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

I'll start by answering your question.

An I allowed to stop ghosting my lines now?

No. Ghosting is an important part of planning your lines, without ghosting you cannot plan your lines, thus they will be more inaccurate and less confident. You must ghost every line you make in this course.

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 foreshortening 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, it's also good that you're making use of added line weight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth, however don't forget that this added lineweight must be added subtly, with a single mark superimposed on top of the overlaps only, not the entire length of your line.

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

You did not submit the requested one page of leaves for this lesson.

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 and helps you create 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 you need to stick to the rules more thoroughly, there are places where your degrees are too consistent and hardly change, and places in which the way the ellipse degree changes is inconsistent with the rules, either getting larger when it should be thinner or thinner where it should be larger. So don't forget that as a form shifts in relation to the viewer, so will the degree of the ellipses within that structure also shift according to the way the branch is positioned.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are starting to come along in the right direction. 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, but you are coming across a couple of obstacles that are keeping you from reaching your full potential. So here are the points you should look out for whenever you tackle these exercises again so that you can start to get the most out of this Lesson.

First things first, an issue that hurts your work without you even realizing it 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 you haven't used the space available to you on your page as effectively as you could have, instead of adding more drawings to your page you should start to limit 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, which leads me into the next point.

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 constructing your branches with ellipses and skipping straight away to drawing the outer edges, such as in these constructions which flattens your structures. You're also skipping construction steps by not following the correct method to construct forking branches and knots which causes your work to look flatter and less specific than it could be. Remember that these are not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.

When it comes to your leaf structures they often bend unnaturally. 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 leaf constructions, 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.

Ease up on your lineweight, it's thick and you go over almost the entirety of your lines in most cases, but lineweight should not jump from one form's silhouette to another, as that smooths everything out too much. Almost as if you pulled a sock over a vase, it softens the distinctions between the forms and flattens the structures out somewhat.

Instead lineweight must be subtle, used only to clarify the overlaps between the forms that are being built up, as explained here.

And lastly let's take a look at your addition of texture to these structures, which needs some work as it's looking very explicit as you add too many big areas of black to your work, which goes against the concept of drawing implicitly. You also don't design your shadows with a specific purpose in mind and so there are no focal points of detail in your constructions which leaves no places for your viewer to focus on or any areas of rest for their eyes, there's no contrast and so everything competes to keep the viewer's attention.

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

In general you're starting to move in the right direction but you're still struggling on a couple of points and applying these methods consistently to your work, as such I believe you would benefit from tackling these exercises again before moving on to more complex tridimensional challenges.

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

2 plant construction pages.