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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows, your lines are looking confident and smooth which helps communicate the fluidity that arrows have as they move through space. You're making good use of the depth of the page with your use of perspective and your hatching is correctly placed for the most part, you only really get it wrong here.

• When it comes to the perspective, things that are further away become smaller and as they get closer to the viewer they get bigger. This affects objects of consistent size and width that stretch across space in the same way: segments of the object will look bigger and others smaller, as such the bigger part of the arrow will be the one that's closest to the viewer and the segment that's behind it should be the one getting the hatching.

• It's good to see you applying the extra lineweight on top of your arrows, just keep in mind that lineweight should be applied with a single confident stroke superimposed on top of the overlaps of arrow bends. Your application is sometimes a bit too thick, or you forgot to apply it.

Leaves

For your leaves they're coming out a little bit mixed, the leaves where you apply the leaf construction method are quite well made, but often times you're skipping the method entirely. For example in this fern and in this palm leaf, you don't apply the leaf construction method to your fern, and while you make use of the method for the overall footprint of the palm leaf you don't apply the same technique to the inner leaves, this causes them to come out particular flat and stiff, with no sense of energy or flow behind them.

Your addition of edge detail can also use some work so you can apply it consistently, you add it beautifully to your maple leaf but for other leaves you're often cutting back into your initial construction. Make sure that wherever possible you're working additively in your constructions, don't cut back into what you've already drawn, as this often makes us think more about the flat shapes on the page, rather than the solid forms they represent.

It's also very good to see how you approached the more complex leaf construction method in this maple leaf, but remember to apply this concept to your other complex leaf shapes as well, such as the oak leaf where you end up skipping construction steps.

A final note for this exercise is that many of your leaves are being looked at head on, with no overlaps or bends. It's important to practice many different kinds leaves, not only their type but also in their overlaps and bends and different views, as leaves in actual plant constructions will rarely face only the viewer.

Branches

You're doing really well in this exercise. It's great to see you following the instructions by extending your lines as this allows for a healthy overlap between segments, which in turn helps us achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next.

I've noticed that you often have visible tails in your compound strokes, but this isn't a big deal, it's more important to extend your lines correctly as with time your accuracy will naturally improve, you might like to attempt to superimpose your new lines on top of the previous ones in order to get better at this.

Lastly, make sure that you're always drawing through your ellipses twice.

Plant Construction Section

Continuing on to your plant constructions, you're starting to understand and apply the concepts of construction introduced in this lesson. Your work has a lot of problems that are holding your homework back, however, and there are some things I'd like to point out that are going to improve your work.

The first one is that sometimes you're not completely using the construction techniques introduced in this lesson. Such as how you didn't construct this cactus or how you skip construction steps in here by not drawing the petals with the leaf construction method in parts where they would become obscured by other petals. You also don't use the forking branches method in your constructions.

Another thing that could be improved in this cactus is how you're approaching the spikes as flat forms, instead of constructing them as forms.

• The purpose of these exercises is to develop our sense of spatial reasoning through the use of exercises which are essentially drills. Think of how an athetle might repeat the same set of exercises as they train for the olympics, while they won't always execute it perfctly, what's important is that the theory behind it is correct so that eventually they'll expand their skills. Otherwise, at best they could train themselves wrong and end up not improving as fast as they might otherwise, and at worst they could hinder their own improvement or even injure themselves.

  • This is why it's incredibly important for you to draw through all of your forms, as small or as unecessary as you might believe them to be, by drawing through your forms you're helping develop your sense of spatial reasoning and training your brain to think in a tridimensional manner.

Something that's also important to mention is how often when drawing leaves, the confidence in your linework is taking a dip, which hurts the solidity and flow of your leaves, making them stiff such as in here and in here.

• When approaching cylindrical structures such as flower pots and mushrooms, drawing a minor axis first will help with keeping the various ellipses aligned. You're doing well by drawing most of your constructions this way, but sometimes you forget this step.

When drawing your constructions maintain tight specific relationships between your forms. You must complete the construction steps in your plants, such as in your kelp where you don't completely use the leaf construction method by not enclosing the ends of the leaves.

