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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows they're looking quite fluid due to the confidence which they're drawn. You're making good use of the depth of the page with your use of perspective.

Don't forget the last steps for this exercise, your hatching is barely noticeable and hardly helps separate your arrow segments. Your shading should be neat and tidy, your lines here also rely on the principles of mark making introduced in Lesson 1, lines must have a clear start and end point, as such your lines should go from one end of your arrow's width to the next. After your arrow is complete add lineweight to reinforce your arrow overlaps, you apply it sometimes, but not always, so don't forget it.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves, the fluidity present in your arrows is transfering nicely into these structures. They're looking energetic as you capture not only how they sit statically within space, but also how they move across the world.

I've noticed that essentially none of your leaves have edge detail applied, with the exception of one. If we look back on the instructions for this exercise we can see that out of the steps depicted, only step 4 is optional.

You also end up skipping construction steps for this structure, by attempting to build your leaf this way you hurt it's solidity, we can see here how the complex leaf construction method can be used in order to main fluidity and solidity when approaching less conventional leaf structures.

Branches

Some of your branches deviate a bit from the instructions for this exercise. Keep in mind the characteristics for branches, simple cylinders of consistent width with no foreshortening.

While it's good to see you extending your lines, often times you don't start you next segment at your ellipse point, which can leave gaps between your lines and hurts the solidity of your forms.

Remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse, and stopping halfway to the third, with the new segment repeating the pattern from the 2nd ellipse until your branch is complete. This helps us maintain control of our marks and allows for a healthy overlap between them, which helps to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition.

You should also make sure to always draw through your ellipses twice.

Plant Construction Section

Now for your plant constructions, your work is overall very good and looks incredibly, you're applying the methods and techniques shown here to great effect. There are however a couple of points that you should keep in mind going forward in order to take your work to the next level.

The first thing that stands out to me right away is the fact that you're drawing earlier phases of construction more faintly, and often tracing back over your initial constructions, by doing this you miss out on the original confidence that your original lines had, stiffening parts of your construction and reminding the viewer that they're looking at a series of lines on a page as tracing puts focus on following 2D lines, instead of focusing on the 3D forms that they represent.

Drawing earlier phases of construction more faintly can also make one think of Drawabox exercises as sketching, where the initial lines are less important than the refinement that comes later on. But Drawabox exercises are not sketching, they're drills created with the explicit purpose of helping you develop your spatial reasoning skills, it's important that you commit to your marks and respect the decisions and boundaries that they establish, as such all phases of construction must be drawn in roughly the same line thickness. 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.

• When approaching cylindrical structures such as flower pots, make sure to draw them around a minor axis in order to keep your various ellipses aligned. For flower pots specifically also make sure to fully construct the rim of the border, it's great to see you're already thinking about it, but don't forget to add an inner ellipse to indicate the thickness of the rim.

Often times your constructions don't fit your page, and you end up having to cut them off. In the case that your construction is too big to fit on your page, make sure you don't add the pieces that would get cut, spheres and leaves should simply be left out, and branches and stems that would continue can be cut short and capped off with an ellipse.

Your mushroom constructions, as well as your cactus are looking good.

For the flower in the same page as your cactus I've noticed that you don't completely apply the leaf construction method as you leave a gap between your flow line and your outer edges, I've also noticed that said outer edges were drawn in a single stroke.

Leaving gaps between your phases of constructions keeps the relationships between your forms unspecific and vague, which hurts the solidity of the forms.

When you establish a form, don't attempt to alter it's silhouette, altering it's silhouette won't alter the form it represents, it will only break it's connection and solidity as a 3D form. This is what happens in your attempt at the bunny cactus demo, once you put down a form, make sure to treat it's outermost edge as the maximum boundary for your form.

The same is true when you establish boundaries for petal structures in your flowers, due to the flow lines for the petals going past the boundary laid out by the previous phase of construction (the one where you established the simple overall footprint for the structure). The bigger shape establishes a decision being made - this is how far out the general structure will extend - and so the flow lines for the later leaf structures should abide by that. It's just easy to forget that when these previous shapes don't actually define forms as much as spatial boundaries/scaffolding for us to use.

For this plant construction you're zigzagging your edge detail, which is a mistake as outlined here.

Final Thoughts

Overall, you've done a pretty good job with these exercises, you're applying the methods and instructions to your work which is giving it a great sense of form. Don't forget to keep the points I've mentioned here in mind to take your work into the next level, I'll be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.