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

Arrows

Let's start this critique by taking a look at your arrows, where your linework is looking confident and smooth which helps communicate the feeling of fluidity that arrows have as they move through the world. You're also making good use of the depth of the page with your use of foreshortening, and your well applied and correct placement of the hatching helps solidify the illusion of depth you wish to achieve in this exercise.

It's good to see that you're making use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth.

In general you're doing well, so keep tackling this exercise during your warm ups in order take your understanding of arrows and 3D space further, experiment with the different ways arrows can twist and bend and move across space, try different rates of foreshortening and experiment with the negative space between overlaps, all of these will help you challenge yourself and develop your skills further.

Leaves

The fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely into these new structures. 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.

It's good to see that you're also experimenting with some more complex types of leaf structures, and doing so by following the instructions, which allows you to create a much tighter and more solid looking structure that still feels flexible and energetic.

Your addition of edge detail is generally looking good, as you don't attempt to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time and you're keeping the line thickness between your phases of construction roughly consistent, all of which helps you create a tighter, more solid construction that still feels fluid and energetic. Just keep in mind that when approaching edge detail, you should generally build on top of the forms you've already drawn, constructing your edge detail additively, avoid cutting back into the forms you've already drawn as that can cause us to focus too much on manipulating 2d shapes on the page, instead of the tridimensional edges they represent in space.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are generally coming along decently as you're following the instructions for the exercise which allows you to create some solid but still organic looking structures.

There are a lot of visible tails present in your 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.

For your ellipses it's good to see that you're making an attempt to always draw through them twice as that allows for a smoother mark in general, although I am still seeing some noticeable signs of hesitation so don't forget to execute then with confidence, from the shoulder, and swiftly to avoid wobble. When it comes to your application of the ellipse degree shift to your branches it's good to see that you seem aware of it but it can still be slightly improved, as it stands your degrees are too consistent and hardly change at points which 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

Let's finish this critique by taking a look at your plant constructions, which are looking incredibly well made, you're applying the construction methods and techniques introduced in this Lesson to great effect which helps you create some very tridimensional and solid looking constructions, you're demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

You're not only trying to capture what these structures look like, but you're focusing on how they work, how they exist fully in their tridimensional space by drawing through your forms and carefully thinking about the way each piece of your construction exists in 3d space and how the different parts of your structure exist in relation to one another.

This is all very good, there are only a couple of small things that if kept in mind will help you take your work from great to awesome.

• It's good to see that you're drawing your plant pots around a minor axis, but you're not really constructing them beyond a basic cylinder which doesn't properly communicate where the inside of the pot is or the different planes of the structure. so make sure to add an inner ellipse to indicate the thickness of the pot's border, as well as construct the outer rim that's present in most types of plant pots.

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, and you don't generally ever cut into your forms, there are a couple of examples of you extending marks off existing form's silhouettes.

Your Daffodil construction is particularly really well constructed as you carefully work through each stage of construction.

In [this construction(https://imgur.com/a/6MXgWCd) I've noticed that you're not really constructing these flower structures with the leaf construction method. Despite their more odd conical shapes they are actually still very leaf like in nature and as such should have been approached with the proper technique in order to maintain their sense of energy and fluidity.

However this is a very complex plant structure with lots of elements to it, which did end up limiting your ability to properly apply the construction methods to their full extent and fully construct and define the relationships between the different stages of construction, as the stems inside of the flower structure were not fully constructed with the branch method. In this case it's good to remember that our primary focus when approaching these exercises should be to always apply what we've learned in order to hone our skills.

If a certain structure is too complex in order to approach it with the correct methods, it's best to focus more on applying the construction techniques and methods to simple structures, rather than trying to juggle several elements at once.

And lastly let's take a look at your usage of texture in your plant constructions. Where you're starting to move in the right direction by starting to think of cast shadows, but it still ends up as very explicit at points because you're not pushing your usage of texture as much as you could and making full use of cast shadows your marks are sparse and timid.

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.

Our focus should be on understanding how each individual form sits in 3D space and how that form then creates a shadow that is cast onto that same surface, only after analyzing all of the information present in our reference we'll be able to translate it to our study. This means that the shape of our shadow is important as it's the shape that defines the relationships between the form casting it and the surface it's being cast on, which is why we need to consider carefully how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic.

This approach is of course much harder than basing our understanding of texture on other methods that may seem more intuitive or basing it on the idea that texture = making our work look good, but in the long run this method of applying texture is the one that enforces the ideals of spatial reasoning taught in this course. By following these ideals, you'll find yourself asking how to convey texture in the most efficient way possible, with less lines and ink, focusing on the implicit mark-making techniques introduced in Lesson 2.

Final Thoughts

You're doing well here, you're showing a great sense of form and understanding of tridimensional space. You're using the techniques and methods introduced in this lesson to great effect and capturing really solid tridimensional objects on your page.

I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete, I believe you've understood the purpose of these exercises and executed them really nicely, I believe you're ready to tackle the challenges in the next lesson. Good luck in Lesson 4.