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

Arrows

Let's start this critique by looking at your arrows, which are looking pretty fluid and energetic as your lines are very smooth and confident. You're also making really good use of the depth of the page with your usage of perspective and foreshortening in your arrows, this gives them a nice extra layer of tridimensionality.

It's good to see that you're making use of added lineweight as a finishing touch for your arrows, as well as adding hatching which helps you clarify how your arrows twist and turn in space and reinforce your spatial reasoning skills, however your hatching lines often end at arbitrary points or float in the middle of your arrow, remember that all marks made in this course must follow the same principles of mark-making, make sure your marks have a clear start and end point, going from one end of your arrow's width, to the next, and of course, always execute them with the ghosting method.

In general you're doing well, so keep tackling this exercise in order 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

Your leaves are looking pretty good as the fluidity present in your arrows is translating really nicely into these new structures, you're not only capturing how they sit statically within space but also how they move across the world from moment to moment.

It's good to see that you're also experimenting with some more complex types of leaf structures, and doing so by following the instructions, which allows you to create a much tighter and more solid looking structure that still feels flexible and energetic.

Your addition of edge detail it's coming along quite nicely, although there are some points that can be improved. Generally, you're not trying to capture more than one element of edge detail at a time, although there are a couple of places where you do end up zigzagging your edge detail which is a mistake that goes against the third principle of mark-making from lesson 1. You're often laying down your edge detail additively, on top of the structures you've already drawn, which is great.

You have a tendency to go over some of your marks more than once, especially around the silhouette of your leaf structures, when constructing your edge detail make sure that you're always keeping your line thickness roughly consistent between phases of comstruction, so as to not encourage yourself to redraw more than you strictly need to. Lineweight itself is a tool that should only be employed to clarify the distinction between overlaps.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they're coming along decently made as you're generally following the instructions for this exercise, although it's still possible to strengthen a couple of points and stick to the instructions for how to draw branches more closely. It's good that you're drawing your edges in segments, but you're often only drawing them up to the next ellipse, not past it and completely up to the halfway point between ellipses, which essentially removes the healthy overlaps we want to achieve between our marks.

So make sure to revisit the instructions for the exercise, remember that you must start a segment at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully to the halfway point between the third and second ellipses, with a new segment repeating this pattern from the 2nd ellipse and so on until your branch is complete. This helps us maintain higher control over our lines and allows for a healthier, more seamless transition between marks.

For your ellipses it's good that you're putting in the effort to always draw through them twice. You seem generally aware of the ellipse degree shift which is good, as it helps you solidify the tridimensionality of your branches, but it can be better, as sometimes your degrees don't change as much as they should, so don't forget that as a cylindrical structures shifts according to the viewer, so will the ellipses in that structure also shift.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are generally coming along really well made, you're making use of the construction techniques introduced in the lesson and to quite great effect, which helps you create some very tridimensional looking structures. You're certainly demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

Of course there are always a couple of things that we can improve, as such here are some of the points you should keep in mind whenever you tackle these exercises again.

I've noticed that despite your good usage of edge detail in your page of leaves, it's almost non-existant in your plant construction pages. Despite it's misleading name, edge detail is actually another essential step of the construction process and it will help you further communicate how your structure exists in 3d space. Only the last step of construction - texture - is optional.

• It's good to see that you're constructing your plant pots around a minor axis, that helps you keep your several ellipses aligned to each other more easily, we can still push this construction further though by constructing the outer rim that's present in most types of plant pots, as well as adding an inner ellipse to the pot to indicate the thickness of the border.

It's good to see that you're making use of boundary lines for several of your plant constructions as they can help us keep our structure more tightly put together and maintain more specific relationships between our phases of construction, but there are a couple of times where your marks go outside of the boundaries you've established, such as in here where it's difficult to tell what the purpose of the boundary line is, because all of the structures go past it, which means that it may as well not exist. When you place down a boundary, make sure to follow it specifically.

I've 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. I believe this ended up contributing to an issue I found within your work: the fact that you're not always drawing through your forms, since the complexity of the structures made it incredibly difficult to keep your work tidy and clean.

For example, in this construction you've drawn through some of your flower structures, but you did not fully construct the stem structures that should connect these flowers to the ground, even cutting some stems off when they wouldn't be visible to the viewer anymore. In that same vein, you didn't fully construct the petal structures in this construction, you've only drawn the parts that would be visible to the viewer.

Make sure that you're always drawing through your foms and constructing them fully, as otherwise you'll be limiting 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, what it attaches to, how it exists in tridimensional space.

You still have a big tendency to add too much lineweight to your structures, remember that lineweight must be subtle, only a single pass on top of a line to thicken it slightly, not several passes over the same line.

Final Thoughts

Overall your work is really good, and the only reason you haven't reached your full potential is because of a couple of stumbles and issue within your work, make sure to keep these points in mind when tackling these exercises again in order to get the most out of Drawabox. I believe you've understood the concepts and techniques introduced in the lesson, and that you're ready for the construction challenges present in the next lesson. I'm going to be marking this submission as complete, good luck in Lesson 4.