Hello pipoum, 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 nice 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 execute and not end at arbitrary points. It's good to see that you're making use of added lineweight on top of the bends to reinforce their depth, but keep in mind that lineweight must be subtle, with a single mark superimposed on top of the preexisting one in order to clarify an overlap, and integrate seamlessly into the underlying marks.

Generally you're doing a good job with this exercise, I'd like to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise in order to keep pushing yourself. Try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different rates of foreshortening, keep in mind that arrows are very flexible objects and can move freely across the world in all sorts of manners, so you should push yourself and explore the different possibilities.

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.

However you do also have some unnatural bends present in your leaves. Keep in mind that even though leaves are very flexible structures, that mostly applies to their length and not their width. They're like a piece of paper, not a piece of rubber, they can fold and bend in a lot of ways, but they can't stretch or compress, and if you try to force them to they'll simply rip apart.

You're not making use of edge detail in your pages, edge detail would have greatly helped you further communicate the form of your structures and how they move through space, but by not adding it they're left very simple, so make sure to add edge detail whenever possible, and remember that only the last step of leaf construction - texture - is optional.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently made as you're following the instructions for the exercise, you're drawing your edges in segments which allows you to maintain higher control over your marks which allows you to create some solid but still organic looking structures.

There are a lot of visible tails present in these branch structures, while this is a very common mistake we can attempt to mitigate it by limiting the amount of ellipses in our branches, by spacing them further apart we'll allow for a bigger length of runway between ellipses, and ensure a smoother, more seamless transition between marks.

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. It's good to see that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift and making use of it in your constructions, but it can be improved at points, some of your degrees are too consistent and hardly change which is a mistake that flattens your structures. Remember that as a form shifts in relation to the viewer, so will the degree of the ellipses within that structure also shift.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's talk about your plant constructions, I can see the beginnings of you starting to understand the purpose of this lesson, but unfortunately you are falling into a couple pitfalls which severely impact the quality of your work and how much you're getting out of these exercises.

This is because you are not always following the instructions for the exercises and you are not applying them to your work, as thoroughly as possible, you're approaching these exercises more as sketching at points, making use of the construction techniques much more loosely than you should and leaving forms open ended and not always drawing through your forms.

Drawabox is a course that seeks to develop your sense of spatial reasoning skills through a set of exercises and drills. The exercises introduced here give you the tools necessary to deconstruct different structures in a way that allows you to understand how they exist in a three dimensional space and how the different parts of your structure exist in relation to one another.

As such it's important that you [follow all instructions as they are written,](https://drawabox.com/lesson/0 /3/gettingthemost) otherwise you won't be getting the most out of each study session.

I've also noticed that for these pages you had a tendency to choose more complex plant structures with lots of elements to them, while this is not necessarily a mistake it can end up limiting your ability to hone your skills and fully become acquaintanced with the construction techniques and methods, in this case it has hurt your ability to construct branches to their full extent, sometimes skipping construction steps entirely, causing you to draw ellipses that were too small, branches that were too thin and with lots of inconsistent volume to them.

You also haven't constructed forked branches with the forked branches construction method, and you haven't always constructed your leaf structures with the leaf construction method, not starting them with a flow line, leaving them open ended, or drawing their outlines right away, the same can be said about these strawberries which has caused them to look flattened.

In general you should have drawn less complex structures in the same space you've used, and this would have allowed 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.

Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that in several of your constructions you don't draw through some of your forms, such as leaves or branch like structures, 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 you're relying on your observation skills and trying to copy your reference, instead of engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and truly trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, how each and every forms exists in 3d space relative to one another.

And lastly let's take a look at your addition of texture to these structures, which needs some work as it currently does not follow the principles of texture as it's taught in Drawabox, you make use of form shadows in your work with large areas of filled in black, which goes against the idea of drawing texture implicitly and can obscure the underlying construction, making your work harder to evaluate. Your work also looks unfinished as you have highly rendered texture close to structures with no texture to them, such as in here.

So let's revisit how texture in Drawabox is approached, by looking back on this page we can refresh our memory on texture through the lens of Drawabox and see that it is not used to make our work aesthetic or good looking, instead every textural form we draw is based on what's physically present in our reference.

Our focus should be on understanding how each individual form sits in 3D space and how that form then creates a shadow that is cast onto that same surface. Only after analyzing all of this information present in our reference will we be able to translate it to our construction. This means that the shape of our shadow is important as it's the shape that defines the relationships between the form casting it and the surface it's being cast on, which is why we need to consider carefully how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic and communicates this tridimensional information.

This approach is of course much harder than basing our understanding of texture on other methods that may seem more intuitive or basing it on the idea that texture = making our work look good, but in the long run this method of applying texture is the one that enforces the ideals of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following these ideals, you'll find yourself asking how to convey texture in the most efficient way possible, with less lines and ink, focusing on the implicit mark-making techniques introduced in Lesson 2. Make sure to go over these reminders in order to solidify your understanding of texture further.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to your question the answer lies in drawing bigger, as you'll naturally be able to draw bigger ellipses and keep

It seems to me that you haven't taken as much time with your individual constructions and making sure that you always apply the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson material thoroughly to them. As a result it seems you don't fully understand why these methods and techniques are important and how they should be applied to your work, which causes the quality of your work and the usage of these methods to be very inconsistent in your pages.

It's important that you understand how to make use of these techniques to the best of your ability in order to construct a structure that feels tridimensional. As such I'm going to be asking you for some revisions so that you can revisit these exercises before delving into more complex subjects. Take your time to look at the relevant lesson material mentioned here, then please reply once you're finished with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

4 plant construction pages.