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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows their linework is looking smooth and confident which helps sell the feeling of fluidity that arrows have as they move across the world.

Your hatching is neatly applied, although you could improve on it slightly by making sure that your lines have a clear start and end point, and thus go from one end of your arrow's width to the other, without floating or ending at arbitrary points. It's also good that as a finishing touch you're making use of additional lineweight on top of the overlaps.

Still speaking of your hatching, sometimes you're adding it to the incorrect side of the bend, which makes it seem that the bigger part of the arrow is moving away from us - the viewer - and that the smaller part is much closer. This can be seen in this arrow.

• Perspective works in the following manner: things that are further away from the viewer will look smaller, and as they get closer to the viewer they'll look bigger. The way this affects an object of consistent size and width that stretches across space is that certain segments of that object will look bigger and others smaller, either gradually or dramatically depending on the perspective of the scene, as such the bigger part of the arrow will always be the one that's closest to the viewer so the segment that's behind it should be the one that you apply the hatching to, in order to signify that it's behind the bigger segment and thus, further away.

Leaves

Onto your leaves they're looking very fluid and energetic due to your confident lines, however an important thing to note is that not many of your leaf structures fold or bend in this page - a trend that continues in your plant constructions. That's something to keep an eye on whenever you tackle this exercise again, as leaves are organic subjects - they're affected by all sorts of forces, from the wind to gravity and their own weight pulling them down, as such you'll improve much more by also thinking about the way these objects will look when they move through the world.

Make sure to keep your phases of construction tight and specific, don't leave gaps in between your flow line and your outer edges, they must connect.

It's good to see that you're exploring with the complex leaf construction method but as mentioned above it's important to keep your phases of construction tight and specific, in order to ensure a complex structure is kept tight and specific you shouldn't skip construction steps, which you do for all of your complex structures by not first capturing the main form of the structure that later forms will abide to.

Your application of edge detail is pretty decent as you're not trying to capture more than one piece or bump of detail at a time, and you're adding it in with roughly the same line thickness as the rest of the construction, all of this ensures that you're drawing a much tighter and more solid looking construction.

Branches

Your branches are looking really well made as you're following the instructions to the exercise and the correct methodology for how the edges are to be laid out, on top of that your accuracy is really good and your lines run into each other while still maintaining confidence.

Sometimes you accidentally cut back into your ellipses which slightly undermines your initial construction, to avoid that make sure to always start your new edge segment at the ellipse's outermost edge, and to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the defining edge of the form.

Still speaking of ellipses it's good to see that you're making the effort to always draw through them twice, and it's good that you also seem aware of the ellipse degree shift, although some of them are a bit too consistent which slightly flattens your form, so make sure that you're adding variation to your ellipse's in order to make your cylindrical forms feel more believably tridimensional.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions. Look through your work, your attempts at the demos are good as they all stick closely to the instructions for the exercises. Your own original constructions are also quite solid and tridimensional looking, you're definitely on the right track, but there are still a couple of things that must be addressed before you can start to get the most out of your Drawabox homework.

Here are some of the issues present in your work which you should pay attention to in the future;

• Not always making use of the methods introduced in the lesson.

More specifically the method for how to construct forking branches, which is used intermittently and arbitrarily, as well as not making use of the leaf construction method for the leaves in this structure.

Keep in mind that the methods and techniques introduced in this course aren't suggestions or guidelines, they're tools which will help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning by helping you break down your reference into tridimensional forms and understand how each piece of an object sits in 3d space, and how those forms can be manipulated, oriented, and how they relate to one another in space.

As such you must always make use of them. When you don't make use of the forking branches method the relationships between your forms are left unclear and vague, and when you don't make use of the leaf construction method you're essentially not constructing any form, as single lines do not hold any sense of volume or tridimensionality to them, especially at the scale we're drawing in - which means that the leaf structures in this page flatten your work, they remind your viewer that they're just looking at lines on a page, and they don't help you further your understanding of 3d space.

This crassula plant construction has a couple of issues with it, which need to be addressed. Besides the fact that you don't make use of the leaf construction method for these structures, another issue is that your forms seem really haph-hazardly made and rushed, you did not give this plant as much time as it required and some of the forms were in some level added to the construction without proper consideration of how they existed alongside other forms.

This is noticeable because of stray marks and lighter marks that don't denote any form, which seem caused by you moving your pen, but not fully committing to the form you were going for. You also don't draw through your forms, which is another mistake because drawing through our forms allows us to fully explore the subject we're drawing and how each piece attaches to one another, by not drawing through your forms you not only make it harder for you to understand how your forms relate to one another, but it also means you have to rely on guessing and become more careless with their placement.

It's also important to mention that your contour lines don't really...do anything. For example this contour is really vague and does not properly communicate any clear sense of volume. Those kinds of contour lines - the ones that sit on the surface of a single form, only serve to take a form that can already be interpreted as 3 dimensional, and clarify it. In truth, they're useful for introducing the concept of a contour line, but in practice their usefulness is somewhat limited.

You can find here an example where contour lines are used alongside the leaf construction method in order to denote the thickness from the leaf, thus ensuring you get the benefits of both techniques - the fluidity of the leaf construction method, and the extra tridimensional information that contour lines can add to your construction.

Final Thoughts

You're starting to understand these concepts and how to apply them to your work, for example the branch construction method is really well applied in your drawings, however it seems that at points you're getting impatient and rushing to finish your page, especially when there are several small forms that need to be construct you tend to rush through them and give them each less attention because there are so many of them, but this only hurts the solidity and believability of your construction - as well as how much you're getting out of this lesson.

As such I believe you need to revisit these concepts and re-familiarize yourself with the instructions for these exercises, and take your time with each construction so that they can be done to the best of your current ability, please reply once you're finished with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches

2 plant construction pages.