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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your lines are confidently drawn, this helps push the feeling of fluidity that arrows have as they move across the world. You're also making good use of the depth of the page with the perspective added to your arrows.

What you can look towards improving in this exercise is your addition of hatching lines as you sometimes add it to the incorrect side of the overlaps, this breaks the illusion of depth necessary for this exercise.

• Perspective works by having objects appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when further away, even if they're the exact same size. Following this logic, an object of consistent size will become bigger the closer it is to the viewer, and smaller the further away it is, as such the bigger part of the arrow is always going to be the one closest to the viewer, therefore the smaller arrow segment should be the one getting the hatching.

You should also keep in mind the last step for this exercise by adding it to your arrows.

Leaves

Onto your leaves they're looking energetic as you capture the sense of flow they have as they move across the page, this is because the sense of fluidity present in your arrows carries over nicely into this exercise.

It is in part, a bit disappointing to see that you haven't really experimented with edge detail in this exercise. Usually this means I'd check to see if you have applied edge detail tk your plant constructions - but it seems edge detail is also lacking there.

If we revisit the instructions we'll see that from all the steps introduced in the instructions, only step 4 is optional, edge detail must be added to your leaf.

Other than this, another thing you can focus on is your addition of texture. While it is sparse, the way that you're adding it here is what I like to call "representational texture", this means that you're drawing your texture in a very explicit manner because you're not closely analyzing your reference, instead, you rely on what you think the texture of your leaves look like and apply that to your drawing.

I'll go more in depth on texture and shadow shapes in the plant construction section of this critique, but for the specific case of applying texture to leaves, here are a couple of useful notes you can check out.

Branches

Continuing on to your branches they have a couple of issues present within them.

The one that stands out to me right away is not an issue with your execution of the exercise, but with your page. There are only three branches in your page, five if individual arms of branches are counted. Considering that your work was likely drawn in an A4 page and the white space present in your page, you could have fit a lot more branches here, this would have allowed you to get more practice in with individual branches, as well as understand the basics before attempting the more complicated forking branches method.

Onto your actual execution of the exercise, your branches here are generally a bit too long and have a great distance between ellipse points, this, alongside often drawing edges in a single stroke, which is a mistake often causes you to lose control of your line. Another issue I've noticed in that in some of the places where you did extend your line and start a new segment, you started your new line at the place where your previous line ended, instead of back at the ellipse point.

Branches should be approached in the following manner, by starting your segment starting at the first ellipse, extending it past the second ellipse, and stopping halfway to the third, with the new segment repeating the pattern from the 2nd ellipse until your branch is complete. This helps us maintain control of our marks and allows for a healthy overlap between them, which helps to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition.

Onto your ellipses, I can see that you're attempting to draw through your ellipses twice, but sometimes you're falling short on this step with your smaller ellipses, make a conscious effort to draw through them. Another issue, which is heavily impacting the solidity of your branches is that your ellipses degrees are hardly changing when they should have variation applied to them, as shown here. Remember that as a cylindrical form shifts towards or away from the viewer, the degree of the ellipses within that structure will also shift.

Plant Construction Section

Finally it's time to get to the meat of the lesson, onto your work here you're moving in the right direction by applying the concepts and techniques introduced previously, this is all helping you develop your sense of spatial reasoning and draw solid structures.

There are of course, always things to improve, so here are some points I belive you've done well and would like to see you keep developing by adding it to your work and some points where you can still look towards improving in their execution.

When constructing any kind of cylindrical structure, such as the body of a mushroom, make sure to construct it around a minor axis in order to keep your various ellipses aligned.

Keep tight and specific relationships between your different phases of construction, don't leave arbitrary gaps between your flow line and your outer edges, this leaves their relationship vague and as such, the structure isn't as solid as it could be, remember that the ends of your flow lines and your outer edges must connect.

For this flower and a couple of your other constructions I can see that you went back over your initial lines in order to make them thicker, but this thickness is very noticeable and clearly much more than a single pass, it's also a bit inconsistent, this all contributes to remind yourself and your viewer that this is a flat drawing and not a solid object. Doing this encourages us to think in terms of doing a rough sketch, or a clean-up pass, this should be avoided whenever possible as it makes is focus on following lines on the page, rather than how those lines represent tridimensional forms in a tridimensional space.

As such, all of your phases of construction should be given the same amount of importance by being drawn in roughly the same line thickness. Lineweight itself should only be added to clarify areas of overlaps in order to help differemtiate between the different parts of construction.

In your attempt at the potato plant the camera angle is different from the one in the actual demonstration and the shadows don't all line up. In the demo, the part that's filled in is basically so densely packed that the shadows fill up the dirt you can see between the gaps. This at least in part suggests that you may be misinterpreting that filled black area as some sort of arbitrary artistic choice.

Another problem is how your cast shadows are sticking to the forms that cast them, but as shown here these shadows don't work like this, and will be distorted based on the shape of the surface they're cast on. Your lightsource is also a bit inconsistent.

Filling in large areas of black in this mushroom cap, this flower, and other constructions goes against the idea of texture introduced in this course. For the mushroom cap specifically there's no form that's casting any shadow like this, you're misinterpreting the glossy surface of the mushroom as texture, but local color should be ignored when it comes to drawing texture. Filling in large areas of black also makes your underlying construction more difficult to see and thus, difficult to analyze and critique.

Texture in the context of this course is also extension of the concepts of construction. In a lot of ways they're the same concept, with construction being focused on the big and primitive forms that make up different objects, with texture simply being focused on conveying to the viewer the small forms that run along the surface an object, if it's thick and rugged, or if it's smooth and sharp, essentially texture is a form of visually communicating to the viewer what it would feel like to run their hands across that object's surface.

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 construction. As introduced here in what are essentially the "principles" of texture in Drawabox and how it is used in the course, we can notice that we should focus on each individual form and how it casts a shadow on neighboring surfaces, understanding how each individual form sits on a 3D space, and closely analyzing all of this information present in our reference to be able to translate it to our study.

The shape of this shadow is 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 surface it's being casted on, as a shadow cast on a round surface will be round, while a shadow on a plain smooth surface will suffer less distortion to it's original shape.

This approach is of course much harder than basing our understanding of texture on other methods that may seem more intuitive, but in the long run this method of texture is the one who enforces the ideas of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following these ideas and as you keep applying it to your work, you'll find yo urself asking how to convey the texture in the most efficient way possible, with less lines and ink, focusing more on the implicit mark-making techniques introduced in Lesson 2. Going forward here are a couple of final reminders of how texture in Drawabox is approached.

Final Thoughts

You have some good work here and you're starting to understand and apply the concepts of construction and spatial reasoning that this lesson seeks to teach.

As such, I'll be marking this lesson as complete, feel free to move on to the next lesson and add these exercises to your warm-up list, don't forget to apply the points present here when tackling these exercises again or moving forward with the course. Good luck in Lesson 4.