Hello WereVrock, 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 keeping foreshorting 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 also good to see that you're making use of added line weight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth, just don't forget that this lineweight must be subtle and integrate seamlessly into the underlying marks.

You've done a good job on this exercise, what I'd like to tell you so you can keep getting the most out of this exercise is actually to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise, try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different rates of foreshortening, keep in mind that arrows are very flexible objects and can move freely across the world in all sorts of manners, so you should push yourself and explore the different possibilities.

Leaves

The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy although they do look a bit unnatural at points due to the way that they bend or their size becomes inconsistent, 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.

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. You're also keeping the line thickness between your phases of construction roughly consistent, all of which is very good and helps you create a tighter, more solid construction that still feels fluid and energetic.

Your attempts at leaf texture are leaning a bit too much towards the implicit side as you outline texture in one side of your structure and leave the other completely blank. There's much more going on than just a few stray marks implying veins and we can do much more to accurately communicate this type of texture, take a look at this informal demo on how to approach leaf texture, and make sure to give these reminders on how texture works in Drawabox a read.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are coming along decently made as you're following the instructions for the exercise, you're generally drawing your edges in segments which allows you to maintain higher control over your marks - however it does seem that in a couple of places you don't always extend your marks as far as you should have which partially removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve between lines in this exercise.

So if this is the case just don't forget 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.

Due to your ellipses being way too small for the most part you're not always drawing through them twice which is a mistake that causes them to be stiffer than they should be. When it comes to your addition of the ellipse degree shift to your branches it can still be improved, as it stands your degrees are too consistent for the most part, they hardly change which is a mistake that flattens your structures. 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.

Your potato plant is looking good but it seems to simply be way too small, remember that your construction should take up as much spaces as it needs within the confines of your page.

For your venus fly trap construction you are moving in the right direction, but there is a minor change that you could have made which would have allowed you to create a tighter and more specific structure. Currently you approached the "body" or the "stem" of the venus fly trap as a sort of leaf shape, while this is a valid way to approach this structure it leans too heavily on the side of oversimplification for this part of the plant structure and makes the structure feel fragile, flimsy and flat.

This part of the Venus Fly Trap is actually cylindrical in nature, but it's hidden underneath the more leafy part of the stem, it's helpful to understand this because you can then simplify the forms by capturing this part of the structure as a branch ( which makes it much clearer how the "trap" of the venus flytrap connects to the rest of the structure ) and afterwards build the rest of the structure with the leaf construction method, which will allow for a structure that feels less flimsy and much more solid.

Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that in some of your constructions such as in here you haven't drawn through some of your forms, this limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise as not drawing throug your forms means you're forced to rely on your observation skills, instead of engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and truly trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, where each form comes from and what it attaches to.

Always keep in mind that the construction methods and techniques introduced in this course must always be applied to your work, as they're tools which will help you construct much tighter and solid looking structures, while this is something that you generally respect for this corpse flower construction you haven't constructed the petal like structures at the bottom part of the structure, which has stiffened the construction. Since these structures are still leaf like in nature they must be constructed with the leaf construction method.

In general once you've put a form down on the page do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form, but extending off of preexisting forms faces a similar problem.

You can find here a demonstration that I've put together for different student once on how to approach flower structures that have a more cylindrical shape in the context of a daffodil, and I believe you will find it useful.

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. It's good to see that you're also attempting to construct the outer rim that's present in most types of plant pots.

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 to applying these concepts to your work in order to get the most out of this lesson. Good luck in Lesson 4.