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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows you're drawing your marks with a good deal of confidence which helps solidify the feeling of fluidity that arrows posses as they move through all the three dimensions of the world they exist in. You're keeping foreshorting in mind while constructing your arrows which allows you to make good use of the depth of your page, this gives a nice extra layer of tridimensionality to your arrows.

It's good to see that you're making use of additional lineweight to reinforce the depth of your arrows. Your usage of hatching helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space and further your own understanding of the tridimensional space these objects occupy, but there are a couple of times where you've placed it incorrectly, making it seem like your arrow is getting bigger the further away it is, and getting smaller as it gets closer, which goes against the rules of perspective.

• Perspective works in the following manner: things that are further away from the viewer will look smaller, and as they get closer to the viewer they'll look bigger. The way this affects an object of consistent size and width that stretches across space is that certain segments of this object will look bigger and others smaller, either gradually or dramatically depending on the perspective of the scene, as such the bigger part of the arrow will always be the one that's closest to the viewer so the segment that's behind it should be the one receiving the hatching.

Leaves

The original linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity, but something to note is that none of your leaf structures fold or bend in any way, this is something to keep an eye on whenever you tackle this exercise again, as leaves are organic structures that are affected by all sorts of forces, from the wind to gravity to their own weight pulling them down, as such you'll find that in plant structures leaves will actually be oriented in a variety of different ways, and you'll improve much more by thinking about the way these objects look when they move through the world from moment to moment, instead of just trying to capture how they sit statically within it.

It's good to see that you've experimented with complex leaf structures but remember not to skip construction steps when approaching these more intricate structures.

For example both of these structures are looser, flatter and stiffer than they could be because you're skipping construction steps and trying to capture the complex shape of the leaf right away, instead of constructing these individual arms each with the leaf construction method and then connecting them together in order to create the larger, more complex structure as shown here.

Another issue present in your leaves is the way you're approaching your edge detail, 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, etc. that could be avoided by putting more time into the work. 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.

While it's good to see that you're not trying to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time you're also constructing it subtractively which is a mistake, instead, make sure to always construct your edge detail carefully, and additively, on top of your construction, as cutting back into our forms can cause us to focus too much on manipulating the 2d shapes on the page, instead of how our marks represent edges in tridimensional space.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently made as you're following the instructions for the exercise, which allows you to create some solid but still organic looking structures. But there are a couple of places where it seems that you're starting your new segments on top of the previous mark you've made, instead of back at the previous ellipse point.

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.

For 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. While it is good to see that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift it can still be improved. At points your degrees hardly change which flattens your structures, so remember to look over the page explaining the degree shift again, and always keep in mind 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, which are coming along decently. You're starting to follow the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson which allows you to construct solid looking and believably tridimensional structures, you're demonstrating a good developing sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

There is not much to say about your work but here are some pointers you should keep in mind when tackling these exercises again in the future.

Many of your constructions seem like they would have benefited from being drawn bigger, for example this oregano construction is very vague, the smaller structures are not constructed with the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson, and thus they're left unclear, flat and stiff. If you had focused on just this structure for your page you would have had more space to fully construct it.

In this Cumin Plant construction the contour lines on your structure don't really do anything. Those kinds of contour lines, the ones that sit on the surface of a single form, only serve to take a form that can already be interpreted as 3 dimensional, and clarify it, but in this case you're overdoing it, adding a lot of marks that contradict one another and flatten the overall structure. In these cases it's best to stick to the minimun amount of contour lines in order to communicate the tridimensional volume of your structures, and focus on contour lines that communicate the intersection between two different forms.

It's good to see that you're putting in more effort into drawing leaf structures that move through tridimensional space, but you still have some unnatural bends present in your leaves. Keep in mind that even though leaves are very flexible structures, that mostly applies to their length and not their width. They're like a piece of paper, not a piece of rubber, they can fold and bend in a lot of ways, but they can't stretch or compress, and if you try to force them to they'll simply rip apart.

Always keep in mind that the construction methods and techniques introduced in this course must always be applied to your work, as they're tools which will help you construct much tighter and solid looking structures, there are times where you deviate from the construction methods by not starting your branches with a minor axis and not drawing forking branches by following the instructions. They're not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.

Final Thoughts

In general your work is moving in the right direction, you're following the instructions to the exercises and your work is looking tridimensional, there are a couple of things that should be addressed but in general I believe you're ready to tackle the spatial reasoning challenges found in the next lesson. Don't forget to pay close attention to the feedback you've recieved and apply it to the next lessons and to your warm up pages.

As such I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.