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

In regards to your question the answer is that it depends, due to the nature of these exercises and the variety of references that one might come across there won't always be a clear answer to how dark is too light to add as a shadow. It's up to you, as the one drawing to make these decisions and choose what parts of the shadow you wish to add and which ones you wish to obscure, this also means that it's more important that you understand your reference than it is that you're able to copy it 1:1. But a good rule of thumb is that if a shadow shape is obscuring too much of your construction you're either focusing on local color or a form shadow, and thus should not add it to your drawing.

It's also important to remember that the shadows that we add to our work should only be considered if they're cast shadows if they're a form shadow, regardless of their presence in the reference picture they should be ignored. I go more in depth on this in the texture section under the Plant Construction Section of your critique, but feel free to always ask for clarification if you need.

Without further ado, let's get to your critique.

Arrows

Starting with your arrows you're applying a great sense of perspective to them and your confident linework helps capture the sense of fluidity they have as they move across the page. All of this comes together very well as you're making good use of the depth of the page.

What can be improved here is your application of extra lineweight, as explained [here](https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/4/step 4) extra lineweight should be used to reinforce overlaps, to help differentiate them from the other parts of the arrow, currently you're often applying lineweight to entire parts of the arrow or parts that don't need the extra lineweight, such as the arrow head.

You're also applying several passes of lineweight over your arrow. Remember that lineweight should be added with a single confident stroke superimposed on top of the previous line.

Your hatching is also correctly placed, but do remember that it should still be executed with the ghosting method.

Leaves

You've done really well in this exercise, the sense of flow you had present in your arrows carries over nicely to your leaves, giving them a great sense of energy as they move across the page. Your application of edge detail is also very well executed as you don't try to capture more than one piece of detail at a time, good job.

What can be improved here is that you're often defaulting to drawing your textures explicitly, when you should remember to draw implicitly. Here and here are a couple of reminders on how texture is used in Drawabox.

Branches

Moving on to your branches, I can see that you understand the instructions, but you're falling into a couple of problems. The first is that even though I can see you extending your lines for some of your branches you're not always following this step, sometimes you even completely skip this step and end up drawing your lines in a single stroke, which is a mistake as outlined here.

Remember that the line extension method must be approached by starting a segment at the first ellipse, drawing your line past the second while keeping confidence in mind and then stopping halfway to the third ellipse, with the next segment restarting the pattern from the second ellipse until you finish the branch.

Your branches are also having size consistency problems, remember that branches in this exercise should be approached in their most basic form - no foreshortening and with consistent size.

You have visible tails in your compound strokes but this isn't a big deal, as you continue practicing this exercise your accuracy will naturally improve, but one thing you can attempt is to start superimposing your new line on top of the previous one regardless of how off course it was.

While it's great to see you drawing through your ellipses there are two things I want to mention, the first is that for your smaller ellipses you're not drawing through them twice and that for some ellipses you're drawing more than two times, with one particular ellipse looking like it was drawn through four times this is getting your ellipses to look too loose, ideally you want to draw through your ellipses only two to three times.

Plant Construction Section

Onto your plants, they're coming along quite nicely, but there are a couple of fatal flaws that jump out to me right away and they're responsible for bringing down the quality of your work.

You're not achieving your full potential due to how you're often skipping construction steps in your plants, for example you don't make use of the branch construction method for the stems of the flowers in this page and the body of these mushrooms - which are also looking especially complex as you don't build them up starting from simple forms - despite their basic forms being the same, you also don't make proper use of the forking branches construction method for this plant.

Also for the sunflower in this page you're again skipping construction steps by not fully constructing some of the leaves.

• Remember that the purpose of these exercises is to develop our spatial reasoning skills through the use of drills and repetition of exercises. Therefore it's important that we engage our brain and fully think through any spatial reasoning challenges that may arise by fully constructing every form, even it's not entirely visible.

• All concepts introduced in previous exercises must also be considered and applied to our constructions, so remember to always apply the methods you've learned previously to your homework such as in this plant where you originally use the branch construction method for the main branch, but don't use it to construct the smaller branches.

• Don't leave arbitrary gaps between your flow line and your outer edges.

In this flowerr you completely skip construction steps and draw parts of it as single lines, this doesn't convey any sense of depth or volume to your construction, you don't construct it's stem with the branch construction method either, nor do you draw it's petals with the use of the leaf construction method since there are no flow lines present.

Remember that we're not here to make pretty drawings, we're here to develop our skills and as such must follow all of the instructions in order to get the most out of the course.

Try not to fill in large areas of black in your exercises such as you did here, this obscures the underlying construction and makes it harder to evaluate your assignment. This also goes against the principles of texture introduced in lesson 2. While you're adding texture to some of your plants implicitly which is great you still often go back to drawing them explicitly.

Texture in this course is still based on the idea of developing our spatial reasoning skills by focusing on the small forms that run along the surface an object, if it's thick and rugged, or if it's smooth and sharp, by thinking of the forms that exist in this manner and how light affects them we can essentially communicate to the viewer what it would feel like to run their hands across that object's surface.

This shadow shape is also important as it's the shape that defines the relationships between the form casting it and the surface it's being cast on, only after careful observation can we understand how to best design a shadow shape that best conveys the texture of an object, as well as how that shadow would be affected by the surf ace it's being casted on, as a shadow casted on a rounded will be rounded, while a shadow on a plain smooth surface will suffer less distortion to it's original shape. As introduced here, we can notice that we should focus on each individual form and how it's shadow is cast on neighboring surfaces. Understanding how each individual form sits on the 3D space we're building and closely analyzing all of this information present in our reference is how we're able to translate it to our study.

None of this has to do with decorating any of our drawings, what we draw here is based on what's physically present in our reference image.

This approach is of course much harder and much less intuitive than basing our understanding of texture on other methods. But these techniques are the ones that reinforce the ideals of spatial reasoning that this course seeks to teach. By following these concepts and by applying it to your work, you'll find yourself asking how to convey the texture in the most efficient way possible, with less ink, focusing more on the implicit mark-making techniques introduced in Lesson 2. As a final note, you can find here a couple of reminders on how texture in Drawabox should be approached.

Final Thoughts

Your constructions have a lot of potential, they're already starting to look tridimensional and solid. What's holding your work back is how often you skip or forget to apply the concepts you've learned previously.

You must give each and every one of these assignments the time that they require, this includes revisiting previous lesson material whenever you feel unsure of what your next steps should be.

I'm unsure of how big your drawings currently are, but you might want to reconsider the space you allocate to each individual construction from now on and focus on trying to fit only one construction per page, only adding a new drawing if after finishing the first, there is enough space on the page to add another, since the current size of your constructions isn't allowing you to use your shoulder effectively, for example, you're often not drawing through your ellipses because of how small they are.

I'd like to make sure that you truly understand the instructions of these exercises before passing you onto the next lesson. Make sure to revisit any relevant lesson material mentioned here before attempting your next pages.