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

Arrows

First things first don't forget to pay close attention to the homework page amounts established in the homework section of this lesson, you've submitted two pages of arrows when only one was requested.

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 there are a couple of times where you've placed it incorrectly, making it seem like your arrow is getting bigger the further away it is, and getting smaller the closer it gets to the viewer, which goes against the rules of perspective.

• Perspective works in the following manner: things that are further away from the viewer will look smaller, and as they get closer to the viewer they'll look bigger. The way this affects an object of consistent size and width that stretches across space is that certain segments of this object will look bigger and others smaller, either gradually or dramatically depending on the perspective of the scene, as such the bigger part of the arrow will always be the one that's closest to the viewer so the segment that's behind it should be the one receiving the hatching.

In general you've done well in this exercise, just don't forget to keep the points mentioned in mind and try to get out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise, try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different rates of foreshortening, keep in mind that arrows are very flexible objects and can move freely across the world in all sorts of manners, so you should push yourself and explore the different possibilities.

Leaves

The fluidity present in your arrows translates quite nicely into these new structures, you don't only try to capture how leaves sit statically within space, but also how they move across the world from moment to moment.

It's good to see that you've experimented with complex leaf structures but remember not to skip construction steps when approaching these more intricate structures.

This leaf structure is looser than it could be, because you did establish what space your structure will take up physically and what boundaries will tie the different parts of the structure together, despite complex structures being made up of several different parts, they still exist as a single entity, by not skipping construction steps you can ensure that your constructions are much more solid and specific.

Moving on to your addition of edge detail it is starting to move in the right direction as you don't generally attempt to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, but you need to spend more time with the execution of each mark - because there are so many and they seem individually unimportant, you're putting less time into each one and so they do not properly rise off and return to the existing stroke - there are often gaps and overshoots, and that could be avoided by putting more time into the work. No mark you draw is unimportant - if you decided it was worth adding, it's worth giving as much time as it needs to be done to the best of your current ability.

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, but this is a very common mistake, as you continue to tackle this exercise during your warm ups your accuracy will naturally improve.

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, which helps these structures feel more solid and believably tridimensional.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, where unfortunately you haven't followed the specifications for what your pages should consist of and as such you didn't get as much out of this lesson as you could have otherwise. When going through this course don't forget to pay close attention to what is being requested of you in the homework section of the lesson, as is stated here if you wish to include your attempts at the demos in your work it should make up no more than less than half of your total homework pages, so in this case since the amount requested is 8 and that would be a maximun of 3 pages of your own attempts at the demos, and 5 pages need to be your own original constructions.

However you just kept drawing the the same demos over and over again, which not only goes against what was required but is also considered grinding, which is heavily discouraged.

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, you will never be able to ride a bike on your own because you haven't actually tried it.

There are at most 2 original plant constructions that I could identify, but it's not enough for you to properly apply the skills you've learned over the previous exercises, and for one of these constructions you skipped construction steps by not constructing these branch structures with the correct branch construction method, instead you simply draw them as lines which does not communicate any sense of form or volume.

Another issue that hurts your work without you even realizing is the fact that you're pre-planning the amount of constructions you want to fit on a given page before you've even committed to any of them. Because of this your pages have big empty spaces that could have been better used not by adding more drawings to your page, but instead by limiting them, which would allow you not only more room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises, but also give you enough space to fully engage your whole arm when drawing.

Outside of some of your attempts at the hisbiscus demo, your orange construction and your attempts at the pitcher plant demo you're not really making use of edge detail in your pages, edge detail would have greatly helped you further communicate the form of your structures and how they move through space, but by not adding it they're left very simple, so make sure to add edge detail whenever possible, and remember that only the last step of leaf construction - texture - is optional.

Ease up on your lineweight, it's 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

Because you only tackled the demos you have not shown whether you fully understand the purpose of these exercises or if you have simply done a good job at following the demos - which is not a bad thing, but it is simply the first step towards understand the methods and techniques introduced in this lesson and it's important that you tackle your own original constructions in order to fully develop your spatial reasoning abilities.

As such I'm going to be asking you for some revisions, please reply once you're finished with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

4 plant construction pages, they must all be original constructions from photo reference that you chose.