Hello Meli55, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your lines are looking very confident and smooth, which gives them a great sense of energy and fluidity in your arrows as they move through the world. You're making really good use of the depth of the page due to your application of foreshortening to your arrows.

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.

You're doing very well in this exercise, so I'd just like to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise, as your arrows are generally very similar in the way they move through space as well as their rates of foreshortening. Try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different types of perspective and 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 fluidity present in your arrows is translating quite nicely into these new structures, you're not only trying to capture how leaves sit statically within space, but also how they move across the world 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 generally construct your edge detail additively. You're also keeping the line thickness between your phases of construction roughly consistent, all of which is very good and helps you create a tighter, more solid construction that still feels fluid and energetic.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are generally coming along decently, but there are a couple of points where that can be improved, as you're slightly deviating from the instructions for the exercise. For example it's really good to see that you're extending your edge segments, but you don't always extend it up to the halfway point between ellipses, or start your new mark back at the ellipse point, both of which make it harder to achieve the healthy overlaps we're aiming for 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.

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. From what I can see you do seem aware of the ellipse degree shift, but currently your degrees are often a little bit too consistent and hardly change which flattens your forms. 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. Generally coming along really nicely, you're making use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson for the most part which allows you to create some really nice and tridimensional looking constructions. You're certainly developing your sense of spatial reasoning.

There are certainly still things that can be improved in your work, so here are the points that you should adress the next time you tackle these exercises in order to keep improving your skills.

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, such as in here and here. They're not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.

Make sure to keep the relationships between your different phases of construction tight and specific. Avoid leaving gaps in between a branch's ellipses and the outer edge, as well as leaving gaps in between a leaf's flow line and it's outer marks, they must connect.

You're not 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.

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. Going further than that, make sure to also construct the outer rim present in most types of plant pots, as well as add a ground plane, such as this to communicate where the dirt starts, and where it ends, or extend the stems of your structures all the way down - otherwise it'll seem like your structures are floating in the air.

Final Thoughts

In general your work is moving in the right direction, you're usually following the instructions to the exercises and your work is starting to look tridimensional do to that.

I believe you're ready to tackle the spatial reasoning challenges found in the next lesson, as such I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.