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

Arrows

Let's start this critique by taking a look at your arrows, where your linework is looking fairly confident and smooth, which adds a nice sense of fluidity to your arrows as they move through the world. It's good to see that you're making usage of the depth of the page by applying foreshortening to your arrows.

It's good that you're making use of hatching as that helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space, although you can push it a little bit further and make it slightly more noticeable, as well as make sure that you're always adding it when possible.

When making use of added lineweight on top of your overlaps as a finishing touch to your arrows don't forget that this lineweight must be added subtly and confidently, it should only added on top of the overlaps, not the entire length of the arrow.

In general you're moving in the right direction, so tell you so you can keep getting the most out of this exercise is actually to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise, try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different rates of 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.

However you also 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.

It would have been nice to see you attempt some more complex leaf structures alongside your more basic leaf constructions.

Outside of a single exception you're not making use of edge detail in your pages, including your plant instructions, which would have greatly helped you further communicate the form of your structures and how they move through space, keep in mind that edge detail is another step of the construction process and as such it must be considered whenever possible. Only the last step of construction - texture - is optional.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are generally coming along decently as you're following the instructions for the exercise which helps you create a more solid but still organic looking structure. However there are a couple of changes that can be made which will help you create structures that are overall more solid and tightly made.

Firstly it's possible to see that you're struggling with the edge segment extensions, often losing control over your marks and extending your marks too far past the halfway point between ellipses, the way we can mitigate this issue is by placing our ellipses further apart, which will ensure a bigger length of runway between marks, ensuring a smoother transition between marks and allowing us more space to fully engaging our arm when drawing and maintain a higher level of control over our strokes.

Another thing you should be aware of are gaps in your construction, which undermine the initial construction and create size inconsistency. Make sure to always ghost your marks as many times as you need, and if a mark does goes awry, attempt to aim for the next ellipse anyway with your new mark.

For your ellipses it's good that you're generally putting in the effort to always draw through them twice, although at a couple of points you don't quite reach this number, lifting your pen earlier instead and causing you to only draw through your ellipses about 1.5 times, so make sure to only lift your pen once you've executed your mark at least two full times to ensure a tight and smooth ellipse.

It's good to see that you're generally aware of the ellipse degree shift but be careful as even though you're varying your ellipse's degrees, they are often inconsistent with the way the form turns, getting wider at the middle of the form and then suddenly thinner at the ends even when there's no indication that the form is bending in this manner, or vice versa, if the rate of change in your degrees is not in line with the rules of perspective you will end up flattening your structures by accident.

Plant Construction Section

And now let's take a look at your plant constructions, where you're generally following the instructions for the techniques and methods introduced in the lesson material, this in turn is helping you develop your sense of spatial reasoning and create structures that feel more grounded and tridimensional.

Of course there are still some things that can be improved, so here are the points you should keep in mind whenever you tackle these exercises again so that you can get even more out of your study sessions next time.

Whenever we tackle a certain structure, we must always make sure that we're constructing it to it's full extent, we shouldn't leave gaps in between forms or leave forms/silhouettes open ended, as that undermines the solidity of our work. This is something that's very present throughout your work, as there are places where your leaves are open ended, because you didn't connect the outer edges with another mark, in a similar way to how we connect both our marks during the arrows exercise.

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. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

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 do generally respect, we can see one spot on your king oyster construction where you actually cut into existing form's silhouette's in here in an attempt to fix a mistake, but there's many reasons we draw these exercises in ink - it forces us to be more purposeful with our marks, and causes us to face our mistakes when we do commit them, we can't erase them and pretend like they do not exist, we can only try to be more mindful of them in the future.

• 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.

There are some things which could have been approached differently in your attempt at the potato plant demo by following it more closely, which would have helped you get more out of the exercise. As it stands currently your structure was drawn way too small, which severely limited your ability to fully construct the branch structures present as well as keep you from completely engaging your arm, make sure to always draw your structures at a size that feels comfortable to you, but still allows you to construct it fully by making use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson material.

It's also important to point out that the way you've filled in the areas of black in the construction is different from the way it was shown in the demo, because there the 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 the shadows don't all line up, this suggests that you may be misinterpreting these areas as some sort of arbitrary artistic choice, but they're still concepts that must be carefully considered.

Final Thoughts

Overall your work is good, you seem to have understood most of the instructions for this lesson but you have a couple of minor issues which are holding your work from being the best that it could be. I believe that you've shown yourself to be capable of moving on and tackling the new challenges that will be present in Lesson 4, but keep in mind my feedback and don't forget to keep practicing these exercises during your warm ups. I'm going to be marking this submission as complete, good luck in Lesson 4.