Hello SEI4,

Congratulations on finishing Lesson 3! It's good to see you're continuing the course despite a break, today I will be offering you some critique, I hope that my critique proves helpful for you in your Drawabox and art journey.

Starting off with

Arrows

You are executing your lines confidently which makes them look fluid and smooth, good job! You're also adding lineweight correctly, although sometimes you go overboard by trying to apply it to the entire length of the arrow ( remember to only add lineweight to key areas where the arrows overlap ), you're also not afraid of overlapping your arrows which is great.

Here are a few reminders on how to add lineweight.

https://m.imgur.com/OHvr7Mb

https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/4/step4

The struggles you face in this exercise is the minor inconsistency to the size of your arrows, especially at the bends sometimes your arrows will narrow suddenly or look bigger than they should. To tackle this problem you can try building your arrows in segments with the ghosting method so you can see if the width feels right before you commit to a line.

Keep in mind that when adding hatching to the bends of our arrows it should not stop at arbitrary places, it should go from one end to the next.

To finish this part, do not forget to draw through your forms even if a part would be obscured, it's important to draw through all of our forms to properly develop our sense of spatial reasoning.

Leaves

You are beautifully working additively on your leaves for the most part, but sometimes like the leaf on the bottom right and top right you cut back into your initial construction.

With leaves this isn't much of an issue, as they're a flat object cutting back into them won't harm it's solidity like cutting into a sphere or box would, but it's good practice to already start working on them additively so as not to fall on this trap later even if subconsciously.

The leaf on the bottom right could also have been tackled like this instead:

https://drawabox.com/lesson/3/2/skipping

Your texturing here also doesn't seem to follow Drawabox principles, something that you end up carrying into your plant constructions, I suggest rereading the page on textures and looking at this informal demo on a leaf texture before attempting it again.

https://drawabox.com/lesson/3/8/texture

Branches

Sometimes you seem to try to draw your branches in a single stroke, but as you go along you do a good job of building them in segments instead.

https://drawabox.com/lesson/3/2/onestroke

You don't have much feathering which is good! But there are still visible tails in some compound strokes, it's a very common mistake so don't worry too much about it, but to try to improve regardless you can superimpose your new line on top of the next one, even if it diverges clearly from the intended path.

Don't forget to draw through your ellipses, even small ones. You can start practicing small ellipses during your warm ups to get better at this.

I will also tell you that to help with your size consistency problems in this exercise, keep in mind that as a general rule when an ellipse gets a wider degree it means it's turning away from the viewer and therefore it will be the same size or smaller than the ellipse closest to the viewer. As you get into more complex branches this will get more complicated and might not always be true, but focus on simple branches for now.

Plant Construction Section

Now onto your plant constructions, I believe you did well, but didn't always follow through on the Drawabox method for them, which causes a few problems and holds your work back. I will be pointing out some of these things, not necessarily in the order of most to least important.

• We are working in pen so that we're forced to face our mistakes, which is why if we commit one we must accept it and move on, instead of making a second line to try to fix it. Don't draw fainter either, there appears to be a lot of faint lines, underdrawings in your constructions and then darker lines on top, all your lines should be the same dark black so that we're forced to accept them as forms and stick to them, not see them as a "sketches" that we can fix later with darker linework.

• Don't forget to use the leaf construction method, even for petals, they are structured the same at their core, therefore should be approached similarly, many of your plant constructions, more notably flowers don't have a flow line and you immediately jump to drawing only shapes that you see, instead of thinking of how these forms work and then constructing them.

Don't jump into complexity right away, first find the "gesture" of your leaf with your flow line and then use your next two to find the overall simple shape of the leaf or petal, then build that complexity upon your previous construction.

• On this plant you forget to cap the stem with an ellipse, don't leave it open ended.

https://imgur.com/a/fIxgwd4

https://drawabox.com/lesson/3/2/exercisebranches

• I would also like to point out that you don't draw through your forms in many of your pages. As I explained before it's important to draw through them to understand the object better, even if you can't see them.

• In your seventh page, you didn't construct the right plant's stem using the branch construction method.

• Draw pots around a minor axis to keep your ellipses aligned more easily.

It seems you are struggling with adding lineweight, trying to add it to entire forms when it should be added only to key areas to clarify what form is in front. Here's a very helpful demo created by User Weijak, on the Drawabox discord server on adding lineweight and cast shadows to plants.

https://m.imgur.com/a/8Ft3eNI

Final Thoughts

I'm not sure if you are rushing, but it seems that when tackling these constructions you looked for shortcuts ( not using the branch method for things like stems, not drawing petals using the leaf construction method ) drawing shapes instead of constructing your plants properly and not drawing through your forms.

I feel like while you understood the exercises you skipped important steps which end up harming your work and by extension it stops you from developing your sense of spatial reasoning properly.

I won't be passing you to the next lesson yet, each lesson builds on top of the previous and drawing through your forms will be especially important in the next lessons where our subjects won't be flat like leaves and as such will be more affected by a poor underlying construction.

I'm going to ask you for some revisions, I suggest that you read over the Lesson 3 page, watch the videos and the demos if you haven't already, then please reply with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

3 plant construction pages, purely constructional, no texture or detail.

If you're not in it already, have you considered joining the Drawabox Discord?

https://discord.com/invite/FtSS4hhqSu

The Drawabox discord server is the best place to ask for critique on partial work as you move along the exercises, and with the Critique exchange initiative you can make sure that you're always guaranteed a critique even though you're a community member.