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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows you're drawing your marks with a good deal of confidence which helps solidify the feeling of fluidity that arrows posses as they move through all the three dimensions of the world they exist in. However your arrows have little to no foreshortening, make sure to explore the size difference between arrow segments more in order to make better use of the depth of the page and push your understanding of tridimensional space further.

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, so keep tackling this exercise during your warm ups in order to take your understanding of arrows and 3D space further, experiment with the different ways arrows can twist and bend and move across space, try different rates of foreshortening and experiment with the negative space between overlaps, all of these will help you challenge yourself and develop your skills further.

Leaves

The linework for your leaves needs some more work, at times it is looking a bit patchy and has clear signs of hesitation, which goes against principles of mark-making from lesson 1. Remember to keep your linework smooth and confident in order to communicate the fluidity and sense of energy of your leaves.

There are also some unnatural bends present in your leaf structures. Keep in mind that even though leaves are very flexible structures, that mostly applies to their length and not their width. They're like a piece of paper, not a piece of rubber, they can fold and bend in a lot of ways, but they can't stretch or compress, and if we try to force them to they'll simply rip apart.

Another issue present in your leaves is the way you're approaching your edge detail, while it's good to see that you're not trying to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time you're 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.

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.

There are a lot of visible tails present in these branch structures, 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 can be improved, as it stands your degrees 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

Lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions. They're generally coming along pretty well made, I can see a good developing sense of spatial reasoning in these pages, however you're not always applying the construction methods and techniques to your work as they were instructed in the lesson material. 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.

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 drawing your branches with the correct method or by trying to capture complex curves in your leaves right away, rather than building it up gradually as edge detail. They're not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.

You're not making use of edge detail in your pages, edge detail would have greatly helped you further communicate the form of your structures and how they move through space, but by not adding it they're left very simple, so make sure to add edge detail whenever possible, and remember that only the last step of leaf construction - texture - is optional.

You're taking a great first step towards starting to think of how to break down different structures in these tomato flowers but it does end up accidentally stiffening the inner structure of the flowers 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.

You can approach the "hood" of the wolfsbane in a similar way to the pitcher plant construction, building it up in chunks and connecting the different parts of the structure together.

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. Going further don't forget to construct the outer rim that's present in most types of plant pots, and make sure to add a ground plane to your structures, this line is necessary when constructing plant pots because otherwise your structure will look like it's floating in mind air, which breaks the illusion of the construction.

Final Thoughts

In general you're starting to move in the right direction but you're still struggling on a couple of points. As such I believe you will benefit from tackling these exercises again before moving on to the next lesson, please revisit the lesson material mentioned and then reply with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

2 plant construction pages.