Hello royllercoster, I’m ThatOneMushroomGuy and I’ll be the TA handling your critique today.

Arrows

Let’s start this critique by talking about your arrows. You've done an overall really good job with this exercise, your linework is looking smooth and confident which aids you in giving a great sense of fluidity and flow to your arrows. You’re making good use of the depth of the page with your usage of perspective and your neat hatching placed at the correct side of the overlaps helps sell the illusion of tridimensionality.

Just remember two things: first, that you stick with hatching, and not filled in areas of black to differentiate between overlaps, as these should be reserved for cast shadows only, and secondly, make use of added lineweight on top of the bends as a finishing touch in order to reinforce their depth.

The only thing you can keep in mind when tackling this exercise again is to start getting out of your comfort zone more often, as your arrows are incredibly similar in terms of foreshortening and orientation, arrows are very flexible objects and as such there’s an infinite number of ways they can twist, bend and move through space. Exploring this in your pages will help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning further.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves the sense of fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely into these new structures, although there are a couple of issues which bring down the quality of your work and should be address.

The biggest of these is your overreliance on contour lines which... Don't really communicate any new information about the form of your leaves. The types of contour lines that sit on the surface of a single form only really serve to take a form that can already be read as tridimensional, and clarify it. In practice however, their usefulness is limited, as the more contour lines you put down, the more chances there are for you to commit mistakes which may be unnoticeable individually, but quickly accumulate and undermine the fluidity of your form, such is the case of your leaves, which are stiffened by the abundance of contour lines. Whenever you add a new contour line, ask yourself what new information about the form this mark is supposed to communicate.

Your application of edge detail is pretty good as you’re generally not trying to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, which allows you to create a much tighter, more solid looking structure with clear relationships defined between forms.

Your usage of texture can be improved in this exercise, as you're only drawing them as single lines, which comes across as a very explicit use of texture. Make sure to design your shadow shapes by outlining the shadow and only afterwards filling it in, you may also find this demo on how to think when approaching leaf texture very useful.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they’re also coming along quite decently as you’re generally following the instructions for the exercise which help you create more tridimensional structures. However there are a couple of things which can be done differently which will help you take your branches into the next level.

Firstly it’s good to see that you’re making use of the line extension methodology for your branch’s edges, but you’re not always making use of this step consistently, there are moments where you extend it past the correct point, or don’t extend it far enough.

So remember how branches should be approached, each edge segment must start at the first ellipse point, be extended past the second ellipse and stop halfway to the third ellipse - not before, not later - and afterwards, you’ll start a new segment following these same steps in order to create a seamless transition between marks. In order to ensure this smooth transition, it’s also important that your ellipses are placed far apart from one another, so that each segment is a nice length of runway that allows you to draw from the shoulder.

It's great that you're drawing through your ellipses twice, although there are some visible signs of hesitation in your lines, so you can certainly start ghosting your lines faster, in order to avoid wobble. While it's good that you seem aware of the ellipse degree shift many of your ellipses degrees are still too consistent across some of your branches which is a mistake since as the orientation of a cylindrical form shifts in space in relation to the viewer, so will the ellipse's degrees within that structure shift.

Plant Constructions

And finally let’s talk about your plant constructions, in general it’s good to see that you’re making an effort to follow the instructions for the exercises introduced previously in the lesson, which is setting you on the right path to start understanding how these different structures exist in tridimensional space. However there are a couple of misunderstandings and issues which are stopping you from truly getting the most out of these exercises, and they must be addressed so that you can bring up the quality of your work.

One of the most important problems to address is the fact that you’re not always drawing through your forms, such as the leaf structures in this page, this stops you from making use of the leaf construction to it’s full extent, and you’re also skipping construction steps, due to this your leaf structures are left stiff and awkward, and your entire structure is left flattened because you’re unable to properly establish how each form sits in relation to one another in space.

Remember that the construction methods introduced in this lesson are not suggestions or guidelines, they’re tools which have the explicit purpose of helping you develop your sense of spatial reasoning, in order for thst to be possible you must be apply them to your work.

In that same vein you must always draw through your forms because forms don’t stop existing when they’re obscured by different parts of a structure, just like the pipes in a house don’t stop existing when you can’t see them. Thus, as small or as unecessary as a form may be, make sure to draw through it in order to fully understand how each part of a construction sits in space, how the different forms connect to one another and influence each other.

• When drawing any type of cylindrical structure such as plant pots, starting them around a minor axis will help you keep your several ellipses aligned much easier.

It seems you attempted to draw a bonsai tree in this page, but trees and other complex structures like it are not really fit for this lesson, this is because due to their sheer size and complexity, applying the construction methods introduced in the lesson is not really possible, and thus you won’t get as much out of the construction than you would if you attempted a different type of plant structure.

This last structure is slightly flattened because of the spikes that run along the branch structure. Something to keep in mind when approaching any construction is that because we are drawing on a flat piece of paper, we are free to make whatever marks that we make, but it just so happens that a lot of these marks will undermine the solidity of your original construction. The way we can prevent this is by sticking to a couple of rules which help us respect the forms we put down.

One of these rules is that under no circumstance should you attempt to alter the silhouette of your forms. It’s silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form you’re drawing, but it’s connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change the shape, you won’t alter the form if represents, you’ll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this more easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette if a form.

Instead of trying to create new forms by changing the silhouette, we must construct each new piece as their own form as shown here.

Final Thoughts

In general you’re moving in the right direction but your understanding of these concepts can still be strenghtned, as such I’m going to be assigning you some revisions before marking your work as complete. Please reply once you’ve revisited the relevant lesson material with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

2 Plant construction pages.