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

Arrows

Let's start this critique by taking a look at your arrows, which are looking fairly confident and have a nice sense of fluidity to them, it's also nice to see that you're adding hatching as well as additional lineweight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.

Speaking of depth, your arrows certainly look tridimensional, but they're not always making full use of the depth of the page because there's not always a lot of foreshortening applied to them, so make sure to explore more with the different rates of foreshortening possible and the different ways that arrows can move across the world.

In general your work is really good here, and what you can do in order to take your understanding of arrows and 3D space further is by leaving your comfort zone more often and experimenting more with the different ways you can draw arrows in order to further your understanding of 3D space.

Leaves

For your leaves the fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely into these new objects, your leaves are feeling very organic and energetic as you don't only attempt to capture how they sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

It's good to see that you're experimenting constructing complex leaf structures, but make sure to keep the different phases of construction tight and specific to one another, as this structure is looser than it could be because the flow lines for the individual "arms" of the complex structure don't reach the boundary laid out by the previous phase of construction (the one where you established the simple overall footprint for the structure). The bigger shape establishes a decision being made - this is how far out the general structure will extend - and so the flow lines for the later leaf structures should abide by that.

And lastly your application of edge detail is looking pretty good as you're capturing each piece of edge detail individually, which allows you to create a more solid and specific construction, it's also good that you're adding it in with the same line thickness as the rest of the construction and trying your best to always construct it additionally.

Branches

Your branches are looking really well made and solid, they look pretty organic without loosing their sense of solidity and tridimensionality or feeling awkward and stiff. That's because you're following the instructions for the exercise which help you create these well constructed structures, however there are a couple of small changes which will help you even more as you work on these objects.

While it's great that you're extending your edges in segments, you're not always extending them completely up to the halfway point, which makes it easier to create smooth transitions between your marks, so make sure to always extend your lines fully up to the halfway point between ellipses.

On top of that you also have many visible tails in your branches, and while this is not a big deal as it's a very common mistake we all make, you can mitigate it by placing some of your ellipses further apart from one another in order to ensure there's a good length of runway between them.

Still speaking of ellipses it's good to see that you're making the effort to always draw through your ellipses twice as that allows you to create much smoother and more solid looking forms. It's also good that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift and that you're making the effort to vary them throughout your branch's length, as this helps reinforce the illusion of tridimensionality in your branches.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions.

In general your work is looking really tridimensional and quite well made, you're making use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson to great effect, your sense of spatial reasoning is developing quite nicely.

Of course there are a couple of things that you can improve, so here are some of the points you can keep in mind in order to develop your abilities even further.

• In this construction you've done well by making use of boundary lines for both of the main petal structures, but this last set of petals wasn't drawn with the leaf construction method, which slightly stiffens the structure.

It's really good that you're drawing through all of your forms, as that helps you understand how all the pieces in your structure relate to one another and how your structure fully exists in space.

• 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. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

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 respect (and you generally don't ever cut into your silhouettes), we can see some spots on this mushroom, and this other mushroom where you actually did extend off existing forms' silhouettes.

While in this mushroom you attempted to construct these extra forms along the edge of the cap with some form of the leaf construction method, when it comes to objects which already have some kind of volume to them it's better to make use of organics in order to add new forms on top of objects which aren't already flat.

This section has way too many lines which attempt to communicate the same thing. This suggests that you attempted to redraw the same line, so don't forget to never redo any of your marks, always commit to them, and to your mistakes, put the outmost care into the planning of your marks and if they don't turn out quite the way you expected, just shrug it off and continue your construction.

Final Thoughts

You've done very well in this lesson, you're applying the methods introduced in this lesson very effectively, you're clearly demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning through your execution of these exercises and I have no doubt that you're ready for the next lesson, you only need to remember to keep some things in mind to strengthen the concepts introduced here, so don't forget to add these exercises to your warm up list and good luck in Lesson 4.