12:59 AM, Friday June 13th 2025
Hello Chives, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.
Arrows
Starting with your arrows your lines are looking confident and smooth for the most part, although there are some visible signs of hesitation in your marks. So don't forget to always ghost your marks, and execute them from the shoulder. You're keeping foreshortening in mind while constructing your arrows which allows you to make really good use of perspective and the depth of your page, this gives a nice extra layer of tridimensionality to your arrows.
Your usage of hatching helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space and further your own understanding of the tridimensional space these objects occupy, it's good that you're making use of added line weight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.
In general you're doing well in this exercise, your arrows are looking fluid and tridimensional and there's a good variety in the rates of foreshortening and the way they twist and bend through space, so don't forget to keep tackling this exercise during your warm ups in order take your understanding of arrows and 3D space even further.
Leaves
The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, it's good 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.
You need to spend more time with the way you're approaching your edge detail, you don't always fully construct each piece of edge detail to it's full extent, you're also often constructing it subtractively which is a mistake, instead, make sure to always construct your edge detail carefully, and additively, on top of your construction, as cutting back into our forms can cause us to focus too much on manipulating the 2d shapes on the page, instead of how our marks represent edges in tridimensional space.
It's good to see that you've experimented with complex leaf structures but remember not to skip construction steps when approaching these more intricate structures.
This structure is looser than it could be, because you skipped some construction steps and tried to capture the complex form of the structure right away, instead of constructing each individual arm with the leaf construction method and only then connecting them together. Even though leaves are single entities they can still made be made up of several parts.
Branches
Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently made as you're following the instructions for the exercise, you're drawing your edges in segments which allows you to maintain higher control over your marks and helps you create solid but still organic looking structures.
The tailends of your branches are very visible, while this is a very common mistake we can attempt to mitigate it by limiting the amount of ellipses in our branches, by spacing them further apart we'll allow for a bigger length of runway between ellipses, and 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's starting to move in the right direction as sometines you add it to your branches, but it can still be improved, as it stands your degrees are sometimes 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, which are generally coming along well made, as you're following the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson which allows you to construct really solid looking and believably tridimensional structures. I can see a good developing sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.
However there are some issues present in these pages which are holding you back from your full potential. So here are the points you should keep in mind whenever you tackle these exercises again so that you can continue to develop your skills.
First things first, an issue that hurts your work without you even realizing is the fact that you're pre-planning the amount of constructions you want to fit on a given page before you've even committed to any of them. Drawing bigger would allow you not only more room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises, but also give you enough space to fully engage your whole arm.
Always keep in mind that the construction methods and techniques introduced in this course must always be applied to your work, as they're tools which will help you construct much tighter and solid looking structures, there are times where you deviate from the construction methods by not fully constructing your leaf structures. Remember that they're not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.
Technically, the garlic bloom construction is an example of you skipping construction methods because you haven't constructed each individual leaf structure with the leaf construction method - however this is not really a mistake, due to the nature of this course and how it teaches certain skills it's fundamental that we're always making use of the construction techniques and methods we learn to our constructions.
But certain structures are just way too complicated and it's not feasible to draw them with the methods introduced, it is simply impossible to fully draw each individual leaf structure or branch structure in a plant such as this one while still following the instructions for this exercise, as such avoid picking trees, bushes, and similar structures as a subject to study in this lesson.
Another issue present in your structures is that when you put contour lines on your forms they don't really communicate any new information. 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, while they're useful for introducing the concept of a contour line in practice it can be really hard to apply them incorrectly, if even 1 of your lines isn't in sync with the others the solidity of your structure will suffer. As such it's best to focus only on contours that communicate intersections.
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.
You're taking a great first step towards starting to think of how to break down different structures in this construction, but it does end up accidentally stiffening the inner structure a bit if you don't approach it with the leaf construction method which naturally adds a sense of flow and energy to your work.
One way in which we can approach this structure that ensures the petal structures are still flowing nicely and that all of the relationships between the different forms are tight and specific is by using a slightly tapered cylinder in order to construct the main body of the leaf shape, then afterwards make use of the leaf construction method, build it on top of the cylinder in order to capture the flow of the different sections of the leaf structure, and lastly connect them together, making use of edge detail in order to finish the complex structure. I actually put together a quick demonstration of how this would look like in the context of a Daffodil for a different student once, and I believe you will find it helpful.
Final Thoughts
In general your work is good, you're on the path to understanding the purpose of these techniques and exercises and you're making good use of them in your work, if you iron out on a couple of issues you'll be on the path towards drawing even more solid and believable tridimensional structures.
I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.
Next Steps:
Don't forget to add these exercises to your list of warm ups.
Move on to Lesson 4.