For your coral you're adding the extra detail as flat shapes instead of as tridimensional forms, detail such as in here should only be applied to objects which are already flat, such as leaves, but in objects that have volume to them you must also build extra masses as complete forms.

Also fun fact time! For your sea flora page you also draw an anemone, but despite their overall structure, their colors, their leaf like hairs ( or tentacles ) and several people mistaking them for plants, sea anemones are actually animals. You're also doing ok in it's overall construction, but due to the size of the drawing this is causing you to skip construction steps and not follow the branch construction method.

So remember to draw bigger.

• Right now it seems you're pre-planning how many drawings you can fit into your page before starting any constructions. While it's great to see that you want to be getting more practice out of each page your time and space would have been better used not by adding more drawings to your page, but instead by limiting them. Drawing bigger will allow you enough space to fully work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises, it will also give you enough space to fully engage your shoulder when drawing.

I can also see several places where you're not applying the branch construction method of the leaf construction method, such as in the petals of your calla lilies ( and in this particular page you have one flower construction where the stem just suddenly cuts off, when this happens remember to cap that stem with an ellipse, otherwise the lines will hurt the solidity of the construction ) and in the stems in your hydrangeas which don't have a minor axis or extended lines.

Now onto your questions.

• Doesn't there need to be some balance between construction and complexity? If I draw a pot of hydrangeas, it could have 100s of tiny flowers and possibly 1000s of petals. Surely we can't construct all of these??? (I settled on drawing the shapes of the clusters only).

• Also what about irregular shapes? Such as a bonsai tree? I was not clear on how to accomplish a 3D construction that follows the guidelines. There are just globular regions of plant growth. And when we get down to the level of the needle-like leaves, how do you represent those?

Your first and fourth questions nare actually one and the same, just framed from different angles, as such I'll be answering them both in the same paragraph.

Yes, there needs to be a balance between construction and complexity, you would, possibly quite literally, go insane trying to capture each individual leaf with the leaf construction method in a tree, there are hundreds of leaves in the regular Bonsai tree, and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of leaves in your average tree.

This is an incredibly huge amount of effort and not only that, but it's just really difficult to observe the leaves and individual forms in these kinds of plants. For this reason trees aren't appropriate objects to construct in this course.

The same is true for the hydrangeas and any other incredibly complex plant you can think of. We're here to learn how to construct things and as such it's important to be able to analyze the primitive forms that make up these objects, so focus on individual flowers or small clusters of flowers, small enough in order to be able to fully construct each petal, if you can't see individual petals then your reference is too zoomed out.

• For elements of a fairly complex form that are not seen from the frontal view, drawing lines in the rear of the form that won't be seen gets cluttered and unintelligible pretty quickly. It seems reasonable for a few petals on a flower, but for a complex structure, it seems to get very messy and garbled (see my anemone pic). How do you handle this?

The anemone you have drawn is not actually that complex when compared to other kinds of plants that can be approached, the reason you struggled with it so much is that the drawing is way too small, this turns the construction into a mess of lines and dark ink very quickly, so draw bigger, such as 1 plant per page.

• It is hard for me to imagine ever accurately connecting numerous short lines for stems and other tubular structures in a way that leaves me satisfied. This seems extremely inefficient and inaccurate to me. Particularly with tubes of very thin caliber, how can we possibly accomplish this? Or is this just an exercise to develop some particular skill?

Again this is in part caused by the size you're drawing at, it's important that your constructions are big enough that you can engage your whole arm when working, if your tube is too thin or small for you to be able to use the branch method and engage your shoulder when working, this means you either need a bigger page in order to draw bigger, or get a better reference.

And when it comes to the lines you extend in your branches, this is important as it helps us achieve a smoother, more healthy overlap between lines, as well as maintain more control over them as we draw. Something that isn't quite as possible if we were to draw that entire segment in one stroke.

Final Thoughts

You're moving in the right direction with these exercises and showing a good deal of improvement in your spatial reasoning skills. But as mentioned above your work has a couple of things that are holding you back from reaching your full potential, the biggest points being that you're not giving your work as much space as it truly requires so that you can get the most out of Drawabox, as well as not always applying instructions.

As such I'm not going to be marking this lesson as complete, I'm going to be assigning you with some revisions, as it's necessary that you show that you understand these instructions and how they should be approached by adding them to your work.