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

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, but don't forget that this lineweight is supposed to be made with a single mark superimposed on top of the overlaps, and it must be subtle, with your new stroke integrating seamlessly into the one underneath.

In general you're doing well, so keep tackling this exercise during your warm ups in order to take your understanding of arrows and 3D space further, experiment with the different ways arrows can twist and bend and move across space, try different rates of foreshortening and experiment with the negative space between overlaps, all of these will help you challenge yourself and develop your skills further.

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.

It's good to see that you've experimented with complex leaf structures and that you're making use of boundaries to keep the relationship between the different stages of construction much more tight and specific for the most part, but this structure is looser than it could be, because you didn't establish the form that all of the later structures should abide to. Don't skip construction steps.

Your addition of edge detail is generally looking good, as you don't usually attempt to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, and you generally construct your edge detail additively. But make sure to keep the line thickness between your phases of construction roughly consistent and don't go over marks that you've already drawn, as this will flatten out your structures unnecessarily.

Branches

Moving on to your branches you are deviating from the instructions for this exercise, while it's good to see that you're drawing your edges in segments you're not starting your new segment back at the previous ellipse point and superimposing it on top of the preexisting structure, 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. It's good to see that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift and making use of it in your constructions, but you can still improve upon this point, since sometimes your degrees are too consistent and hardly change, especially in the middle of your branches. 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, which are coming along quite nicely made. You're generally making use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in this Lesson which helps you create the illusion of tridimensionality in your work, you're not only trying to capture what these structures look like, but you also focus on how they work, how they exist fully in tridimensional space by drawing through your forms and thinking about the way each piece of your construction exists in relation to one another.

This is all very good and it's helping you develop a strong sense of spatial reasoning, there are only a couple of small things that if kept in mind will help you take your work to the next level.

First things first, an issue that hurts your work without you even realizing is the fact that you're trying to fit too many constructions 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 which has limited your ability to make use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in your work.

Make sure to keep the relationships between your different phases of construction tight and specific, don't leave gaps in between a leaf's flow line and it's outer edges, they must connect.

I've noticed that in your homework pages you have made an attempt to add contours to your work which is commendable, but I'd like to talk a little bit more about them, because while it's good that you're trying to add them when you add contour to your forms they don't really communicate any new information. Those kinds of contour lines, the ones that sit on the surface of a single form, only serve to take a form that can already be interpreted as 3 dimensional, and clarify it.

Contours are quite powerful at communicating 3dimensional information about the surface of your object, this means that if you mess up your contour lines it has the ability to flatten out the entirety of your construction, such as in this tomato, where your contour marks don't properly hook around the form of the structure, so it looks flatter, a bit ovoid in nature, rather than spherical. So in general it's best not to add these types of contour lines, rather, focus on intersection lines, the contour lines that communicate the relationships between different forms in your structure.

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.

Ease up on your lineweight, it's thick, with several passes going over the same marks and jump from one form's silhouette to another, which smooths everything out too much. Almost as if you pulled a sock over a vase, it softens the distinctions between the forms and flattens the structures out somewhat.

Instead lineweight must be subtle, used only to clarify the overlaps between the forms that are being built up, as explained here.

Final Thoughts

I'm going to be marking this submission as complete, as I believe that in these pages you have demonstrated that you do understand the way these construction methods and techniques should be used and why they're important for your work, you just need to be more thorough when applying these concepts to your work in order to get the most out of this lesson. Good luck in Lesson 4.