Hello mozzalexis, 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 also making really nice use of the depth of the page with your usage of perspective and foreshortening.

It's good that you're making use of some well applied 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 well as making use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps as a finishing touch to your arrows.

Overall your work here is really solid so in order to keep pushing yourself make sure that you're attempting arrows outside 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, 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 usually 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

For your branches you are generally following the instructions for the exercise which is good, but there are a couple of places where you're not following them completely to the letter which stops you from getting the most out of this exercise. For example, while it's possible to notice that you're breaking your marks into segments, you barely extend them past the second ellipse, which partially removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve in this exercise.

So remember 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.

It's good to see that you're following the instructions for drawing knots and forking branches correctly. 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 overall.

It's good to see that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift and making use of it in your constructions, which helps these structures feel more solid and believably tridimensional.

Plant Construction Section

In order to finish this critique, let's see how you've used the knowledge you've gained throughout the previous exercises and how you've applied it to your plant constructions, the actual plant based meat of the lesson.

One of the most important points to keep in mind is that since 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 bunny cactus and in this inkcap mushroom places where you actually cut back into some of your preexisting forms. While the bunny cactus is not your fault as that's the way it's shown in the demo, this is one of the cases where the lesson material has evolved and as such, some of the demos contain some outdated info present.

So in the future, keep in mind that Drawabox would like you to focus on additive construction by making use of additional masses in order to construct new forms on top of what you've already drawn. This also applies to leaf structures, as you're cutting back into them very frequently as you construct edge detail.

When approaching any type of construction make sure that you're always keeping the line thickness between different stages of construction consistent. For your constructions here and here you're starting with fainter lines and adding later ones with a thicker stroke, but this encourages you to approach construction as though you're redrawing everything at every step. Instead, we're simply building upon the existing structure, modifying what's already there at each stage. There are things that simply won't need alteration, and therefore the marks that defined them from the start should be able to stand for themselves when you're done, without being redrawn or traced over needlessly.

We can make use of added lineweight at the end of a construction as a tool to help us clarify the distinction between overlaps, as demonstrated here.

Final Thoughts

Overall your work is looking good and tridimensional, you clearly understand the methods and techniques introduced in this lesson, as such I'm going to be marking this submission as complete as it's clear that you are ready for the challenges that you'll face in the following lesson. Good luck in Lesson 4.