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

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 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 to see 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 to 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 fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely into these new structures, they have a great sense of energy and flow to them, 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.

Your edge detail is looking pretty well made, you usually approach it additively - that is, constructing it on top of your preexisting structure, as well as putting it down with the same general line thickness as the rest of your construction, these are good things that help you construct solid and tight structures that still feel fluid and energetic, but something you should look out for is the fact that at points you are zigzagging your edge detail marks which is a mistake that goes against the third principle of mark making from lesson 1mistake.

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 create solid but still organic looking structures.

There are a lot of visible tails present in these branch structures, while this is a very common mistake we can attempt to mitigate it by limiting the amount of ellipses in our branches, by spacing them further apart we'll allow for a bigger length of runway between ellipses, and ensure a smoother, more seamless transition between marks.

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 overall. It's good to see that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift and making use of it in your constructions, which helps these structures feel more solid and believably tridimensional.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are coming along quite nicely made. You're generally making use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in this Lesson which helps you create the illusion of tridimensionality in your work, you're not only trying to capture what these structures look like, but you also focus on how they work, how they exist fully in tridimensional space by drawing through your forms and thinking about the way each piece of your construction exists in relation to one another.

This is all very good and it's helping you develop a strong sense of spatial reasoning, there are only a couple of small things that if kept in mind will help you take your work to the next level.

I've noticed that you attempted the daisy demo and this bottle palm tree twice, which is discouraged as it's considered grinding, you could possibly have gotten more mileage out of it by attempting the same type of structure but with a different reference picture, in this manner not only would you have avoided grinding needlessly, but you would have challenged yourself by testing the knowledge you gained from the previous construction in a different context, forcing you to fully put your spatial reasoning skills to the test.

You're making really good use of boundaries which allows you to construct structures with a tighter relationship between different stages of 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, while this is something that you generally respect, in this crassula umbrella construction you have deviated from the instructions by drawing the stems as single lines - rather than constructing them with the branch construction method - which doesn't communicate any sense of form or tridimensionality, you have also not constructed the petals of the flower with the leaf construction method, this has caused the flower to look stiff as you attempt to capture it with flat shapes and then further clarify it with contours.

Despite the odd shape of the petal it is still very leaf-like in it's nature, as such it should be approached with the leaf construction method. One way you can tackle this type of plant structure is by using a circular boundary in order to denote the space that the form will take up, then afterwards make use of the leaf construction method, build it on top of the boundary in order to capture the flow of the different sections of the leaf structure, and lastly connect them together, making use of edge detail in order to finish the complex structure. I actually put together a quick demonstration of how this would look like in the context of a daffodil once, but I believe it will be useful as an example for this construction and your bellflower.

On top of this I must mention that trees, like your bottle palm tree are not a good subject to be chosen for this lesson, you have technically omitted construction steps in your bottle palm tree by only capture the main shape of the trees' leaves, rather than capturing each individual leaf structure as well. This is not feasible with the space and the tools we are working with, so avoid structures like trees for this lesson.

I've noticed that you're not making use of edge detail in your plant construction 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.

I've noticed that in your homework pages you have made an attempt to add contours to your work which is commendable, but I'd like to talk a little bit more about them, because while it's good that you're trying to add them when you add contour to your forms they don't really communicate any new information. Those kinds 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 3 dimensional, and clarify it.

Contours are quite powerful at communicating 3dimensional information about the surface of your object, this means that if you mess up your contour lines it has the ability to flatten out the entirety of your construction, such as in these tomatoes where your contour marks don't properly hook around the form of the structure, so it looks flatter, a bit ovoid in nature, rather than spherical. So in general it's best not to add these types of contour lines, rather, focus on intersection lines, the contour lines that communicate the relationships between different forms in your structure.

• 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 mango construction how you've cut back into the silhouette of your structure in an attempt to change it's form, but in turn this has flattened it.

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 applying the concepts taught in this lesson to well. Your constructions are starting to look solid and tridimensional. I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete as I believe you're ready to tackle the challenges present in the next lesson, just don't forget to keep the points I've mentioned here in mind and apply it to your work. Good luck in Lesson 4.