Hello Bluefrog23, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.

For your question this is something that is intentionally vague in order to leave it up to the student's discretion. Due to the way warm ups work (10-15 minutes of 2-3 exercises chosen at random) there's not a lot of time to do something more involved that might take longer. So it's up to you, you can do more plant constructions on your own once your submission is marked as complete if you'd like, or work on a single construction for your warm ups over the course of several sittings.

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 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, 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 execute and not end at arbitrary points. It's good that you're also making use of added line weight on top of the overlaps in order to reinforce their depth.

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 edge detail is looking quite well made, you're not attempting to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, and you're often approaching it additively - that is, constructing it on top of your preexisting structure, but your edge detail marks are a bit thicker than your original lines, if this was intentional, just remember to keep the line thickness between your different stages of construction roughly consistent.

Moving on to your application of texture it's starting to move in the right direction as you're following the instructions for texture in these structures, 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.

There's a lot more we can do to accurately communicate leaf texture as there's much more going on than just a few stray marks implying veins, 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 coming along really decently made as you're following the instructions for the exercise, you're drawing your edges in segments which allows you to maintain higher control over your marks which allows you to create some solid but still organic looking structures.

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. 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 lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, where you are starting to understand the purpose for these exercises and the methods and techniques introduced, however you are facing quite a few difficulties as you tackle these constructions which prevents you from getting the most out of this lesson. So here are some of the issues you should address the next time you tackle these exercises.

The first and most important part of your work that needs to be addressed right away is your linework. As explained back in Lesson 1 one of the overarching goals from this course is to help train you to be more confident and purposeful in your marks. This means executing every line in a single, intentional stroke, in order to create clean constructions that are more intentional and more thoroughly planned out. Having marks that are not confident and were redrawn will by extent make your constructions look unclear and messy.

Aways 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, for the most part you deviate from the instructions for the exercises by not constructing leaf structures with the method or by not constructing them in their entirety, such as in this rose construction, this bellflower construction and these daffodil flowers.

Deviating from the construction methods has caused both of these structures to end up stiffer and flatter than they should be, since the leaf construction method naturally adds a sense of flow and energy to these structures. Despite the odd conical shape of these flowers, it's petals are still very leaf-like in nature and should be approached with the leaf construction method.

There are two ways we can generally approach it - either by drawing different sections of this structure with the leaf construction method in it's entirety and only afterwards connecting the different leaves together in order to build the complex shape, or by using a slightly tapered cylinder in order to construct the main body of the leaf shape, then afterwards make use of the leaf construction method, build it on top of the cylinder in order to capture the flow of the different sections of the leaf structure, and lastly connect them together, making use of edge detail in order to finish the complex structure.

I actually put together a quick demonstration of how this would look like in the context of a daffodil flower for a different student once, and I believe you will find it useful.

Technically another example of you skipping construction steps can be seen in this bonsai tree construction, where you haven't constructed each individual leaf structure with the leaf construction method - however this is not really a mistake, due to the nature of this course and how it teaches certain skills it's fundamental that we're always making use of the construction techniques and methods we learn to our constructions.

But certain structures are just way too complicated and it's not feasible to draw them with the methods introduced, it is simply impossible to fully draw each individual leaf structure or branch structure in a plant such as this one while still following the instructions for this exercise, as such avoid picking trees and similar structures as a subject to study in this lesson.

For your venus fly trap construction you are moving in the right direction, but there is a minor change that you could have made which would have allowed you to create a tighter and more specific structure. Currently you approached the "body" or the "stem" of the venus fly trap as a sort of leaf shape, while this is a valid way to approach this structure it leans too heavily on the side of oversimplification for this part of the plant structure and makes the structure feel fragile, flimsy and flat.

This part of the Venus Fly Trap is actually cylindrical in nature, but it's hidden underneath the more leafy part of the stem, it's helpful to understand this because you can then simplify the forms by capturing this part of the structure as a branch ( which makes it much clearer how the "trap" of the venus flytrap connects to the rest of the structure ) and afterwards build the rest of the structure with the leaf construction method, which will allow for a structure that feels less flimsy and much more solid.

Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that in some of your constructions you haven't drawn through some of your forms, the biggest example is your rose construction, this limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise as not drawing throug your forms means you're forced to rely 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 each form comes from and what it attaches to.

I would also strongly recommend not drawing earlier phases of construction with a fainter line and later ones with a thicker stroke, as this is going to encourage you to approach construction as though you're redrawing everything at every step. Instead, we're simply building upon the existing structure, modifying what's already there at each stage. There are things that simply won't need alteration, and therefore the marks that defined them from the start should be able to stand for themselves when you're done, without being redrawn or traced over needlessly.

Final Thoughts

It seems to me that you haven't fully grasped why these techniques and methods should be applied to your work, and why they are important, which causes the quality of your work and the usage of these methods to be very inconsistent in your pages.

It's important that you understand how to make use of these techniques to the best of your ability in order to construct a structure that feels tridimensional. As such I'm going to be asking you for some revisions so that you can revisit these exercises before delving into more complex subjects. Take your time to look at the relevant lesson material mentioned here, then please reply once you're finished with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

4 plant construction pages.