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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows they're looking pretty smooth due to the confidence which they're drawn with. But while your arrows flow nicely they're often flattened because you're afraid of letting your edges overlap when they should. Another issue is that your arrows don't have any foreshortening applied to them, which causes them to be contained the 2dimensional space of the page. You need to push yourself outside of your comfort zone and vary the sizes between your arrow segments noticeably in order to apply foreshortening to your arrow and communicate an illusion of perspective and depth in your scene.

• Perspective works by having objects appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when further away, even if they're the exact same size. Following this logic, an object of consistent size moving through space will have segments that are closer to the viewer should be bigger, and segments that are further away should gradually get smaller.

I understand that it's hard to vary the size between each segment as you execute your second line, so instead of creating this second line in one smooth motion, you can instead construct your arrow in chunks using the ghosting method. In this manner you can roughly gauge the size of the arrow segment by placing dots and only after planning your mark executing it to the best of your ability and integrating each line into the next.

Another way you can push the depth in your arrows is by diminishing the amount of negative space between your overlaps, and even have overlaps on top of overlaps.

After you finish your arrows, don't forget to make use of lineweight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.

Leaves

Moving onto your leaves there are a couple of issues here which are holding you back from your full potential and limiting how much you'll get out of these exercises.

The first of these problems is that you're not considering how the flow line is more than just a 2d line, it establishes how a leaf flows through space, almost as if it established the gesture of your leaf but also the basics for how your leaf structure will then exist in 3d space. As such it's important that you draw how your leaves are affected by outside forces such as the wind and gravity and that they bend and fold over themselves so that you can capture not only how they sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

This is especially important because when tackling actual plant structures you'll find that it's very rare that all leaf structures in your reference only face the viewer completely, so it's very useful to start tackling these kinds of leaves as early as you can, otherwise they start to feel like flat stickers glued to your page, instead of the tridimensional and free-flowing objects that they are.

Another trap you're falling into is the trap of zigzagging your edge detail, this is a mistake as it goes against the third principle of mark making from lesson 1 and it's something you'll generally want to avoid. Since this issue is caused by our impulse to rush, make sure that you're always take the time to carefully work through your edge detail and make sure no line tries to capture more than one piece of detail at a time. You should also remember to always construct your leaves additively whenever possible, do not cut into what you've already drawn as that undermines the solidity of your forms and can make you focus too much on the shapes on your page, instead of how your lines represent edges in space.

Another thing you should keep in mind is how the complex leaf construction method works since for this leaf structure you ended up skipping construction steps by not by not drawing the individual arms with the leaf construction method which causes the leaf structure to be less solid and structurally sound than it could be otherwise.

I heavily recommend that you reread the instructions for drawing leaves in their entirety before tackling this exercise again.

Branches

Moving onto your branches they're coming along decently as you're generally following the instructions for the exercise.

It's good to see that you're establishing a minor axis for your branches, drawing through your ellipses twice and executing your edge marks in segments which allows you to maintain greater control over your lines.

What you can look out for in this exercise the next time you attempt it is to simply focus more on the size consistency of your branch structures and to refamiliarize yourself with how the ellipse degree shift works, because currently you're switching the degrees which makes the size of the form seem inconsistent. You should also focus on the forking branches method and follow it's instructions more closely as you're skipping the step where you establish the "knot" where your new branch will stem from.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly for your plant constructions, you're starting to understand some of the concepts this lesson seeks to teach but there are a couple of things that we should take notice of.

One of the biggest issues present in your constructions is that you're not making use of the methods and techniques introduced previously in the lesson. For example, this venus fly trap and these mushrooms are some of the examples where you haven't made use of the branch construction method in order to construct the stems and bodies of the plant structures despite the fact that it would be applicable. Considering that your page of branches is pretty decent, this suggests that you were at least in part aware of the instructions but decided not to apply them during your actual plant construction pages.

In this pumpkin construction you've also not made use of the leaf construction method.

Keep in mind that these construction methods and techniques are not suggestions or guidelines, they are tools that were created with the explicit purpose of helping you develop your sense of spatial reasoning, in order for that to be possible you must deconstruct and reconstruct different structures making use of these methods in order to fully understand how they exist in a tridimensional space, how each form exists in relation to others, and where it attaches to and how it affects the forms around it. So don't try to skip instructions or alter the methods shown, they are very flexible and can be applied in a wide variety of ways, but it's necessary to make use of them in order to get the most out of these exercises.

This sunflower is another example of a construction where the leaf construction method was not applied, in this particular case this is in part caused by the fact that you didn't draw through your forms which limited your ability to fully make use of the method.

Just like how the methods are tools for helping you develop your abilities so is the act of drawing through your forms as it completely allows your brain the space necessary to fully work through the tridimensional puzzles that arise when tackling these exercises. Drawing through your forms allows you to understand how each form exists individually but also how it attaches to different forms instead of just assuming how it looks and not drawing it, which leaves the construction vague and leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and unclear relationships between forms.

So as small or as unecessary as you might believe these forms to be, forms don't stop existing when they become obscured by other forms, so always draw them in their entirety.

• As a side note, in the same way that we're drawing the forms of our plants in their entirety, so should you completely construct structures such as plant pots in their entirety, and not just their silhouette. Think of the forms that make them up and how to gradually construct it from simpler forms.

You often leave some of your forms open ended, as mentioned in the branches exercise page you should absolutely NEVER leave a tube open-ended, even if your image cuts off there. This applies not only to branches but plant pots and any other forms, that's because our lines represent the edges of tridimensional forms, so if you leave a forms open ended you leave it unclear as to where the edges of the form are and you'll remind your viewer that they're only lines on the page, and not actual objects that exist in their own tridimensional world.

You seem to be making a lot of use of form shadows in this lesson. What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. 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. I recommend looking over these reminders before you decide to tackle texture again in your exercises, as well as this demo that demonstrates how the shape of our shadow is important for communicating texture and how it should be designed carefully in a dynamic way. You can also see here these concepts applied in the context of a leaf texture.

Final Thoughts

In general you're on the right path to developing a strong sense of spatial reasoning and your drawing abilities further, but you must pay attention to the instructions for the exercises more closely and to spend more time applying these instructions to your work. I'm going to be assigning you some revisions as it's important that you show you understand these concepts and methods and how to apply them to our object of study in this lesson before moving on to more complex and more difficult structures.

Please revisit the relevant lesson material and then reply once you're finished with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

5 plant construction pages.