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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows, you've done really well in this exercise, your linework is confident with only some minor signs of hesitation which helps push the illusion of fluidity that arrows have as they move through the space they occupy. You're also making really good use of the depth of your page which solidifies the idea that these arrows truly exist on a tridimensional world of their own, and aren't just confined to a 2d page.

It's also nice to see you applying your hatching, which is tidy and neat, to the correct side of the bends as well as applying extra lineweight on top of the overlaps.

Overall you've done well and what I can recommend that you keep in mind when tackling this exercise again is to start getting out of your comfort zone more often, there are many different types of arrows as shown in the example homework page so make sure to attempt and experiment with all of them in order to challenge yourself and develop your skills further.

Leaves

Moving onto your leaves the fluidity present in your arrows is translating well into these new structures and they feel pretty energetic. However, something that stands out right away is how almost none of your leaves are bending or folding in some way.

In actual plant structures you'll find that it's very rare for leaf structures to be assorted in this manner, instead they'll be found in all sorts of rotations and can be influenced by all sorts of external forces such as the wind or their own weight pulling them down, so you should focus on drawing leaf structures that bend, twist and fold, making use of the entire tridimensional space available to you, and focusing on not only capturing how they sit statically within space, but also how they move across that space from moment to moment, otherwise your leaf structures end up feeling like flat stickers on a page, instead of real objects that exist freely in an actual tridimensional space.

Your attempts at drawing more complex types of leaf structures are coming along really well done, although for this leaf structure's construction is a bit looser than it could be as you ended up skipping some construction steps, you didn't capture the overall structure of the leaf before drawing the individual arms, when approaching more complex leaf structures consider the following: does this structure, despite how many individual arms it may have, still act as a single structure? If the answer is yes, approaching the structure by drawing it's overall primitive form first will help you create a tighter, more specific construction.

Your application of edge detail is really good. You're not attempting to capture more than one piece of detail at a time which allows you to create a tighter and more specific structure, it's also good that you add your edge detail with roughly the same line thickness as the rest of your construction.

When it comes to your use of texture there's not much to base a critique on, as your application of it is pretty sparse even when it comes to the individual leaf structure, but I heavily recommend that you look over these notes on how to think when adding texture to your leaf structures.

Branches

Moving onto your branches they're coming along very decently as you're generally following the instructions to this exercise pretty thoroughly which helps you create pretty solid and believable structures. There are some small signs of hesitation throughout this page which indicate that you may be slowing down in order to be more accurate with your lines, but remember that above all else your lines must be confident as accuracy can be trained later.

Your ellipses are looking good, it's great to see that you're always drawing through them twice which helps you create smooth and confident marks, but at times they're looking a bit too messy and loose because you draw through them more than three times. Try to aim for two passes over your ellipses at most, as more than this can unnecessarily disrupt the cleanliness of your ellipses. It's good to see that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift and applying it to your branches, that helps you create more solid looking cylindrical structures.

Plant Construction Section

Now let's move on to your plant constructions, unfortunately there are a couple of problems present in your work which are holding you back, it's important that you address these issues as you're showing some good potential such as in your pineapple construction and your mushrooms, they're looking very tridimensional already and if you address these issues you'll be set to get even more out of these exercises.

Right away one of the issues present in your work that heavily impacts its quality is the fact that, as you approach these constructions, you draw smaller in order to be able to fit nore drawings in any given page. This is certainly admirable as it's clear you wish to get more practice out of each given page, but unfortunately this hurts your progress as it artificially limits the space on the page available to you, which makes it harder for you to engage your whole arm when drawing and it doesn't leave you enough room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when working through these exercises, it also forces you to spend less time with each individual construction and to skip construction steps.

You must give yourself as much time and space as you need when working on these exercises, draw as big as necessary to make use of the techniques introduced in the lesson and only after you're done with your first construction should you gauge whether there is enough space left for another drawing. If there is you should certainly add it, but if not, it's completely okay to have only a single construction per page.

The second issue I've noticed in your work but perhaps even more important than the first is that you're not following instructions and you're not employing the construction methods introduced in the lesson.

Examples of you not making use of the construction techniques introduced in the lesson include:

• The fact that you did not follow the instructions on how to draw branches in any of your plant construction pages, despite how well you've done in your page of branches which in part suggests that you either didn't pay as much attention to the instructions as you should and didn't realize you must always follow the instructions to the letter, or you decide to consciously change the method for your plant construction pages. Regardless the solution for this issue is the same: pay attention to the instructions and always apply them thoroughly, do not deviate from them or try to alter the exercises.

• Your leaf constructions are very well done, but at times you completely skip the construction steps for drawing leaves which severely impacts the quality of your work, such as in this Holly construction, where you jump into complexity too soon by trying to capture the complex form of the leaf right away. This stiffens your construction because even "spikey" leaves have a natural flow to them, by not following the instructions you remove this energy and the specificity of the construction which flattens it.

Remember that the purpose of these exercises is to help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning, we only use plants, insects and other subjects as subjects that we can use to study, things that we can break down to their primitive forms for our artistic development, these techniques and methods help you understand better how each piece of your structure sits in space, it's volume and it's edges as well as how each form relates to the others, so make sure to always make use of the methods present in the lesson as the process of doing so will help your brain understand how these spatial reasoning puzzles fit together much better.

A different problem that often comes in tandem with the previous issue is not drawing through your forms, and this is also present in your work in places such as in here and in here. Thus is harmful to your progress because it goes against the skills Drawabox wishes to help you develop.

Think of how an athlete trains for a competition, they'll have a set of exercises that they come back to again and again, and while they won't always execute them perfectly, what's important is that the theory behind it is correct so that eventually they'll develop their skills. Otherwise, at best they could train themselves wrong and won't improve 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, or as cluttered as they might make your construction, by drawing through your forms you're helping develop your sense of spatial reasoning and training your brain to believe that the lines you draw on the page exist in a tridimensional space.

• When constructing cylindrical structures such as plant pots and mushroons, make sure to start them around a minor axis in order to keep their several ellipses aligned.

Final Thoughts

Due to a couple of different factors your work is suffering in quality and you're not getting as much as you otherwise would in the lessons. I'm not going to be moving you onto the next lesson yet, each lesson builds on top of the previous one and introduces even more complex concepts, if you haven't grasped the concepts in this lesson and haven't been able to apply these techniques to the spatial reasoning puzzles that arised then you'll struggle in the following lessons.

As such I'm going to be assigning you some revisions in order to give you the opportunity to review these methods and techniques before tackling more difficult exercises.

Please revisit the relevant lesson material then please reply with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

4 plant construction pages.