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

I went back and checked your homework and previous submissions and I've noticed that you are consistently using a sketchbook to draw your homework in. While you are free to draw on any paper that's not lined or crumpled napkins from the bar I do believe this is holding you back from your full potential, you consistently have a tendency to draw things way too small and this sketchbook you're using doesn't allow you to properly fold your pages out of the way and it limits your ability to comfortably make use of the full range of your arm.

If you must use a sketchbook I heavily recommend changing to a ringed sketchbook rather than a stitched one, as ringed sketchbooks can lay flatter and you can fold your pages out of the way, allowing you to draw more comfortably and rotate your sketchbook more comfortably.

It also looks that you've submitted your homework as a subfolder that you might have dumped some personal files into without meaning to. You probably don't want them to be included or available to the public so try to take a look at it.

Arrows

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. You're keeping foreshortening in mind while constructing your arrows which allows you to make 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.

You've done a good job with this exercise, but I'd like to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise, try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different rates of foreshortening, keep in mind that arrows are very flexible objects and can move freely across the world in all sorts of manners, so you should push yourself and explore the different possibilities in order to further your understanding of tridimensional space.

Leaves

The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, but something to note is that the majority of your leaf structures don't fold or bend in any way, this is something to keep an eye on whenever you tackle this exercise again, as leaves are organic structures that are affected by all sorts of forces, from the wind to gravity to their own weight pulling them down, as such you'll find that in plant structures leaves will actually be oriented in a variety of different ways, and you'll improve much more by thinking about the way these objects look when they move through the world from moment to moment, instead of just trying to capture how they sit statically within it.

For your addition of edge detail 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.

You also need to spend more time with the execution of each mark there are often gaps and overshoots in your edge detail marks that could be avoided by putting more time into the work. No mark you draw is unimportant - if you decided it was worth adding, it's worth giving as much time as it needs to be done to the best of your current ability.

Your addition of texture also needs some work because you're trying to make use of dots in your work to achieve a hatching look, but this goes against the principle of cast shadows and how texture works in this course.

There's much more going on than just a few stray marks and dots implying texture and we can do much more to accurately communicate this, 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

You have submitted two pages rather than the one that was requested, make sure not to submit more work than what was assigned.

Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently made as you're generally following the instructions for the exercise, but they can still be improved. While it's good to see that you're drawing your edges in segments you're always extending said segment completely up to the halfway point between ellipses, which partially removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve in these structures.

So remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully up to the halfway point to the third ellipse, afterwards you'll start a new segment, making sure to place your pen at the second ellipse and repeat this pattern until your entire branch is complete.

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

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions where you are starting to get acquaintanced with these construction methods and techniques and understand why and how they need to be applied to your work. But you're facing a couple of obstacles that are hurting the quality of your work and stopping you from getting the most out of this Lesson.

So here are the issues present in your work and how to address them the next time you tackle these exercises.

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. Because of this your pages have big empty spaces that could have been better used not by adding more drawings to your page, but instead by limiting them, which 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.

As it stands your constructions are too small and you have also chosen some very complex structures which has limited your ability to make use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in your work.

Don't forget 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, but you're deviating from the instructions for these exercises at points such as in here and here where you skip construction steps while drawing branches by either drawing them without a minor axis or skipping the method entirely and drawing them as single marks, which causes them to look inconsistent and it does not communicate any sense of form or volume. You also skip construction steps when drawing leaves and petals, such as in here, here and in this construction where you put too much focus on capturing the complex outline of the structure right away, rather than building it up in sections and starting with a flow line first, the way you approach yout leaves not only stiffens them, but also flattens them.

Remember that these methods and techniques will help you develop your sense of form and spatial reasoning, they will help you create a tighter grasp on how different forms exist in tridimensional space and how they relate to one another, but they can only do that if you're consistently applying them. They're not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.

Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that in some of your constructions you don't draw through some of your forms, such as these petals in this structure, or some of the branch structures in this construction, this limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise as not drawing through your forms means relying on your observation skills, instead of engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and truly trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, where it comes from, what it attaches to.

You're not making use of edge detail in your pages and at points you're trying to capture the complexity of a leaf's outline right away, which causes you to lose control over your marks and stiffens the structure, 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.

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.

Make sure to keep the relationships between your different stages of construction tight and specific, make sure to never leave forms open ended in your page such as in here. Always construct them fully and cap branches off with an ellipse.

Final Thoughts

In general you're starting to move in the right direction but you're still struggling on a couple of points and applying these methods consistently to your work, as such I believe you would benefit from tackling these exercises again before moving on to more complex tridimensional challenges.

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

2 plant construction pages.