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

Arrows

Starting this critique with your arrows your linework is looking fairly confident and smooth, which adds a nice sense of fluidity to your arrows as they move through the world. It's good to see that you're making usage of the depth of the page by applying foreshortening to your arrows, as this helps reinforce their tridimensionality and your spatial reasoning skills.

It's good that you're making use of hatching as that helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space and your own understanding of the tridimensional space these objects occupy. As a finishing touch to your arrows don't forget to always make use of added lineweight on top of your overlaps to reinforce their depth.

You're doing very well in this exercise, so I'd just like to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise, as your arrows are generally very similar in the way they move through space as well as their rates of foreshortening. Try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different types of perspective and 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 fluidity present in your arrows is translating quite nicely into these new structures, they have a great sense of energy added to them. You're not only trying to capture how leaves sit statically within space, but also how they move across the world from moment to moment.

It's good to see that you've experimented with complex leaf structures such as in these leaves, but remember not to skip construction steps when approaching these more intricate structures. Your structures are looser than they could be because you did not put down a boundary to establish the overall form of the structure that later structures should abide to. Despite complex structures being made up of several different parts they still exist as a single entity, by not skipping construction steps you can ensure that your constructions are more specific.

For example this structure is looser than it could be, because you attempt to capture the complex shape of the leaf right away, instead of breaking it up into simpler, more manageable steps. Take a look at this demo for an explanation of how we can approach these types of leaf structures while still respecting the leaf construction method and ensuring that our construction feels solid, but still fluid.

Your edge detail is looking quite well made, you're not attempting to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, and you're often approaching it additively - that is, constructing it on top of your preexisting structure, as well as putting it down with the same general line thickness as the rest of your construction, all of these are good things that help you construct solid and tight structures that still feel fluid and energetic.

Branches

For your branches they are generally coming along decently as you're putting in the effort to follow the instructions for this exercise, but there are a couple of changes that can be made in order to help you stick to the instructions more closely. It's good to see that you're extending your edge segments, but you're not always etarting each new segment at the previous ellipse point, instead you start it around the place where your previous mark ended which partially removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve.

So remember how branches should be approached, notice how each new edge segment starts at an ellipse point, continues past the second ellipse, and stops halfway to the third. Afterwards you'll start a new segment at the next ellipse point, not where your last mark ended, extending it past the third ellipse, and stopping halfway to the fourth, and so on until your entire branch is complete.

The purpose of this is to get us used to this method of building up complex lines with individual strokes that overlap to create the illusion of a single mark, that way we can maintain higher control and accuracy over our marks while still allowing for a great deal of confidence.

Something else you should consider is limiting the amount of ellipses present in your branches, as it stands, at points you have too many ellipses in close proximity to one another such as in here which doesn't allow you enough of a length of runway to extend your marks, it also makes it harder for you to fully engage your arm when drawing. As a general rule of thumb, treat ellipses as indicators for when the form shifts noticeably, that way you don't end up with too many ellipses that communicate the same information to the viewer.

For your ellipses it's good to see that you're putting in the effort to always draw through them twice, but when it comes to your application of the ellipse degree shift it can be severely improved, as it stands your degrees are too consistent and hardly change which is a mistake. 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. You're making use of the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson material, you're drawing through your forms which means you're not only trying to capture what these structures look like as shown in your reference, but carefully thinking about the way they exist fully in 3d space and how the different parts of your structure exist in relation to one another.

This is all very good and you're demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

Of course there are always a couple of things we can do in order to improve our work, so here are some of the points you should keep in mind when tackling these exercises again in order to keep improving your skills.

Something that's really important to keep in mind as it can impact the quality of our work without us even realizing it the space we allow ourselves when drawing. It's important that we never limit ourselves, but when we pre-plan how many constructions we wish to fit on a given page before even committing to any of them we can hinder our own abilities.

There are generally two things we must allow ourselves when tackling these exercises in order to get the most out of them. They are time and space, in this case, you don't always allow yourself enough space when approaching these exercises because you're preplanning how many drawings you wish to fit on a given page, which artificially limits the space your brain has in order to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that naturally arise as we tackle these exercises. So make sure that your first construction is as big as it needs to be, only afterwards should you gauge whether there is enough space on the page to add another construction, if not, it's completely okay to have a single drawing in your page.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - 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.

While this is something that you do generally respect, we can see in this mushroom where you did extend the form of the mushroom cap off existing forms structures in here. Instead when it would have been better to approach this part of the structure as a tridimensional form, making use of an organic form and contours to communicate the form of the cap such as in here.

You're done very well in this construction, you carefully consider each stage of construction in order to create a more solid structure and your construction looks much more tridimensional and specific as a result.

It's good to see that you're approaching your cylindrical structures such as mushrooms with a minor axis, as that helps your keep your several ellipses aligned more easily.

Your Venus Fly Trap generally came out pretty well made but there are a couple of things that if approached differently 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 and flimsy.

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 cylinder ( and it makes it more clear 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.

Final Thoughts

Overall, you seem to understand the purpose behind each exercise and how it should be applied even if you have some shortcomings, don't forget to keep practicing these exercises during your warm ups in order to keep improving your skills. I'm going to mark this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.