. Zigzagging your edge detail is a mistake that goes against the third principle of mark making from lesson 1 and is something you generally want to avoid.

In the cases where your edge detail is a bit more complex as it changes the structure of the plant itself you can keep these notes in mind on how to work on a construction with a subtractive technique. You're moving in the right direction with it in this monstera deliciosa but keep in mind that you'll still be following the overall structure of the leaf as your guide for the construction, as such you should not ignore the boundaries that your initial leaf construction establishes and stick by it, making sure that all your lines start at your outer lines, cut back into your form, and then come back to your outer edge.

I would like to talk about your page of succulents which feel particularly flat, this is not only due to not making use of the leaf construction method but also due to the nature of succulents, which are plants that have naturally thick leaves, while their leaves still follow similar principles to regular leaves, it's important to also capture this thickness in order to properly show their tridimensionality and form. You can see here an example of a succulent I've drawn, where after making use of the leaf construction method I make use of contour lines around the leaf's lenght in order to indicate the thickness of the form.

Your linework is less confident in your plant construction pages than it is in your first exercise pages, but it's especially wobbly in this snake plant since it's made in patches, instead of being executed with a single stroke. Remember the principles of mark-making from Lesson 1, marks should be continuous and unbroken.

I heavily recommend that you take a look at the demonstrations for this lesson, as well as taking a look at the informal demos page as they contain some good and useful information when approaching plant construct which can be missed sometimes.

In specific, I heavily recommend taking a look at the daisy demo, the pitcher plant demo and the cactus demo. I recommend these demos because they cover most of the techniques we're going to be using in this lesson very thoroughly by using different kinds of plant structures.

The last thing that heavily impacts the quality of your work, but not less important than the other points mentioned today, is the fact that you're planning how many constructions you wish to fit on a given page before you actually commit to drawing any of them, it's admirable as it's clear you wish to get more practice out of each page, but this only harms your progress by artificially limiting the space available to you on your page and doesn't allow you enough room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises. Not only that, but drawing bigger will allow you to fully engage your whole arm when drawing.

So draw bigger, as big as it's necessary for you to be able to properly engage your brain and arm when drawing, and make sure to put as much time as it's necessary into that construction, only after you're done with your first construction should you gauge whether there is enough space left for one more drawing, if yes, great, you can proceed until you finish and afterwards ask yourself if there is enough space for another drawing again. If not, it's completely okay to have only a single construction per page.

Final Thoughts

Now, your work here is generally doesn't follow many of the instructions for these lessons, which is a shame as your first pages started out really well.

Now I'd like to address the submission comment you've uploaded alongside your homework, as it does concern me slightly and makes me suspect the quality of your work may be tied to it. Just in case I'm misunderstanding, based on your comment it seems that you have encountered many bumps while tackling these exercises and struggled with working on your homework pages - struggles which you refer to as "artist's block" - you decided to take a break from the lesson material and once you've felt ready to come back, you completed all the remaining homework pages in a tight 8 hour window.

If I'm correct in my assessment, I'd like to mention that the work that is assigned in this course should not be viewed through a "creative" lens, it is not "creative" work. It is purely analytical in nature, we look at a reference image, we strive to observe and understand the object depicted and afterwards we make use of the techniques we've learned in the lesson in order to construct that object on our page.

As explained back in Lesson 0, every student submitting for official critique needs to hold to specific responsabilities. This includes taking all the time they require to execute the work assigned to the best of their ability. It seems that in this case, this was not held to entirely.

I understand that this was because you, in some way, felt lost and struggled to execute the homework, and so when you finally felt motivated to come back to the material you focused on pushing through and just getting it done. I understand whh that might happen, but unfortunately work that is rushed in this manner does not hold to the concepts introduced in the lesson - which you've demonstrated a clear understanding of in your page of the leaves exercise - and it doesn't demonstrate the best of your current ability. As such, we're limited in the help that we can offer, as the critique we can give based on that does not actually address your own misunderstandings, because you would have figured those out on your own, without our help.

Of course, part of the issues present in your homework pages might have been caused by the very break you took, as we're prone to forgetting the concepts introduced in the lessons and missing key steps of the instructions when we haven't revisited the lesson material in a long time, but in these situations we cannot just march forward from where we've left off - it's like going to the gym for a year, and then not exercising again for months on end, once you go back to working out frequently you'll need to rebuild those muscles and the stamina you once had, you should start out with the lighter weights, plenty of stretches and warm-ups, instead of trying to bench press 150 kilos immediately upon re-entering the gym.

In the same manner that we must rebuild muscle mass after not working out for a while, we must refresh our knowledge of the lesson material by revisiting the exercise's instructions and the concepts the lesson seeks to teach, as well as any demos that are available to us, if we haven't gone through them already, and do a couple of long warm-up sessions - in the range of 20-30 minutes - so that we can make sure that we won't forget the very concepts we're meant to demonstrate when tackling this lesson.

Now, I'm not going to be passing you onto the next lesson. Unfortunately your work doesn't follow the instructions and as such you haven't shown a good sense of spatial reasoning in these pages, the later lessons will be even more complex and complicated, so it's important that you show you understand these concepts by applying them to your work correctly and consistently.

Please reply with your revisions once you're done.