4:46 PM, Sunday July 4th 2021
Starting with your arrows, you're doing a pretty good job of drawing these with a good deal of confidence behind your strokes, which helps push a sense of motion and movement as the arrows move through space. This also carries over fairly well into your leaves, where you're capturing both how they sit statically in space, as well as how they move through the space they occupy.
There are however some notable issues in how you approach building up more complex edge detail. Constructional drawing is all about taking a complex problem and breaking it down into a series of separate, simpler decisions made one at a time. Once a decision is made, we adhere to it as closely as possible - avoiding replacing things unless they actually need to change. There are a few places where you haven't quite held to this all that closely.
For example, if you take a look at this leaf, you end up zigzagging your edge detail back and forth instead of building it up one bump at a time, having them rise off the simpler edge and return to it as explained in the lesson. You're effectively trying to replace the previous phase of construction, which means you don't get the benefit of the solidity we get from a simple structure. When construction is applied correctly, we take the solidity of that earlier structure and carry it through as we build up complexity, ensuring that it is always supported by the structure that is already present.
Instead of replacing that previous phase of construction, we merely draw the parts that change as shown here.
For more complex leaf structures where you've got a bunch of independent sections (like this one, which has three distinct arms), you can apply the leaf construction process for each of those arms, then merge them together. There are notes on approaching more complex leaf structures here, as well as an additional informal demonstration here.
Continuing onto the branches, you're largely doing a pretty good job, except for a couple things - you need to be extending your edge segments fully halfway to the next ellipse, as explained here, and you should also be more mindful of how the degree of your contour ellipses need to shift wider as we slide along the cylindrical structure, away from the viewer. The reasoning for this is explained in the lesson 1 ellipses video.
Going through your plant constructions, your work here is largely quite well done. I think you hold better to the principles of construction here than you did in your leaves exercise, although you are still somewhat prone to trying to redraw entire chunks of forms. I think one of the reasons for this may be a misunderstanding of how line weight should be applied to these drawings.
Line weight is a tool that serves a specific purpose - to help clarify how forms overlap in particular, localized areas. Instead of making every subsequent level of construction darker, we strive to keep their thickness roughly consistent, and then come back towards the end, adding a touch of line weight here and there to help make the overlaps clearer to the viewer. As shown here, we limit it to specific areas, and we execute it confidently to have the mark taper towards the ends, blending it into the existing linework more seamlessly.
Extending off that, I also feel that you're a little loose in where you're willing to employ filled areas of solid black. Throughout the rest of this course, reserve the areas of filled black for cast shadow shapes only. Meaning, if you're going to add something like that, it needs to be sitting on the surface of some form, and that specific shadow shape needs to be designed to imply the presence of some specific form - be it a constructed form that is already explicitly outlined, or a textural form that is being implied through the use of that shadow shape.
So, avoid any kind of form shading or filling in whole areas as you did in the middle of your corpse flower, and avoid filling in the negative space between objects as you did in the peace lily. This will help keep our use of this tool consistent, and will make it much clearer when the viewer sees it. Generally by default when they see an area of filled black, their brain will assume that it's some kind of cast shadow - and it'll take a moment for them to understand if it hasn't been used in that way. By that point, you've already kind of undermined the illusion that they're looking at a solid, 3D object.
Now, before I mark this lesson as complete, I am somewhat concerned with how you were tackling those more complex leaf structures. So, I'm going to assign one more page to address that. You'll find the revisions assigned below.
Next Steps:
Please submit 1 page of the leaves exercise, focusing on more complex leaf structures.