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

Arrows

Starting with your 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 foreshorting in mind while constructing your arrows which allows you to make really 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 that you're making use of added line weight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth, but keep in mind that lineweight must be subtle, with a single mark superimposed on top of the preexisting one in order to clarify an overlap, and integrate seamlessly into the underlying marks.

In general you're doing well, so keep tackling this exercise during your warm ups in order 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 linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, 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 addition of edge detail is starting to mpve in the right direction as you don't usually attempt to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, however it can be improved as you're generally approaching it subctractively and drawing your edge detail with thicker lines than your initial construction.

In general you should approach edge detail additively as much as possible, as cutting back into the forms we've already drawn can cause us to focus too much on manipulating 2d shapes on the page, rather than focusing on the tridimensional edges they represent in space. When it comes to drawing earlier phases of construction more faintly, if that was intentional, just be sure to keep the line thickness for each phase of construction roughly consistent, so as not to encourage yourself to redraw more than you strictly need to.

Moving on to your application of texture it's starting to move in the right direction as you're starting to think about cast shadows, however you can definitely push your application of it further, as you've got several small and timid marks, and several big spaces of white which contradict what you're trying to communicate. There's a lot more that we can do in order to more accurately capture texture in general, take a look at this informal demo on how to approach leaf texture, and make sure to give these reminders on how texture works in Drawabox a read.

Branches

Moving on to your branches they are starting to come along decently, but you're not always sticking to the instructions for this exercise as closely as you should which impacts the quality of your branches. While it's good to see that you're drawing your edges in segments you're not always extending your lines up to the halfway point between ellipses, which partially removes the healthy overlaps between marks that we're aiming to achieve.

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.

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, but it can be improved at points, some of 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 to finish off this cririque let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are generally coming along 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 focusing 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.

In this flower construction you are leaving the ends of your petal structures open ended, this is a mistake. In real life lines don't exist, we use them in our work on order to create the illusion of an edge, when you leave forms open ended you break that illusion of tridimensionality and volume in your form, so make sure to connect the outer edges of your leaf structure to the flow line, in the same way that you must connect both ends of your arrows.

In this construction you're not constructing the entirety of the flower structures with the leaf construction method, you're approaching the end of the petals as edge detail, when it should be constructed in full. You can see here a visual example of what I mean.

Make sure to focus on smaller sections of your plant, covering your entire page with smaller sections of your plant structure will allow you to draw them out more thoroughly and focus on fully capturing each form with the construction methods introduced in the lesson.

• When approaching cylindrical structures such as mushrooms starting with a minor axis will help you keep your several ellises aligned to each other more easily.

Final Thoughts

In general you are doing really well with these exercises, you're demonstrating a strong sense of spatial reasoning in these pages. I believe these issues can be addressed during your warm ups and that you are ready for the next lesson. I'm going to be marking this submission as complete, good luck in Lesson 4.