Hello min2000, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.

Arrows

Starting with your arrows you're doing a good job here, your linework is looking confident which helps communicate the fluidity that arrows have, but if you make a couple of changes to the way you're approaching this exercise you'll get even more out of it in your next pages.

Your hatching can use some work, remember that the principles of ghosting explained back in Lesson 1 dictate that all lines must have a clear start and end point defined, as such your hatching lines should be parallel to one another and go from one end of the arrow's width to the other. Another thing to keep in mind when adding the finishing touches to your arrows is to always make use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce them.

For some of your arrows you're not making a lot of use of foreshortening which leaves your arrows pretty confined to the 2d space of your page. Make sure to explore with different amounts of negative space between overlaps and to vary the size between arrow segments in order to fully explore the 3d space available to you.

Leaves

The fluidity present in your arrows carries over quite nicely onto your leaves, you're capturing a good sense of energy present in these new structures but there's a couple of issues to call out here which hold your work back from it's full potential.

• Firstly, something that stands out right away is how almost none of your leaves are bending or folding in some way.

In actual plant structures you'll find that it's very rare for leaf structures to be assorted in this manner, instead they'll be found in all sorts of rotations and can be influenced by all sorts of external forces such as the wind or their own weight pulling them down, so you should focus on drawing leaf structures that bend, twist and fold, making use of the entire tridimensional space available to you, and focusing on not only capturing how they sit statically within space, but also how they move across that space from moment to moment, otherwise your leaf structures end up feeling like flat stickers on a page, instead of real objects that exist freely in an actual tridimensional space.

• Secondly you're often tracing over your initial lines with a darker, thicker lineweight, which looks hesitant and takes away from the initial energy and confidence your original lines had.

Tracing in general is something you should avoid whenever possible, because it tends to make us focus more on how we're following a line on a flat page, rather than how that line represents an edge in 3D space, and in this case it harms the solidity of your original construction.

I can see that in here you started a complex leaf construction but about halfway through you gave up on it. Every drawing that you give up on is also a learning opportunity that you throw away, if you make the decision to draw a certain structure in this course you must see it the whole way through. I also heavily recommend that you read over this informal demo on complex leaf structures as well as this page on not skipping construction steps.

Your usage of edge detail is looking a bit mixed, you use it as it's best in here but for the most part your edge detail marks don't properly lift off the outer line, establish the new form and then come back down and integrate with the outer line seamlessly. Currently most of your marks don't follow these principles, which means that they end up looking like chicken scratching and unconfident linework, and don't accurately communicate the form of the leaf.

Branches

Continuing on to your branches some of the instructions for this exercise weren't followed through, specifically in how you should start your construction around a minor axis. By revisiting the instructions for the exercise we can see that we should construct our branches in steps in order to create solid looking structures, the first of them is to establish a minor axis, and then start placing ellipses along the line, being mindful of their alignment to the minor axis.

It's good to see that you're making an effort to extend your lines, but you don't always extend it completely up to the halfway point between ellipses and sometimes you extend it too far.

So remember how your edges should be extended, by having your segment start at the first ellipse, 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 branch is complete in order to ensure a smooth transition between segments.

Moving on to your ellipses remember that we must draw through them twice in order to create a smooth and confident looking ellipse. So don't forget this important step. It's good to see that you seem aware of the ellipse degree shift but some of your degrees are still looking too similar to each other which is a mistake as introduced in the organic forms with ellipses exercise.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly onto your plant constructions, your attempts at the demos are the best work you have here, they're the most tridimensional looking and the most solid out of your pages, unfortunately it seems that you haven't really paid as much attention to the instructions as you should have, which hurts the quality of your work and how much you're getting out of these exercises, fortunately since your demos are moving in the right direction it shows that you have potential and can apply some of the concepts introduced already, you simply need to understand them better in order to apply them more thoroughly to your work.

I hope that my critique aids you in your journey as I'll be pointing out the issues present in your work and how to fix them.

