Hello Cassiope23, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.

Arrows

Let's start by taking a look at your arrows, where your lines are looking fairly confident and smooth, which helps communicate a nice sense of fluidity in your arrows as they move through the world. Although I did notice that there are some odd patches of white present in your pages such as in these spots. Is this white-out? If yes, keep in mind that the reason we draw in ink is that it helps instill in us a sense of confidence and thought behind every mark we draw, this means that we must also accept out mistakes when they happen, keep in mind this won't be accepted in the future.

You're keeping foreshorting 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 great 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, but do remember that your hatching lines must still follow the principles of ghosting and mark-making, they must have clear end and start points, be carefully planned and executed, not end at arbitrary points.

Still speaking of hatching, there are a couple of times where you've placed it incorrectly, making it seem like your arrow is getting bigger the further away it is, and getting smaller as it gets closer, which goes against the rules of perspective, you also sometimes add it on top of both sides of the overlap, flattening the structure.

• 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 this 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 receiving the hatching.

In general you're doing well, so keep tackling this exercise during your warm ups in order 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 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.

Your edge detail is looking quite well made, you're not attempting to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, and you're often approaching it additively - that is, constructing it on top of your preexisting structure, as well as putting it down with the same general line thickness as the rest of your construction, all of these are good things that help you construct solid and tight structures that still feel fluid and energetic.

However, do keep in mind that your edge detail should not almost completely enclose your structure like it does here. When you manipulate the silhouette of your structure in this manner you risk flattening it and stiffening your structure, when focusing on edge detail make sure that your marks are adding on top of your preexisting structure, rather than trying to replace it.

It's good to see that you're also experimenting with some more complex types of leaf structures, and doing so by following the instructions, which allows you to create a much tighter and more solid looking structure that still feels flexible and energetic.

Moving on to your application of texture it's looking generally alright, as you're following the instructions for texture in these structures, however you can definitely push your application of it further, as you've some small and timid marks, and several big spaces of white. There's a lot more that we can do in order to more accurately communicate leaf texture as there's much more going on than just a few stray marks implying veins, take a look at this informal demo on how to approach leaf texture for more information.

Branches

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

There are some visible tails present in your 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. From what I can see you do seem aware of the ellipse degree shift, but currently your degrees are often a little bit too consistent and hardly change which flattens your forms. 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 coming along nicely. You're generally making use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in this Lesson which helps you create the illusion of tridimensionality in your work, you're starting to develop a strong sense of spatial reasoning.

You're not only trying to capture what these structures look like, but you also focus on how they work, how they exist fully in their tridimensional space by drawing through your forms and thinking about the way each piece of your construction exists in 3d space and how the different parts of your structure exist in relation to one another.

This is all very good and it's helping you develop a strong sense of spatial reasoning, there are only a couple of small things that if kept in mind will help you take your work to the next level.

I would like to mention that it's best that when you go through your work you avoid making notes that criticize your work. Leave them out of the page, so as to not influence your own thoughts on it or your critiquer. This is because as people we are always our own critics, we can be way too harsh, way too soft, or completely misguided over what we need to focus on, don't worry about this at the start, wait for your feedback and then you can take notes about your work that come from a more neutral, less biased third party, and tackle the issues present in your work that are actually holding you back.

One example of this can be found in this mushroom construction. Where in your notes you have mentioned that "the second ellipse on the cap is too narrow, it should touch the edges." This leads me to believe that you constructed the cap first, and then tried to add an inner ellipse to communicate the volume of the form.

This doesn't create as strong and solid of a construction, instead approach it similarly to the branch construction method, as shown in the mushroom demo, and as mentioned in this section by establishing the ellipses first, then constructing the edges using the ellipses as a guide you'll be able to maintain the relationships between your phases of construction much tighter and specific.

• Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions.

• For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

While this is something that you do generally expect, in this sunflower there are some spots where you cut back into the stem, where you initially established the knot the new branch stems from.

Sometimes you are going a little too heavy on your lineweight, so don't forget that as with all other techniques we use in this course, line weight is a tool that has specific uses, it shouldn't jump from one form's silhouette to another or thicken lines arbitrarily, as this tends to smooth everything out too much. Kind of like pulling a sock over a vase, it softens the distinctions between forms and flattens the structure out somewhat.

Instead, lineweight should only be used to help clarify the distinction between overlaps, as demonstrated here.

And lastly let's take a look at your usage of texture in your plant constructions. You are starting to move in the right direction here, although there are a couple of times where you're focusing on form shadows. What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

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 the information present in our reference we'll be able to translate it to our study. 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.

Final Thoughts

In general your work is moving in the right direction, you're usually following the instructions to the exercises and your work is starting to look tridimensional do to that.

I believe you're ready to tackle the spatial reasoning challenges found in the next lesson, as such I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.