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

Arrows

Let's start with your arrows, where your lines are looking fairly confident and smooth, with only a couple of signs of hesitations. This 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 really good use of perspective and the depth of your page, this adds a nice extra layer of tridimensionality to your arrows.

It's good to see that you're making use of some neatly applied hatching to your arrows as that helps you clarify how your arrows twist and turn in space and reinforce your spatial reasoning skills. It's also good that as a finishing touch you're making use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth, although you don't always make use of it, so don't forget this last step.

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

Moving on to your leaves they are looking good, your initial linework is looking quite smooth and confident which helps add a nice layer of fluidity to your leaves.

However the way you're approaching the next steps of construction is often undermining the original confidence your marks had. Firstly make sure to keep the phases of construction roughly consistent in their line thickness, don't try and make later marks thicker.

You must also make sure that each and every mark you make is carefully planned and executed, because there are so many and they seem individually unimportant, you're putting less time into each one, and so they do not properly rise off and return to the existing stroke - there are often gaps, overshoots, little hairy single marks which do not create any forms, etc. That could be avoided by putting more time into the work.

Make sure that you're also never zigzagging your edge detail because that's mistake that goes against the third principle of mark-making from Lesson 1.

It's good to see that you've experimented with complex leaf structures such as in these leaves, but make sure to always keep the phases between your stages of construction tight and specific. This structure is looser than it could be, due to the flow lines for the individual "arms" of the complex structure going past the boundary laid out by the previous phase of construction (the one where you established the simple overall footprint for the structure). The bigger shape establishes a decision being made - this is how far out the general structure will extend - and so the flow lines for the later leaf structures should abide by that.

Your application of texture generally learns towards the more explicit size as you draw several lines throughout your leaves, but 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 generally coming along decently as you're following the instructions for the exercise which allow you to create some solid but still organic looking structures. One thing you should keep an eye on for this exercise is to make sure that you're always extending your lines fully to the halfway point between ellipses, at times you only extend your lines slightly up to the next ellipse point, which partially removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve with this methodology.

Remember to also never redo any marks you make, there are some faint lines present in your branches underneath darker marks, which shouldn't be there. Drawing marks more faintly can cause us to think of Drawabox as sketching, and undermine our previous phases of construction, so always draw your marks with the same line thickness.

You have some visible tails in your compound strokes, but this is completely normal and a mistake we all make, as you continue practicing your accuracy will naturally improve.

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

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are looking generally well made, you're sticking to the construction methods and techniques introduced in this Lesson which helps you to 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 which 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 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, which will help you create much tighter and more tridimensional work.

One of the issues that severely impacts the quality of your work without you even realizing it is the fact that you're pre-planning how many constructions you wish to fit on a given page before even committing to any of them. 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're not allowing 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 your ability to apply the proper construction methods introduced in the lesson.

So draw bigger, 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.

You're not really making use of edge detail in your pages, edge detail would have greatly helped you further communicate the form of your structures and how they move through space, but by not adding it they're left very simple, so make sure to add edge detail whenever possible, and remember that only the last step of leaf construction - texture - is optional.

Make sure to always keep your phases of construction clear and specific, don't leave gaps between your flow line and it's outer edges, they must connect.

This construction is left a little bit loose, the different phases of construction aren't as tight as they could be, there are a couple of gaps in the construction which can be tightened up. Despite it's conical shape, as such it should be approached with the leaf construction method. There are two ways you can generally approach it - either by drawing different sections of this structure with the leaf construction method, and afterwards connecting the different leaves together in order to build the complex shape.

The other way you can approach this plant is by using a slightly tapered cylinder in order to construct the main body of the leaf shape, then afterwards make use of the leaf construction method, build it on top of the cylinder in order to capture the flow of the different sections of the leaf structure, and lastly connect them together, making use of edge detail in order to finish the complex structure. I actually put together a quick demonstration of how this would look like once for a different student in the context of a Daffodil.

Throughout your work there are several times where you've drawn marks more than once, such as in here. This doesn't seem to be edge detail or added lineweight, so remember the principles of mark-making from Lesson 1. No mark you draw is unimportant - if you decided it was worth adding, it's worth giving as much time as it needs to be done to the best of your current ability, and not just remaking a line until you believe you've gotten it right, as that undermines the idea of ghosting.

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.