First things first make sure to always pay close attention to the information presented in the lesson material, this also includes the requested homework pages. In the Homework section of the lesson it's clarified that you should submit 8 plant construction pages and that while you're allowed to submit your attempts at the demos alongside your homework, that they should make up less than half of your submitted pages. You submitted 5 attempts at the demos, with two of those being the same demo ( the potato plant ) and only 3 of your pages being made up of original work.

This doesn't allow you enough room to attempt to ride the bike without the training wheels, so to speak. While the demos are a great resource and a useful tool to help you understand how these concepts can be applied to real structures it's still important that you attempt them on your own, in order to fully grasp these techniques.

A big issue present in your work, most notably in your own original pages is the fact that you're not making use of the techniques and methods introduced in the lesson.

For example in here and in here you're not drawing your branches with the branch construction method as it's laid out in the exercise's instructions which hurts the solidity of the form as inconsistencies in the branch size become more noticeable, another problem is that in here you're also not making use of the forking branches construct method which leaves the relationships between your phases of construction unclear, and thus your construction is less tight and specific than it could be.

Another problem is that despite demonstrating that you understand the leaf construction method in your page of leaves, you're not making use of it in your plant constructions such as in this page, this leaves your leaf structures stiff, unclear and it also flattens your construction as you go back to symbol drawing, which only allows you to capture the representation of a rose, but doesn't let you draw it as it fully exists.

Remember that we want our viewers and ourselves to be fully convinced that the structures we draw are truly tridimensional, as if our page isn't a piece of paper, but instead a window into a different world, however, by not following the techniques and methods introduced your work is left flat and unconvincing, which only serves to remind your viewer that what you've drawn is not a real object, but just a bunch of marks on a page.

Another big issue that you must address when revisiting these exercises again is the fact that you're not always drawing through your forms.

• It's incredibly important for you to draw through all of your forms, as small or as unecessary as you might believe them to be, forms don't stop existing when they become obscured by other forms. Think of it as building a house and having a full X-ray view of the building, it's a tridimensional puzzle that cannot exist before the foundations are laid out, the roof cannot exist before the walls, and the walls cannot exist before the foundation, in that same vein tips of leaves or parts of a construction cannot exist by themselves, they still exist as full forms even when they're partially obscured by other objects. So always construct forms in their entirety, this will help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning and make all of the relationships between phases of construction in your drawing clear and defined.

When drawing stems, one thing you should remember to do is to always cap their ends off with an ellipse, don't leave two lines floating in your page without it, otherwise your form is left open ended and thus doesn't convey a full sense of volume to the structure.

For your attempts at the potato plant the way you've filled in the areas of black and the way your shadows cling to the form that casts them suggest that you may be misinterpreting the filled in areas of black as arbitrary artistic choices. In the actual potato plant demo, that part that's filled in is basically so densely packed that the shadows fill up the dirt you can see between the gaps - but here the camera angle's different, and your shadows don't all line up, when following along with the demos make sure to also consider the way that your construction is turning out, if your angle turns out to be different, or you've drawn a structure with slightly different proportions or a different rotation, you may want to make changes to your own attempt in order to ensure that your construction is solid and shadows and forms look consistent with your work.

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.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that.

Final Thoughts

While I don't know the timeframe that took you to go through this lesson I still believe that it's a fair assumption to make that you're doing the following of two things.

1. You are rushing in some level, even if it might have taken you a while to finish all of your pages when you were working on the pages themselves I believe that you haven't given yourself enough time to do each construction to the best of your current ability.

2. You are not upholding your responsibilities as a student completely because you're not giving yourself the time to apply the instructions to the best of your ability, while you clearly understand some of the instructions you don't apply it always, which harms your progress and the quality of your work.

Due to these reasons I don't believe you fully understand the concepts that this lesson seeks to teach and I don't believe you're ready for the next lesson and as such, I'll be assigning you some revisions. Please reply with your homework pages once you're finished.