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

Arrows

Let's start by looking at your arrows. Overall, you've done really well in this exercise. Your linework here is looking confident and smooth, which helps sell the feeling of fluidity these objects have as they move across the world, and you're making good use of the depth of the page with your use of foreshortening in this exercise, it's great that you're making use of correctly applied hatching as well as extra lineweight added on top of the overlaps which helps reinforce the depth of your arrows.

The way you can improve in this exercise in the future is by simply challenging yourself further, experiment with different rates of foreshortening as well as different amounts of negative space between your arrow's overlaps and explore the different ways that arrows can move across the world and the different twists and bends they can have while doing it.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves you've drawn most of them way too small, which made it difficult for you to apply the instructions to this exercise very effectively. Because they're drawn way too small you're unable to draw your marks from the shoulder and thus they don't feel as fluid or energetic as they could be if they were drawn bigger, instead they're almost like small blobs of ink, and hardly convey any sense of tridimensionality.

For the leaf structures that were drawn at a decent size your linework is for the most part confident which helps give them a good sense of energy, but they hardly twist or bend, which causes them to feel like flat stickers on a page, instead of the real tridimensional structures they are, which should move across the world from moment to moment, just like arrows do.

It's good that you're making use of the complex leaf construction method, and to great effect already, however you can still make tighter constructions by respecting your initial forms more, for example in this leaf structure you don't respect your initial construction as closely as you could have because you redraw and almost completely replace the original construction by extending off of your leaf's silhouette.

This is a mistake as it makes us focus too much on altering shapes on a flat piece of paper, instead of considering how these are forms in actual 3d space. When you undermine your original construction in this manner you risk creating a less specific, flatter, and unclear construction.

Your application of edge detail is decent, although you should keep in mind that it should be drawn with roughly the same line thickness as the original construction, and to treat edge detail lines as carefully as you would any other mark, in order to avoid gaps and undershoots.

Branches

For your branches they're coming along pretty decently as you're generally following the instructions to the exercise which allows you to create much tighter, solid looking constructions.

You often have visible tails in your branches, this is a normal mistake to make and you'll improve your accuracy with time, however, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind in order to improve your work. Firstly, start placing your ellipses further apart, visible tails also happen when your ellipses are too close together and don't have a nice length of runway between them, which makes it more difficult for you to use the full range of your shoulder and create nice overlaps between lines, you must also attempt to superimpose your new lines on top of the previous ones, in order to aim for a healthier transition between marks.

Moving onto your ellipses it seems you're not following the very important step of always drawing through your ellipses twice. Not drawing through them is a mistake, and for all of the ellipses you draw in this course you must draw through them at least two times.

It's good that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift and applying it to your work as that allows you to create more believable cylindrical structures.

Plant Construction Section

Now let's talk about your plant constructions which in general are coming along quite well constructed and solid looking, you're making use of the construction methods introduced to great effect and you're demonstrating a good sense of spatial reasoning within these spaces.

Of course, there are always a couple of things we can improve, and I believe you'll benefit from hearing about the points you should focus on when visiting these exercises again, as well as some things you may not have considered the first time you attempted these exercises.

Something really important to mention is that for the petal structures in this construction it doesn't seem that you constructed each individual petal structure with the use of the leaf construction method, this might partially be because you made use of too much black, but that's a point that I'll explore later in this critique.

For now from what I can see it doesn't seem that you always made use of the method thoroughly, keep in mind that these methods and techniques are not guidelines or loose suggestions for how to approach your constructions, they're tools which have the explicit goal of helping you develop your sense of spatial reasoning and reliably break down structures into their basic primitive forms so that you can start to understand the forms that make up those structures and how they all sit together in space and relate to one another.

When you skip important instructions, you lose out on this. It's also important to mention that you might have faced some troubles in this page due to the size you're drawing your structures in, which is way too small, and happens in a couple of other pages of yours as well.

When we find ourselves in the situation where the structure we wish to capture would become way too small when drawn on our page, we realistically only have 2 options we can choose from.

1. Decide to focus on a single, individual and much smaller in scale part of the structure, so that we're able to make use of the methods and techniques more thoroughly and clearly in our page, and thus get more out of the exercise than if we were to draw the entire structure, but had to skip instructions in order to fit the drawing into our page.

Or 2. We can choose a different reference picture, be it of the same structure but in an angle that allows us to view it better, or a different structure altogether.

These exercises are drills with the explicit purpose of helping you develop as an artist, thus, it's way less important that you accurately depict the structures you'll come across during your lessons, and much more important that you're able to apply the construction methods and techniques thoroughly in order to help you develop your skills.

• When constructing cylindrical structures such as mushrooms, drawing them around a minor axis will help keep your several ellipses aligned to each other more easily.

Moving on to your use of texture in this exercise you're leaning in very heavily in big areas of black, but these should be avoided. As not only do they obscure areas of your work, making it more difficult to accurately gauge your homework pages but you're also focusing too much on form shadows instead of cast shadows which is a mistake.

Large areas of black break the concept of drawing detail implicitly and muddy up your work unecessarily.

Texture in the context of this course is an extension of the concepts of construction. In a lot of ways they're the same concept, just in different scales, wiith construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, if it's big and thick or thin and small. With texture we're communicating to the viewer what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating tridimensional information.

Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, 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 can then design an appropriate shadow shape that would come from this form. 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 your work is looking good and you're starting to understand the concepts and principles this lesson seeks to teach, you only need to focus on a couple of points in order to take your work to the next level, make sure to always apply the instructions to the best of your ability and never skip construction steps.

I'm going to be marking this submission as complete, as I believe you're ready for the construction challenges present in the next lesson. Good luck in Lesson 4.