Hello Diniarcm, 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 foreshortening in mind while constructing them which helps you make really good use of perspective and the depth of your page, which 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.

In general you're doing well, so keep tackling this exercise during your warm ups in order to 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

You did not submit the requested 1 page of leaves.

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 don't forget to always draw through them twice, drawing through them only once will cause them to be too loose and unconfident. 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 now let's take a look at your plant constructions, which can still be improved as you're not always following the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson, which hurts the quality of your work and how much you're getting out of it. So here are some of the points you need to keep in mind whenever you tackle these exercises again.

Firstly, I've noticed that for the majority of your work you've submitted demos.

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. As mentioned in the homework section of the Lesson, if you wish to add your attempts at the demos to your submission, they should make up no more than half of your homework pages.

Always keep in mind that the construction methods and techniques introduced in this course must always be applied to your work, as they're tools which will help you construct much tighter and solid looking structures, you are often deviating from the construction methods by not drawing your branches with the correct construction method or drawing your leaf structures with smooth curves. They're not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.

Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that for the majority of your constructions you don't draw through some of your forms, such as leaves or branch like structures, this limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise. Not drawing through 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.

Do not forget to always follow the principles of mark-making. Currently you are going over your marks several times, which goes against the first principle of mark making.

On top of this it's also strongly recommended that you do not draw earlier phases of construction with fainter lines and later ones with thicker strokes, as this is going to encourage you to approach construction as though you're redrawing everything at every step.

When drawing something with construction what we're doing is adding building blocks at each different step, using our first forms as a foundation in order to simplify our structures. In this way there's no need to alter that foundation, it should be able to stand for itself when you're done, without being redrawn, traced over, or having it's silhouette modified with 2d shapes on to of it.

You should also ease up on your lineweight, it's too thick, with several passes going over the same marks and jump from one form's silhouette to another, which smooths everything out too much. Almost as if you pulled a sock over a vase, it softens the distinctions between the forms and flattens the structures out somewhat.

Instead lineweight must be subtle, used only to clarify the overlaps between the forms that are being built up, as explained here.

Final Thoughts

In general you're still struggling with the construction techniques and methods introduced in this Lesson.

As such I believe you will benefit from tackling these exercises again before moving on to the next lesson, please revisit the lesson material mentioned and then reply with:

1 page of leaves.

1 page of branches.

4 plant construction pages.