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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows they're all looking pretty good. You're making use of lots of overlaps, you have good foreshortening which makes effective use of the depth of the page and they capture a nice sense of fluidity/confidence. It's also good that you're adding extra lineweight on top of your overlaps, but make sure this is subtle.

One thing you may want to look out for whenever you tackle this exercise is always carefully think through the placement of your hatching, sometimes you've applied it to the wrong side of the arrow's overlap which slightly disrupts the illusion of depth you wish to create.

• Due to how perspective works, objects closer to the viewer appear bigger, and they seem smaller the further away they are. Following this logic, an object of consistent size that's moving away or towards the viewer must have it's size gradually change according to the perspective of the scene. As such, the bigger part of the arrow is always going to be the one closest to the viewer, therefore the smaller part of the segment should be the one getting the hatching instead.

Leaves

The confidence of your arrows carries over nicely into how you're approaching your leaves, you're not just establishing how they sit statically in space, but also how they move through the world they exist in from moment to moment.

One unfortunate issue present in this page is that you're often going outside of your boundaries and ignoring the scaffolding that your previous phases of construction established, such as in here.

When dealing with construction in general, be sure to maintain tight, specific relationships between your phases of construction. So for example, this structure is looser than it could be, because you don't establish flow lines for the individual "arms" of the complex structure, and becaue these arms go past the boundary laid out by the previous phase of construction (the one where you established the simple overall footprint for the structure). These bigger shapes establish a decision being made - this is how far out the general structure will extend - and so the flow lines for the later leaf structures should abide by that.

For further clarification, adding edge detail on top of that, which extends beyond that boundary, is fine - because you're building it on top of a 3D structure that exists. But if we have a flow line or structure that goes beyond this established boundary, then that boundary may as well not exist - since it doesn't establish any structure on its own.

Your application of edge detail is a bit mixed, at times you're adding it well and avoid capturing more than one piece of edge detail at a time, and build your edge detail up on top of your structure, and other times you zigzag your edge detail which is a mistake as it goes against the third principle of mark making from lesson 1, you also cut back into your leaves often when working with additive edge detail would have worked and try to capture the complexity of certain leaf's edges right away, instead of building up those complex bumps with edge detail.

I believe you'll benefit from revisiting this page, on not skipping construction steps as well as the informal demo explaining how to approach complex leaf structures and this demo which talks about subtractive construction, and how to use it when it's necessary.

Branches

Onto your branches they're coming out decently and you're on the right track for drawing these structures, but you're not always following the instructions to the letter which takes away some of the solidity of your branch structures.

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.

Currently while you're extending your edges, you're not always extending it completely up to the halfway point in between two ellipses, which partially removes the healthy overlaps we wish to achieve in this lesson, so don't forget to always ghost your marks and extend them fully to the desired point.

Moving onto your ellipses it's good to see that you're making an effort to draw through them, but sometimes this isn't the case, so don't forget to always ghost your marks as many times as necessary, and only lift your pen once you're sure that you've drawn through your ellipses at least two times.

Be mindful of the alignment of your minor axis to your ellipses, your ellipses are too misaligned which hurts some of your structure's solidity.

Lastly it's good to see that you seem aware of the ellipse's degree shift and that you're making use of it in your work, this helps sell the illusion of form of your cylindrical structures much more convincingly.

Plant Construction Section

Finally let's talk about your plant constructions. Your work here is generally looking good, you're making use of the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson which is helping you create much more solid and believable structures, you're not thinking only of how to represent these objects, but how they're made up of forms and how each form relates to the others in space. You already demonstrate a strong sense of spatial reasoning.

Of course there are always things that we can improve, so I'd like to mention some of the things you should keep in mind for the next time you attempt these exercises, as remembering these points will help you tske your work to the next level.

• One important thing to remember is that because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - but freedom is an illusion as 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.

• A very important rule to follow is that 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 here.

• While this is something that you do generally respect we can see some spots on your constructions - such as in here where you actually did extend off existing forms' silhouettes, almost completely enclosing your leaf's original structure with the new lines you add around it. This is also a mistake because you're zigzagging your edge detail and cutting back into the forms of your leaves. Revisit the instructions for how to draw leaves in order to refresh your memory on how edge detail must be approached.

  • When approaching cylindrical structures such as plant pots make sure to start with a minor axis in order to keep your several ellises aligned to each other more easily.

In several of your plant structures you have elliptical boundaries for your flower structures, but the petals you draw don't respect these boundaries, as shown in the hibiscus flower demo this boundary establishes how far out your petal structures will extend, so as discussed previously if we have a flow line or structure that goes beyond this established boundary, then that boundary may as well not exist.

• You have a bit of a tendency to trace over entire forms sometimes, this is something that should be avoided whenever possible as it can make us focus too much on following shapes on a page, instead of the 3d forms these shapes represent. Lineweight itself should only be used at the end of a construction in order to clarify overlaps and the way different forms interact.

This construction was really well made.

Looking through your work one of the mistakes you make is that you did not make use of the forking branches construction method when it would have been applicable. Make sure to always follow the techniques and methods, never deviate from the instructions for the exercises.

Moving onto your use of texture it's a bit sparse when it comes to your own original attempts, in your attempts at the demos it looks better, but in your original work while you're starting to understand the principles of texture you're still focusing a bit too heavily on making your mushroom look presentable and focusing too much on random marks, instead of carefully designed shadow shapes.

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. Make sure to go over these reminders in order to solidify your understanding of texture further.

Final Thoughts

Overall, you'd done really well in this lesson, you're clearly developing a strong sense of spatial reasoning through the use of these exercises and applying it effectively to your work. Of course, you're falling into a couple of traps because you didn't put as much time into the more minor steps of construction such as edge detail, but even if those parts are small, they're equally as important. Regardless of these issues, your work here is pretty good and you've clearly understood the purpose of this lesson, as such I'm going to be marking this submission as complete. Make sure to keep these points in mind going forward, so that you can keep developing your skills. Good luck in Lesson 4.