Hello Sumi978, 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, but there are a couple of points where your turns are a bit too sharp, this is not necessarily a mistake for arrows but it does break the natural flow of the structure, so do keep it in mind. You're making use of foreshortening when 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, but do remember that your hatching lines must still follow the principles of ghosting and mark-making, they must have clear end and start points, be carefully planned and executed and not end at arbitrary points. As a finishing touch to your arrows don't forget to make use of added line weight on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth.

You've done a good job on this exercise, what I'd like to tell you so that can keep getting the most out of this exercise is to actually 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

In general your lines are looking smooth, however the issue with sharp angles in your work is also present here and it hurts the sense of fluidity and energy in your leaves, we want these structures to have a nice flow as they move through the world, we shouldn't break the rhythm of our lines with sharp angles, stick to curves which are more natural.

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.

It's good to see that you've experimented with complex leaf structures but remember not to skip construction steps when approaching these more intricate structures.

These structures are looser than they could be, because you did not establish the spatial boundary, the imaginary space that all of the later structures will take up, and you've also skipped construction steps in here by trying to capture the complex form of the structure right away, instead of constructing each individual arm with the leaf construction method to it's full extent and only then connecting them together. Even though leaves are single entities they can still made be made up of several parts.

You're not making use of edge detail in your pages, by not adding it they're left very simple and you miss out on a great tool to help you further communicate the way your structures exist and move through space. Make use of edge detail whenever possible, and remember that only the last step of leaf construction - texture - is optional.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently made as you're generally following the instructions for the exercise, but they can still be improved. While it's good to see that you're drawing your edges in segments you're not always extending said segment completely up to the halfway point between ellipses, which partially removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve in these structures.

So remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully up to the halfway point to the third ellipse, afterwards you'll start a new segment, making sure to place your pen at the second ellipse and repeat this pattern until your entire branch is complete.

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. When it comes to your application of the ellipse degree shift to your branches it can be improved, as it stands your degrees are too consistent and hardly change which is a mistake that flattens your structures. Remember that as a form shifts in relation to the viewer, so will the degree of the ellipses within that structure also shift.

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, but unfortunately it seems that the majority of your work is made up of demos. If we take another look at the homework section of this lesson we can see that it's specified there that if we wish to include our own attempts at the demos in our submission, they should make up less than half of our total pages, in this case the max would have been 3 pages out of 8 total.

Demos are like training wheels, they help you learn and understand how these construction methods can be used together in a variety of ways in order to construct certain tridimensional structures, but just like with learning how to ride a bike, you won't know how much you know until you take the training wheels out - and then fall on your face. But it's okay, because the next time you try it it'll be easier because you already have an idea of what you should do.

However if you never take the training wheels out, you won't develop yourself to your full potential. Other than this, there are a couple other issues present within your work that are holding you back and that should be addressed.

Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that in some of your constructions you don't draw through some of your forms, such as the petals in this construction and some of the leaf structures in the potato plant demo, this limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise as not drawing throug your forms means relying on your observation skills, instead of engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and truly trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, where it comes from, what it attaches to.

When working on any construction make sure to keep the relationships between the different stages of construction tight and specific, respect the boundaries you establish and don't leave any gaps in between a leaf's flow line and it's outer edges, they must connect.

• 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 do generally respect we can see some spots in this bunny cactus where you cut back into the forms you've already drawn, however this isn't your fault, as the demo itself also cuts back into that form of the cactus, but due to the nature of the lesson material some demos or techniques can become a bit outdated, but still have a lot of overall value, so this is just something to keep in mind as you continue to work through these lessons.

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

Because the majority of your work is made up of demos I can't be truly sure of how much you've learned from the Lesson material and whether you are fully aware of why and how these techniques and methods should be applied. As such I'm going to be asking you for a couple of revisions before moving you onto the next lesson, please reply once you're finished with:

1 page half of leaves, half of branches.

2 plant construction pages.