Hello whitey549, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your linework is looking smooth and confident with no major signs of hesitation. Your arrows clearly look tridimensional as you're making good use of the depth of the page with your application of foreshortening.

It's good that you're making use of hatching at the overlaps in order to reinforce the depth of your page, but don't forget to also make use of added lineweight on top of overlaps as a finishing touch to your arrows.

While you've done really well in this exercise, your arrows are all looking very similar in their orientation, types of overlaps, and rates of foreshortening. Keep in mind that arrows are incredibly flexible objects, they can move in all sorts of ways across the world, you must experiment with that in order to further your understanding of 3d space and how objects exist in it.

Leaves

Your leaves are looking a bit mixed, while some of your leaves look pretty smooth and energetic, you've also got some leaf structures that feel pretty awkward and stiff, because your flow line is awkward and stiff. You've also got some pretty small leaves on your page and unnatural folds which all break the illusion of flow and energy that we want our arrows to have. Remember that we must make sure we're always executing our marks to the best of our ability, drawing them from the shoulder and making use of the ghosting method as much as necessary.

This leaf structure does not follow the leaf construction method in the way it's outer edges are laid out, they have no sense of flow or direction due to the very stiff circular form they make, which is why the leaf feels awkward.

These leaf structures are less solid than they could be because you're skipping construction steps and not making full use of the complex leaf construction method. By not capturing the overall form of the leaf first you leave the construction much less tight and specific than it could be, as even though complex leaf structures have several elements to them they still exist and function as a single entity.

Your application of edge detail is fairly decent as you don't attempt to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time which allows you to create a much more solid construction with much clearer relationships established in between the phases of construction. But keep in mind that this step of the construction process should be approached additively, avoid cutting back into the forms you've already drawn as much as possible, in order to avoid redrawing more than you strictly need to.

Branches

Moving on to your branches it seems you have some clear deviations from the instructions to this exercise. Make sure to always follow the instructions to the letter in order to ensure you'll be getting the most out of drawing. When working on this exercise follow the characteristics for drawing basic branches, simple cylinders with no foreshortening.

Another issue present within your work is that you're also not always following the instructions on how the edges are to be laid out, it seems that at some points you've extended some segments for longer than you should, and in others not as far as you should have.

So let's revisit the instructions for the exercise in order to remember the manner in which branches should be approached. Above all else, we're striving for confidence in our lines, in order to strive for confidence and accuracy in our branches we're going to be building our edges in segments, with our first segment starting at the first ellipse, extending it past the second ellipse and extending it fully to the halfway point to the third ellipse, afterwards we'll start a new segment, making sure to place our pen at the second ellipse and repeat the pattern until our branch is complete.

For your ellipses you're not always drawing through them twice, which is a mistake. Don't forget to ghost through your ellipses enough times until you feel properly confident and execute your marks switfly, at least twice. Something you should look out for as you work on your branches is the ellipse degree shift, as you don't always change the degree of ellipses as the form shifts away from the viewer and they look a little bit too consistent, at timee which hurts the believability of the structure.

Plant Construction Section

And finally let's talk about your plant constructions.

In general your constructions are moving in the right direction, your work is looking solid and you're often making use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson, your attempts at the demos are especially good, although they make up more than 3/8 of the pages requested.

Your original constructions are also looking quite tridimensional, although you run into a couple of issues sometimes, for example make sure that you keep your entire construction contained within your page, letting your forms run off from your paper won't allow you to fully think through how those forms exist in 3d space, and it can hurt the solidity of your work.

Make sure to keep all your phases of construction tight and specific, as such don't leave any gaps, especially not large gaps in between a leaf's flow line and it's outer edges, they must seamlessly connect.

In this flower construction the flow lines for the individual petals go past the boundary laid out by the previous phase of construction (the one where you established the simple overall footprint for the structure). The bigger shape establishes a decision being made - this is how far out the general structure will extend - and so the flow lines for the later leaf-like structures should abide by that, otherwise it may as well not exist.

Another issue within this construction is that these forms were not fully constructed, while you establish in part how these structures would connect to the rest of the flower structure, you didn't construct them with clear, organic forms as they feel slightly stiff, and you didn't draw through your forms, which is a mistake.

It's incredibly important to draw through all of your forms as small or as unecessary as you might believe them to be because forms don't stop existing when they become obscured by other forms. Think of it as building a house and having a full X-ray view of the building, it's a tridimensional puzzle that cannot exist before the foundations are laid out, the roof cannot exist before the walls, and the walls cannot exist before the foundation. So always construct forms in their entirety, this will help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning and make all of the relationships between phases of construction in your drawing clear and defined.

You don't make a lot of use of edge detail in your pages, but keep in mind that edge detail is an essential step of construction in order to indicate the subtle forms along your leaves, so make sure not to skip it.

Final Thoughts

In general your work is good, you only need to follow some of the instructions more closely and address some problems, that way you'll be able to take your work into the next level. I believe you're ready for the challenges present in the next lesson, as such I'll be marking this submission as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.