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

Arrows

Starting this critique by taking a look at your arrows your lines are looking very smooth and confident which helps you communicate a great deal of fluidity in your arrows. You're making good usage of the depth of your page because you're keeping foreshortening and perspective in mind as you construct your arrows which gives them an extra layer of tridimensionality.

Your addition of hatching helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space and allows you to further your own understanding of the tridimensional space these structures occupy, but don't forget that hatching lines must also follow the principles of ghosting and mark-making. They must have clear start and end points, being carefully executed and not end in arbitrary points or float in the middle of your arrow.

Speaking of hatching, it's possible to see in your arrows moments where you have placed your hatching incorrectly making it seem as if your arrow is getting bigger the further away it is, and getting smaller as it comes closer to the viewer, which goes against the rules of perspective.

• In very simplistic terms perspective works in the following manner: things that are further away from the viewer will look smaller, and as they get closer they'll look bigger. When an object of consistent size and width moves through space certain segments of this object will look bigger and others smaller, either gradually or dramatically depending on the perspective of the scene. As a rule of thumb the bigger part of the arrow will be the one that's closest to the viewer, and so the segment behind it should be the one receiving the hatching,

It's good that you're making use of added line weight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth, but don't forget that this must be added subtly, with a single mark superimposed on top of the overlaps only.

Leaves

The linework for your leaves is looking smooth and confident. The fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely into these new structures, and it's good to see that you're not only trying to capture how these structures sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

Your addition of edge detail can use some work. There are a couple of moments where you're zigzagging your edge detail which is a mistake that goes against the third principle of mark-making from Lesson 1 and must be avoided. There's also a couple of instances where you have these small, almost feathery looking marks that run on top of your outer edge marks and are almost chicken scratchy in nature, they remove the confident and fluidity of your original marks and don't properly communicate any new forms.

Despite it's name edge detail is actually another step of the construction method that helps further communicate the form of your leaf structure and how it moves through space, it's important that the marks you put down are all thought through and executed carefully, they must come up from the outer edge mark, establish your edge detail and then seamlessly integrate back into the outer edge mark.

And lastly your addition of texture is another area that can be improved upon, your marks are all very small, there are several dots in your leaves and these timid marks prevent you from fully capturing the texture of these leaf structures.

There's much more going on in the surface of these structures than just a few marks implying veins and we can do a lot more to more accurately communicate this type of texture, take a look at this informal demo on how to approach leaf texture and make sure to give these reminders on how texture works in Drawabox a read.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently as you're following the instructions for the exercise really well, which allows you to create some really solid but still organic looking structures.

There are some visible tails present in your branch structures, but this is a very common mistake and your accuracy will naturally improve the more you practice this exercise. You may find that by limiting the amount of ellipses in your branches and spacing them further apart you'll allow for a bigger length of runway between ellipses and find it easier to ensure a smoother, more seamless transition between marks.

For ellipses it's good to see that you're making an attempt to always draw through them twice, as that allows for a smoother mark overall. When it comes to your application of the ellipse degree shift to your branches it can be improved, it's good to see that you're aware of it, but there are times where your degrees change too rapidly, and at times they are too consistent and hardly change which is a mistake that flattens your structures. Remember that as a form shifts in relation to the viewer, so will the degree of the ellipses within that structure also shift.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions. You are starting to move in the right direction with your constructions, you're starting to make use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson and you're starting to demonstrate your developing sense of spatial reasoning.

However there are some issues present in your work which are holding you back from your full potential, so here are the points you should look out for the next time you attempt these exercises.

Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that in almost all of your constructions you don't draw through several of your forms, such as leaves or branch like structures, this limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of these exercises.

As such you should be drawing through all of your forms, no matter how much it would be logically obscured by other parts of the construction or obscure said parts. This allows your brain to work through these spatial reasoning challenges to it's full extent and fully understand how each form you're drawing exists in 3d space, where each form attachs to, where it comes from and how they all come together to make up your structure in 3d space.

In addition to this it's strongly recommended that you don't draw earlier phases of construction with a fainter line and later ones with a thicker stroke, as this is going to encourage you to approach construction as though you're redrawing everything at every step. Instead, we're simply building upon the existing structure, modifying what's already there at each stage. There are things that simply won't need alteration, and therefore the marks that defined them from the start should be able to stand for themselves when you're done, without being redrawn or traced over needlessly.

When approaching cylindrical structures such as plant pots make sure to start with a minor axis in order to keep your several ellipses aligned to each other more easily.

Ease up on your lineweight, it's thick, with several passes going over the same marks and jump from one form's silhouette to another, which smooths everything out too much. Almost as if you pulled a sock over a vase, it softens the distinctions between the forms and flattens the structures out somewhat.

Instead lineweight must be subtle, used only to clarify the overlaps between the forms that are being built up, as explained here.

And lastly let's take a look at your usage of texture, which needs some work as you're deviating from the instructions, you're approaching it very explicitly, focusing on large areas of black that obscure your underlying construction, you confuse form shadows and areas of local color for cast shadows, which stops you from communicating texture in the way it's approached in this course.

So let's revisit how texture in Drawabox is approached, by looking back at this page we can refresh our memory and see that texture through the lens of Drawabox is communicated through the use of cast shadows.

It is not used to make our work aesthetic or pretty, instead every textural form we draw is based on what's physically present in our reference. Our focus should be on understanding how each individual form sits in 3D space and how that form then creates a shadow that is cast onto that same surface. Only after analyzing all of this information present in our reference will we be able to translate it to our construction. This means that the shape of our 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, which is why we need to consider carefully how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic.

This approach is of course much harder than basing our understanding of texture on other methods that may seem more intuitive or basing it on the idea that texture = making our work look good, but in the long run this method of applying texture is the one that enforces the ideals of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following these ideals, you'll find yourself asking how to convey texture in the most efficient way possible, with less lines and ink, focusing on the implicit mark-making techniques introduced in Lesson 2. Make sure to go over these reminders in order to solidify your understanding of texture further.

Final Thoughts

You're starting to move in the right direction but you're falling into a couple of traps and pitfalls which are holding you back from your full potential, and stopping you from getting the most out of these exercises.

I'm not going to be passing you onto the next lesson yet, these concepts will be highly important in the following lessons, make sure to revisit any relevant material mentioned here, once you're finished please reply with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

2 plant construction pages.