Hello RLX8, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your linework is looking confident and smooth which helps communicate the feeling of fluidity that arrows have as they move through the world. You're making really good use of the depth of the page and your arrows are looking fairly tridimensional.

It's good to see that you're making use of both well applied hatching as that helps you clarify how your arrows twist and turn in space and reinforce your spatial reasoning skills. Making use of added lineweight on top of the arrow's overlaps as a finishing touch is a nice touch which helps reinforce the feeling of depth in your arrows. In order to make your lineweight even more subtle you should try to taper your new lines, creating a smooth transition between the original mark and the new one.

The only thing you can do in order to take your understanding of arrows and 3D space further is by exploring the different ways arrows can move across the world, explore the different ways they can twist and bend and move across the world as well as experiment with the negative space between overlaps.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves the fluidity of your arrows is translating nicely into these new structures. You're not only capturing how these leaves sit statically in space, but also how they move across the space they exist in from moment to moment.

This structure is looser than it could be, because you're skipping construction steps when tackling a more complex structure, as such the relationships between your forms are left unspecified, and the forms aren't consistent with one another. Despite how many arms complex leaf structures might have, they still function as a single entity, making use of a boundary as shown in the complex leaf structures informal demo will allow you to create a tighter, more consistent and specific construction.

Your addition of edge detail is looking fairly decent, for the most part you're not trying to capture more than one piece of detail at a time, although there are some small moments where you zigzagged your edge detail, so don't forget that this is a mistake that goes against the third principle of mark making from lesson 1. You're also generally putting it down with the same line thickness as your initial construction and usually working on it additively, all of which is good.

Your application of texture is moving in the right direction, but it seems that in certain points you're a bit timid or uncertain of the marks that you make, which causes them to be a bit too random and awkward at times. Take a look at this demo that demonstrates how we can create more dynamic shadow shapes, as well as this informal demo on how to think when approaching leaf texture, notice how there's a lot more going on than just a couple lines implying veins in the surface of the leaf - there's a lot you can explore to more convincingly communicate this type of tridimensional information.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they're looking well made as you're drawing your branch's edges in segments as well as attempting to extend your segments past the next ellipse and up to the halfway point between them, as that helps us create smoother transitions between our marks - but there are a couple of times where your lines aren't completely extended, or where you started your new lines only a bit further down, instead of at the ellipse point.

So don't forget to follow the instructions for the exercise, closely, remember that you must start a segment at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully to the halfway point between the third and second ellipses, with a new segment repeating this pattern from the 2nd ellipse and so on until your branch is complete.

For your ellipses you're putting in the effort to always draw through them twice. Quite often you're accidentally cutting into your ellipses, which slightly undermines your construction, make sure that you're always treating your ellipse's outer perimeter as the defining silhouette for the structure, in order to avoid cutting into them. Something you should keep in mind is that many of your ellipses degrees barely change when they should due to how the ellipse degree shift works, as shown here. Remember that as a cylindrical form shifts towards or away from the viewer, the degree of the ellipses within that structure will also shift.

Plant Construction Section

And finally let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are looking really well constructed. In general you're making really good use of the methods and techniques introduced here, which greatly help you in creating structures which feel believably tridimensional and solid, you're certainly demonstrating a strong understanding of the concepts taught in this lesson, and a strong sense of spatial reasoning.

There are some small things which hurt the solidity of your work at times, so make sure to keep these points in mind the next time you attempt these exercises, in order to get the most out of these exercises.

Make sure that you're always sticking to the instructions as closely as possible, and taking your time to carefully apply them whenever you're tackling these exercises, because in this construction you haven't made use of the minor axis to construct your branch-like structure. Remember that these techniques are not guidelines or suggestions, they're tools and you must always apply these instructions to the letter.

Keep the relationships between your phases of construction tight and specific, don't leave gaps in between forms, such as your leaf's flow line and it's outer edges, they must connect.

Don't forget the instructions for how to add edge detail to your leaf structures, don't zigzag your lines, and make sure you're constructing your edge detail additively whenever possible, don't cut back into the forms you've already drawn, as that can cause you to focus too much on the shapes on the page, instead of the edges they represent in 3d space.

In this structure you've drawn some of the smaller stem structures as single lines, but they don't communicate any tridimensional information, and don't specify how your forms attach to the rest of the structure, when tackling these exercises, make sure that you're always constructing the forms present in your work to their full extent, in order to fully understand how your structure exists in space.

When it comes to your use of texture you're moving in the right direction, you're thinking about the cast shadows present in your work, but you're also making use of many filled in areas of black as well as form shadows, instead of focusing only on the cast shadows and the tridimensional information that they communicate in your structures.

When we're approaching texture in this course we really must understand that texture and construction are actually the same concept, just at different levels. 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. Make sure to go over these reminders in order to solidify your understanding of texture further.

Final Thoughts

In general you are making use of the construction techniques introduced in the lesson to great effect, and your work is coming along quite tridimensional as a result. I believe you are ready to face the tridimensional challenges presented in the next lesson and as such I'm going to be marking this submission as complete, good luck in Lesson 4.