Hello KHOAI, 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 keeping foreshortening in mind while constructing your arrows which allows you to make really good use of perspective and the depth of your page, this gives a nice extra layer of tridimensionality to 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, it's good that you're making use of added line weight on top of the overlaps in order 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 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've experimented with complex leaf structures but remember that the bigger shape establishes a decision being made - this is how far out the general structure will extend - and so you should keep your constructions tight and specific, the flow lines for the later leaf structures should abide by that.

This structure is looser than it could be, due to the flow lines for the individual "arms" of the complex structure not reaching the boundary laid out by the previous phase of construction.

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 generally keep the line thickness between your phases of construction roughly consistent, but don't forget to construct your edge detail additively as much as possible, that is, on top of your structure, avoid cutting back into the forms you've already drawn as that will cause us to focus too much on manipulating 2d shapes, rather than the 3d edges they represent.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently made as you're following the instructions for the exercise, you're drawing your edges in segments which allows you to maintain higher control over your marks and helps you crealte solid but still organic looking structures.

For ellipses don't forget to always draw through them twice, drawing through them only once will cause them to be too loose and unconfident.

When it comes to your application of the ellipse degree shift to your branches it can be improved, as it stands your degrees are too consistent and hardly change which is a mistake that 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

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are generally coming along well made, as you're following the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson which allows you to construct more solid looking and believably tridimensional structures. I can see a good developing sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.

However there are some issues present in these pages which are holding you back from your full potential. So here are the points you should keep in mind whenever you tackle these exercises again so that you can continue to develop your skills.

First things first you've submitted mostly demos, including several attempts at the same demo, which is considered grinding and is not allowed. Demos should at most, make up only 3/8 of your total plant construction pages.

Demos are like training wheels, they help you learn and understand how these construction methods can be used together in a variety of ways in order to construct certain tridimensional structures, but just like with learning how to ride a bike, you won't know how much you know until you take the training wheels out - and then fall on your face. But it's okay, because the next time you try it it'll be easier because you already have an idea of what you should do. However if you never take the training wheels out, you won't develop yourself to your full potential.

Although generally your attempts at the demos are looking pretty well made, you're generally following the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson material and they're coming along pretty tridimensional as a result.

Be careful when making use of contours however, such as in these cacti constructions. When you put contour lines on your additional masses, they don't really do anything. These typed 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 tridimensional and clarify it. While they're useful for introducing the concept of a contour line, in practice their usefulness is somewhat limited as you need to get every single contour down perfectly, and the more you add the more likely it is that tiny mistakes will accumulate and flatten your structure.

As such it's best to focus on intersection contour lines, the ones that communicate how two different forms relate to one another, rather than simply trying to communicate volume.

When approaching cylindrical structures such as plant pots make sure to start with a minor axis in order to keep your several ellipses aligned to each other more easily.

Your attempts at your own original construction 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 drawing your branches with a straight line instead of fully constructing them with the branch construction method. Remember that these aren't guidelines or suggestions, they're rules.

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.

• 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 generally respect we can see in this construction how you've attempted alter the sillhouette of your constructions and extended off of preexisting forms, which flattens your structure.

You can find here more information that talks about how to make use of organic forms to construct plants that aren't simple branches with leaf structures attached to them, and you can see here how you can construct on top of your preexisting structures with new organic forms.

Final Thoughts

In general you're on the path to understanding the purpose of these techniques and exercises and you're making good use of them in your work, however because you submitted mostly demos it's difficult to fully gauge if you have truly understood the purpose of these exercises and how to fully apply them.

As such I'm going to be asking you for some revisions. Please revisit the lesson material mentioned and reply once you're finished with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

2 plant construction pages.