Hello PkFreeze, 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.

Something you should keep in mind is the placement of your hatching, as quite often you're inverting it's placement, adding it to incorrect side of the bends which disrupts the illusion of depth you wish to create.

• Due to how perspective works, objects which are closer to the viewer will appear bigger, and smaller as they're further away. Following this logic, an object of consistent size that is moving away or towards the viewer must gradually change according to the perspective of the scene. As such, the bigger part of the arrow is always going to be the one closest to the viewer, therefore the smaller part of the segment should be the one getting the hatching.

Unfortunately it seems that you added all of your hatching to the incorrect side of the bends, but fortunately this means that all you need to do in order to fix this issue is to basically just invert the placement of your hatching.

As a finishing touch for your arrows, don't forget to always add lineweight should be added with a single, confident line on top of the arrow's overlaps to reinforce their depth.

Leaves

You did not submit the required 1 page of leaves for this lesson.

Branches

Moving on to your page of branches it certainly can be improved on, you've got some big problems which are severely impacting the quality of your work. It seems you've largely missed some of the instructions for this exercise.

Let's revisit the instructions for the exercise in order to remember the manner in which branches should be approached. Firstly we must remember that we should not be drawing edges in a single stroke. Remember that over above all else, we're striving for confidence in our lines, by drawing your edges in a single stroke you're hesitating which is hurting the solidity of your forms, in order to strive for confidence and accuracy in our branches we're going to be building our branch's edges in segments, with our first segment starting at the first ellipse, extending it past the second ellipse and extending it fully to the halfway point to the third ellipse, afterwards we'll start a new segment, making sure to place our pen at the second ellipse and repeat the pattern until our branch is complete.

Another important point to mention is that the minor axis is a major step for drawing your branches, this includes drawing a minor axis when adding a forking branch.

For your ellipses you're missing a very fundamental step that is mentioned back in lesson 1, and that is to always draw through your ellipses, fully from the shoulder, and two full times. It's good to see that you're varying the ellipse degree shift in your branches, keep that up as it'll help with the believability of your forms.

Plant Construction Section

Now let's move on to your plant constructions. There's a lot of issues present within your work which are severely impacting how much you're getting out of these exercises, I'm afraid that most of these problems are derived from a desire to do well, but that's coupled with rushing and overall inattentiveness which causes you not to follow instructions, skip construction steps and have several inconsistencies in your pages.

I'm going to be mentioning the most important points that need to be addressed in your work so that you can start to get the most out of Drawabox.

I'd like to start by talking about the inconsistency in your usage of the methods and techniques introduced in this lesson. Keep in mind that Drawabox is a course with the explicit focus of giving you the tools necessary to develop your spatial reasoning skills.

This means always making use of the techniques and methods introduced in this lesson no matter what, as they're the tools which if employed, will help you work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises in the most effective manner.

There are several examples where you make use of the leaf and branch construction methods, which suggests that you're at least in part aware of where and why these methods should be employed, and by not always applying it this suggests that you're either rushing your pages, and not giving each individual construction the time it requires in order to be made to the best of your current ability - or, you're consciously, arbitrarily choosing when to employ these methods, regardless of the reason this is still a mistake that can be fixed with the same solution, always make use of the methods introduced in the lesson.

For your plant constructions there are several places where you're not following the instructions for the leaf construction method because you're skipping construction steps. You're often attempting to capture the complex shapes and bumps in your leaves right away, instead of starting with the overall footprint of the leaf and afterwards building this complexity up as additional edge detail.

Still on the topic of your leaves, make sure not to leave any arbitrary gaps between your leaf's flow line and the outer edges.

Make sure that you're constructing all cylindrical objects - such as mushrooms - around a minor axis.

Remember to always draw through your ellipses.

Another thing that heavily impacts the quality of your work is the fact that you're planning how many constructions you wish to fit on a given page before you actually commit to drawing any of them, it's admirable as it's clear you wish to get more practice out of each page, but this only harms your progress by artificially limiting the space of your page and doesn't allow you enough room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises. Not only that, but drawing bigger will allow you to fully engage your whole arm when drawing.

So draw bigger, as big as it's necessary for you to be able to properly engage your brain and arm when drawing, and make sure to invest as much time as its necessary into that construction. Only after you're done should you observe and analyze if there is enough space left for one more drawing, if yes, great, you can proceed until you finish, and afterwards, ask yourself if there is enough space for another drawing, if not, it's completely okay to have only a single construction per page.

Another thing you should keep an eye on is the fact that you're not drawing through your forms, which keeps the relationships between the different phases of your constructions vague and undefined, which undermines the solidity of the overall structure.

• 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, forms don't stop existing when they become obscured by other forms. Think of it as building a house and having a full X-ray view of the building, it's a tridimensional puzzle that cannot exist before the foundations are laid out, the roof cannot exist before the walls, and the walls cannot exist before the foundation, in that same vein tips of leaves or parts of a construction cannot exist by themselves, they still exist as full forms even when they're partially obscured by other objects. Therefore you should make sure you're always drawing forms in their entirety, this will help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning and make all of the relationships between phases of construction in your drawing clear and defined.

Your use of texture can also be improved as it's often being drawn in a very explicit manner and not following the concepts of texture introduved in Drawabox, however, I feel that since your overall work doesn't follow the instructions, that making use of texture is not going to be incredibly useful for you at this moment.

Final Thoughts

Your work here is unfortunately coming out very poor, this is in part, greatly influenced by the fact that in some level you're rushing through your work and not paying as much attention to the instructions and how to apply them correctly.

I'm not going to be passing you onto the next lesson just yet, it's incredibly important that you show you understand how these exercises work by executing them to the best of your current ability. I'll resume my critique and once you've submitted work that has addressed the major issues present within your work.