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

Arrows

Starting with your 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 making good use of perspective and the depth of the page.

Your hatching is well applied as you're keeping it neat and tidy, and it's also good to see that you're making use of additional lineweight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.

Overall some really good work here, don't forget to keep practicing this exercise during your warm ups to keep improving your skills.

Leaves

The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, it's good that you're not only trying to capture how these structures sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

However be careful of unnatural bends present in your leaves. Keep in mind that even though leaves are very flexible structures, that mostly applies to their length and not their width. They're like a piece of paper, not a piece of rubber, they can fold and bend in a lot of ways, but they can't stretch or compress, and if you try to force them to they'd simply rip apart.

Your addition of edge detail is generally looking pretty good, as you're following the proper instructions for drawing edge detail, you don't usually attempt to capture more than one piece or bump of detail at a time, and you generally construct your edge detail additively which is good. You're also keeping the line thickness between your phases of construction roughly consistent, which is very good.

Branches

Your branches are coming along decently as you're generally following the instructions for the exercise, allowing you to create some solid and organic looking structures, although there are a couple of things that could be approached differently, which will help you create more solid, tight looking branches.

There are a lot of visible tails present in these branch structures, while this is a very common mistake we can attempt to mitigate it by limiting the amount of ellipses in our branches, by spacing them further apart we'll allow for a bigger length of runway between ellipses, and ensure a smoother, more seamless transition between marks.

It's good that you're always drawing through your ellipses twice, you also seem generally aware of the ellipse degree shift and applying it to your branches, which helps reinforce their volume and tridimensionality.

Plant Construction Section

And now let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are generally looking pretty good, for the most part you're following the instructions for the exercises which allows you to create some pretty nice and tridimensional looking structures, you're clearly demonstrating a good sense of spatial reasoning.

Of course, there are always a couple of things that we can improve in order to take our work the next level, so here are some of the things you should keep in mind for the next time you attempt these exercises.

  • Sometimes you draw through your ellipses too many times, which causes them to become a bit too loose and messy, try your best to only draw through your ellipses once or twice, to keep them confident and tidy.

  • In your constructions there are often stray marks or gaps in between your lines, including leaving gaps in between your leaf's flow line and it's outer edges when they should connect. This hurts the solidity of your construction as it leaves your forms open ended, make sure to keep the relationships between your different phases of construction specific and clear by avoiding gaps, stray marks, and floating structures.

  • Your work would have greatly benefitted from additional lineweight to clarify the distinctions between overlaps at points, especially for your more complex leaf structures which contain several elements, where some lineweight focused on the overlaps would have gone a great length in helping you communicate how your forms exist in 3d space more clearly.

For your fox-gloves while it's good to see you're considering the more uncommon shape of the flower structures you must keep in mind that they are still very leaf-like in nature, despite the flower's conical shape. As such we must make sure to approach even these types of structures with the leaf construction method, otherwise we can risk stiffening these structures.

There are two ways we can generally approach this - either by drawing different sections of this structure with the leaf construction method, and afterwards connecting the different leaves together in order to build the complex shape, or we can construct a cylinder just like you did, but then go even further and make use of the leaf construction method on top of the cylinder in order to capture the flow of the different sections of the leaf structure, and lastly connect them together, making use of edge detail in order to finish the complex structure. I actually put together a quick demonstration of how this would look like for a different student once, in the context of a daffodil and I believe you might find it helpful.

Final Thoughts

Overall you've done really well in this lesson, you're applying the concepts taught in the lesson very effectively and your plants are turning out quite tridimensional due to that. Keep the points I mention here in mind in the future so that you can keep improving your skills. I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete as I believe you're ready to tackle the challenges introduced in the next lesson. Good luck in Lesson 4.