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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your lines are looking smooth and confident with only a couple of signs of hesitation. Your hatching is neat and tidy, but it's placement can be improved, as currently you sometimes add it to the incorrect side of the arrow's overlap, which contradicts the illusion of depth you wish to achieve.

• Due to the way perspective works objects will appear bigger when closer to the viewer and smaller when further away, even if they're the exact same size. The way this affects an object of consistent size moving through space means that parts of it will look bigger, and others will look smaller based on how close each part of that object is to the viewer, according to this logic this means that the smaller part of the arrow segment should always be the part getting the hatching.

As a finishing touch to your arrows don't forget to always make use of extra lineweight at the top of overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.

Speaking of depth, while your arrows are clearly looking tridimensional they don't have a lot of foreshortening applied to them which causes them to be pretty contained to the 2d space of the page. Make sure to push the size difference between overlaps, challenge yourself in order to fully explore the 3d world that arrows can exist in.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves they're looking energetic and fluid, you're not only capturing how these objects sit statically within space but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

Your addition of edge detail can use some work, looking closely at your lines it seems that, because there are so many and they seem individually unimportant you're putting less time into each one, so they do not proper rise off and return to the existing outer edge mark - there are often gaps and overshoots that could be avoided by putting more time into your lines. No mark you draw is unimportant - if you decided it was worth adding, it's worth giving as much time as it needs to be done to the best of your current ability.

I've noticed that you attempted to add some texture to your leaves, your work is very well done, although it leans towards the explicit side sometimes, with many single lines in order to capture the look of the texture, instead of capturing the shadow shapes with dynamic shapes. You can find here some extra useful notes on how to think when adding texture to your leaf structures.

Branches

For your branches they're coming along decently, you're drawing through your ellipses twice and making use of the ellipse degree shift, so your branches are looking solid as a result, but it seems that you're not following the instructions as closely as you could have, at the places where the ends of your marks are visible it can be noticed that you didn't fully extend your lines to the halfway point between ellipses.

By revisiting the instructions for this exercise we can see that we lay out our edges in a way that allows us to make several marks that run seamlessly into one another, the way we achieve this is by drawing our edges in segments and making sure each line comes up to the halfway point between ellipses, so that the new line is superimposed on top of the previous mark and seamlessly integrated with it. So don't forget this small but important detail.

Plant Construction Section

For your plant constructions there's not a lot to talk about as you've done a really good job with these exercises. You're making use of the methods and techniques taught in the lesson to great effect which allows you to create very solid and believable tridimensional structures, it's as if your page wasn't just a flat object, but a window into a different world.

It's great to see that you're already demonstrating a very strong sense of spatial reasoning in places like your mushroom constructions or your pitcher plants.

Of course, there are always a thing or two that we can improve, so I'd like to mention them in hopes that they will help you as you continue through this course.

• When constructing cylindrical objects such as plant pots make sure to do so around a minor axis in order to keep your several ellipses aligned.

At times you go a bit too heavy with your added lineweight such as in here. Lineweight shouldn't jump from one form's silhouette to the other, as it tends to smooth everything out too much, softening the distinctions between the forms and flattening the structure out somewhat. Instead, your focus when adding lineweight should be on subtlety, only used to clarify overlaps between forms that are built up.

Something important to keep in mind as we're working on these exercises is that 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 some spots on your mushroons where you actually did extend off existing forms' silhouettes, as we see here. Instead, when we need to add additional forms and bumps on top of a structure that isn't flat we must make use of organic masses similar to the ones found in lesson 2, that will be added on top of our forms in order to properly communicate it's tridimensional form.

Final Thoughts

Before ending your critique I must mention something. I'm seeing some very faint lines in your work, they are consistently present throughout your pages, from your arrows to your leaves to many of your plant constructions, you can see several examples of what I mean here. Could you explain what these lines are?

If these are pencil under drawings remember that this is not something you should be doing in this course, and it will not be accepted in the future.

Your work is showing a great understanding of spatial reasoning and I have no doubt you'll do well in the next lesson. Good luck and feel free to move on to Lesson 4.