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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows you've done a really nice job in here, your linework looks very confident and smooth which helps in giving these arrows a great sense of fluidity. It's good that you're exploring the depth of your page and adding hatching to the overlaps between your segments, as well as added lineweight at the top of the arrow's bends, which helps reinforce their solidity as both are effectively and correctly applied.

I do see some stray marks in your work, if these are intentional, remember that you must always respect and commit to your marks, never try to redo a line or mark.

In general you've done well in this exercise and the way you can improve further is simply by getting out of your comfort zone more often and experimenting more with the depth of your page and the different types of perspective, rates of foreshortening and negative space you can apply to your work, all while experimenting with the different ways your arrows can move through 3d space.

Leaves

For your leaves the fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely into these new objects, giving them a great sense of flow and energy.

While your leaves have a great sense of energy due to the confident linework they're often looking a bit flat due to the unnatural folds present in them. Make sure to remember the principles learned in the arrows exercise on how to make flat objects feel tridimensional, and don't be afraid of letting your lines overlap, as that'll help solidify the tridimensionality of your work.

Your application of edge detail is pretty good as you're applying it with roughly the same line thickness as the rest of your construction, you also don't attempt to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time - which is good and allows you to create much tighter and specific constructions, another good point to mention is that you're drawing your edge detail additively instead of cutting back into what you've already drawn.

Your usage of texture in this exercise page is moving in the right direction, but make sure to take a look at this demo on how to think when you approach leaf textures and this diagram on how to create dynamic shadow shapes.

Branches

Now let's move on to your branches, which are looking pretty decent as you're making the effort to apply the instructions to this exercise, however there are a couple of points that can be improve if you start to follow the instructions a bit more closely.

For example, it's great to see that you're making use of the line extension method for your edge segments, but you're always applying iy as it's laid out. By looking over the instructions to this exercise we can see that every new segment must start at the previous ellipse point and be fully extented up to the halfway point to the next ellipse.

While you're extending your segments there are times where you don't start your new mark back at the ellipse point, but instead close to where your last line ended, which effectively removes the healthy overlaps we want to achieve between lines. Another issue is that you don't always extend your segment fully up to the halfway point between ellipses, which doesn't ensure enough of a length of runway between ellipses so that you can integrate each line seamlessly into the next. This is also partially caused by the fact that you sometimes add your ellipses too closely together, which makes it difficult to create smooth marks from your shoulder.

So don't forget to address these issues next time you attempt this exercise.

For your ellipses you're making the effort to always draw through them twice which is great, you don't seem aware of the ellipse degree shift, because the degrees of your ellipses are too consistent throughout their length which flattens the form.

Plant Construction Section

And finally for your plant constructions, in general you're making good use of the construction techniques and methods introduced in the lesson and your work is coming along quite tridimensional as a result, but there's a major issue in your work which greatly holds you back from your full potential in this lesson, and that's the fact you've barely attempted plant constructions on your own.

Make sure to pay close attention to the amount of exercise pages outlined in the homework section of the lesson material, as well as any specifics mentioned, as you've submitted 6 pages that were your own attempts at the demos, but as mentioned in the homework section of the lesson, if you wish to include your own attempts at the demos they must make up less than half the total amount of your construction pages, thus if you added the maximum amount of your attempts at the demos your homework should have been made up of 5 original constructions and only 3 pages of demos.

You have a tendency to go a bit too heavy with your line weight around your silhouettes, which is an issue, line weight shouldn't jump from one form's silhouette to another, as it tends to smooth everything out too much. Almost as if you pulled a sock over a vase, it'll soften the distinctions between the forms and flatten the structure out somewhat.

Instead, focus on using line weight only to clarify overlaps between the forms that are being built up, as explained here

Make sure to always stick to the boundaries you establish for your constructions, such as the boundary for the petals in your attempt at the hibiscus flower. If you decide to add a boundary make sure to stick to it fully in order to push the feeling of depth and tridimensionality in your work, otherwise it may as well not exist.

You're not always making use of the forking branches construction method as it's outlined in the exercise page which leaves your constructions a bit less solid and the relationships between each phase of construction and the relationships between forms is left much less specific and vague.

Final Thoughts

Overall you've done well in this lesson, but there's not much to critique because you drawn mostly plants by following the demos.

Think of the demonstrations as essentially training wheels, they're helpful in that they help us understand how to apply the exercises we just learned to proper tridimensional structures and how to make the most of them, however, in the same way we won't know if we know how to ride a bike until we take them off and attempt on our own, we won't know if we understand how to apply the constructional techniques introduced here until we apply them to our own work, attempting to distill the information we can gather from our reference picture and being able to translate it to a piece of paper.

As such, it's difficult to fully gauge if you have understood the concepts and principles taught in the lesson, and I'm going to be asking you for some revisions before you can move on.

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

2 plant construction pages.