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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your initial linework is looking quite confident, but your added lineweight on top of the overlaps has many visible signs of hesitation which hurts the fluidity of your arrows. When approaching lineweight you must remember the principles introduced in the superimposed lines exercise, above all else, prioritize confidence over accuracy in order to avoid wobbling, ghost as many times as you need, once you feel confident execute your mark swiftly in order to get a smooth new line.

You're making good use of the depth of the page with your use of perspective, by putting some more thought behind your hatching you'll be able to reinforce this sense of depth much more drastically. Sometimes you've applied the hatching to the incorrect side of the arrow's overlap which contradicts the illusion of depth you attempt to achieve.

• Perspective works by having objects appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when they're further away, even if they're the exact same size. Following this logic, the bigger part of the arrow is always going to be the one closest to the viewer, therefore the smaller part of the segment should be the one getting the hatching instead.

Your hatching can also be improved, remember the principles of ghosting from the first lesson, all marks should be planned and have a clear intent and purpose, so make sure that your line goes from one end of your arrow's width to the other, without floating or ending at arbitrary gaps.

Leaves

For your leaves you're off to a great start here, the fluidity you had present in your arrows translates well into these new structures which allows you to not only capture how they exist statically in space, but also how they move across that space from moment to moment.

Your leaf constructions are usually looking very solid, although in here your construction is a bit looser than it could be, because you didn't completely follow the complex leaf construction method. When approaching complex leaf structures ( and any complex structures in general ) it's important to build our forms gradually, thinking of the major masses and shapes before gradually building up complexity within our construction.

So when approaching a complex leaf structure make sure to draw a major leaf shape to encompass and enclose all of the leaf-arms, this is important because even though the leaf structure has many individual parts the structure still acts as a single entity.

Continuing on to your edge detail you're approaching it nicely, generally you're not trying to capture more than one line of "piece" of detail which allows you to maintain greater control over your marks. But make sure that when approaching edge detail that your marks properly lift off from the outer edge line and then come back down, integrating seamlessly into it, on top of that, approach edge detail by always building it up with additive construction rather than cutting back into what you're already drawn.

Cutting back into what we've already drawn can make us focus too much on the shapes on the page and altering the silhouette of our forms, instead of thinking of how those lines represent edges in 3d space.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they're coming along decently as you're making an attempt to stick to this exercise's insructions, but there are a couple of things you should keep in mind when tackling this exercise again.

For the manner in which your edges are laid out you don't always apply it in the way outlined in the instructions. There are a couple of points where you drew an entire segment in one line, or started your new segment around the place where your last line ended which effectively removes their overlap, and in places where you did extend your segments you didn't always extend it completely up the the halfway point between ellipses.

So remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse, extending it past the second ellipse and fully 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 the pattern until your branch is complete.

Another thing you should keep in mind is that your constructions should be tight and specific, there should be no gaps in between your edges and ellipses, you should also be careful when extending your lines to make sure to treat your ellipse's outer perimeter as the defining edge of the form, in order to not accidentally cut into them and undermine their solidity

Speaking of ellipses it's good to see that you're always drawing through them twice. You can still improve upon some aspects in here however, as it doesn't seem like you're aware of the ellipse degree shift, because all of your ellipse's degrees are too consistent which is a mistake because the degrees of ellipses along the lenght of a form should change as shown here. You can hear Uncomfortable talking more in depth about how this works in this youtube video on ellipses.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's talk about your plant constructions. You're moving in the right direction with these, for the most part you make use of the techniques introduced in the Lesson, you're starting to grasp these concepts and as such your working is coming along nicely and looking quite tridimensional.

Of course, there are always things we can improve, so I'll be pointing out some of the things you can keep an eye on when moving through this course which will help you greatly as you tackle these exercises.

This is not an incredibly consistent problem, and generally your later constructions don't possess this problem but I still believe it's worth it to reinforce.

You're not always drawing through your forms. Remember that the purpose of these exercises is to help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning, we only use plants, insects and other subjects as objects we can study, things that we can break down to their primitive forms for our artistic development, drawing through each form will help you understand better how each piece of your structure sits in space, as well as how it relates to the others, so make sure to always draw forms in their entirety.

In this plant construction you didn't draw your branches around a minor axis, which is a mistake because not only does it not make use of one of the techniques established, but it also causes you to lose control over your lines and create branches which have size consistency problems and that end up flattening the construction a bit. Always follow the methods and techniques introduced in order to get the most out of this course.

Still speaking of branches you have an issue that is consistently present across your work, and that's the fact that your ellipses are often misaligned to the minor axis in your branches.

You should also remember the forking branches method when approaching branches with multiple arms and stems, this way you can keep the relationships between your phases of construction tight and specific, otherwise it's not as clear where your new branches attach to.

For this particular flower structure you're not really constructing it with the methods introduced in the lesson. As such you're trying to capture complexity too soon instead of starting your construction with simple forms and gradually adding complexity to them. Considering that this is a flower, it's petals should still be drawn with the leaf construction method otherwise the petals turn out stiff and flat. I actually put together a quick demo that shows one way to approach these types of flower structures for another student, but I believe you might find it useful.

Your attempt at the potato plant demo is a good start, but you haven't followed the demo as thoroughly as you could have, if we compare your page to the potato demo we can see a couple of divergences - mainly, how you've filled in your branches partially with black, and how in the potato plant there are several spots which are filled in areas of black, but in the demo those areas are meant to represent the ground underneath, which due to the dense folliage of the potato plant is completely covered in shadows.

The areas you've filled in with black aren't coherent with the lighting of the scene, as your shadows are above the branch instead of underneath, when the light would most likely come from the top. It's also important to note these are more akin to form shadows, rather than cast shadows which are the kind of shadows we should focus on in this course.

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.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. I recommend looking over these reminders before you decide to tackle texture again in your exercises, as well as this demo that demonstrates how the shape of our shadow is important for communicating texture and how it should be designed carefully in a dynamic way. You can also see here these concepts applied in the context of a leaf texture.

Final Thoughts

Overall your work is turning out decent, for the most part you have shown that you understand how the instructions for the exercise should be applied and where they would be applied to, even if you had some shortcomings and could have paid some more attention to the lesson material at points.

I'm going to be marking your submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.