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

Arrows

Your linework here is looking confident and smooth which helps communicate the fluidity that arrows have as they move through the world. You're making good use of the depth of the page with your use of foreshortening, and the added lineweight on top of the overlaps helps reinforce this feeling of depth in your arrows.

Your hatching is correctly placed, which helps you strengthen your spatial reasoning skills and better communicate the orientation of your arrows in space, however your hatching is zigzagged.

Make sure to always follow the principles of mark making and ghosting for every mark you draw, zigzagging lines goes against the third principle of mark making from lesson 1 and it can cause you to lose control, instead make sure to plan each hatching line with the ghosting method and execute them with confidence.

I'd like to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you attempt this exercise, your arrows, while really well executed are all pretty similar in their perspective and orientation. Remember that arrows are very flexible objects, they can move freely across the page in all sorts of manners, you should capture this by experimenting with different rates of foreshortening, the different ways arrows can twist and bend in space and the negative space between overlaps.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves there's something we should pay attention to right away, while this isn't an outright mistake it does stop you from getting the most out of the exercise. You're approaching all of your leaves by drawing them almost completely straight on, and never folding or bending over themselves in any way, you're not considering how the center line is more than just a 2D mark and that it establishes how a flat object moves across 3D space freely.

Because of this in the leaf structures that do bend in some way or another you often draw them folding unaturally because you're too afraid of letting your edges overlap, which distorts and flattens the structure, keep in mind that leaves are very flexible along their spine, but not so much along their width.

Your application of edge detail is coming along really nicely, in general you're not trying to capture more than one piece or element of edge detail at a time which allows you to maintain higher control over your marks and create a tighter, more specific construction.

Make sure not to leave your work unfinished, once you start a construction follow it through to the end, and don't forget to revisit the informal demo on complex leaf structures, as you're skipping some construction steps in this structure.

Branches

Onto your branches it seems that you're not always following the instructions for this exercise as closely as you could, while it's possible to see that you're extending some of your edge segments you're not always doing so, and in a couple cases you're extending them too far past the halfway point between ellipses.

This is for the most part because your branches have too many ellipses in them, which leaves too little room for you to reasonable extend your lines past the ellipse and up to the halfway point while keeping in mind the principles of mark making and engaging your shoulder.

So make use of way lrss ellipses, try to only add an ellipse when there's a noticeable change in the ellipse's degree and don't forget how branches should be approached](https://drawabox.com/lesson/3/2/onestroke), by having each segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully to the halfway point to the third ellipse. Afterwards you'll start a new segment, placing your pen at the second ellipse, making sure not to leave any gaps in between your edge and your ellipse, and not cut into your ellipse as it undermines the solidity of your forms. Once you're done, repeat this pattern until your entire branch is complete.

Coming back to your ellipses, for the most part you're not drawing through them two full times, it's closer to 1/2 times, which hurts their fluidity and smoothness, so don't forget this very important step of drawing ellipses. Another thing you should look out for is how your ellipses degrees do not change when they should due to how the ellipse degree shift works, as shown here. Remember that as a cylindrical form shifts towards or away from the viewer, the degree of the ellipses within that structure will also shift.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are looking a bit mixed and can certainly be improved as you're not following the instructions for the exercises as closely as you should, which hurts the quality of your work, as well as how much you're getting out of each page.

The biggest problem is the fact that you've demonstrated in your page of branches that you're aware of the instructions for the exercise, however you haven't drawn any of your branches in your plant construction pages with a minor axis, which is the first step of constructing branch-like structures.

On top of that don't forget to never leave tubes open ended as that leaves the form itself vague and can flatten your structure, always cap them off with an ellipse.

I also need to give you a reminder that when tackling these exercises you want to be entirely focused on the task at hand and follow the instructions as they are written](https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/3/gettingthemost). So if you're going to be tackling plant constructions you'll want your entire page to be made up of plant constructions, with no leftovers of other exercises such as in this page.

Looking through your pages, and the way they're often cut off at just one edge of the page, and how in this page the parts of leaf structures at the top are the same parts of this last construction, I assume that in part you're drawing several plants in the same page and then taking pictures of them and submitting them as individual pages.

This is something that severely impacts the quality of your work - the fact that you're pre-planning the amount of constructions you wish to fit on a given page before actually committing to any of them. This is admirable, as it's clear you want to maximize the amount of practice you get per page but unfortunately this actually hurts how much you get out of each individual construction because due to their size you're forced to spend less time on each drawing, and it limits your ability to make use of the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson to their full extent.

And lastly you must remember 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 generally respect, you often cut back into the silhouette of your leaves when putting down edge detail, as well as cutting back into your previous construction in this page.

Final Thoughts

Your work is being held back from it's full potential because you're not making full use of the tools available to you. This causes your work to be flattened and relationships between forms to be left unspecified. In order to gauge if you truly understand the concepts this lesson seeks to teach it's important that you apply these techniques to your work consistently and thoroughly.

As such I'm going to be asking you for some revisions. Please reply once you've revisited the relevant lesson material with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches

2 plant construction pages.