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

Arrows

Moving on to your arrows your linework is generally looking very confident which helps sell the feeling of fluidity your arrows have as they move through space.

Your arrows are certainly looking tridimensional due to your usage of the depth of the page, as well as the fact that you're letting your arrow's edges overlap, but this can be pushed a bit further, as the size of your overlaps are a bit inconsistent, narrowing or bulging suddenly quite often. The way you can maintain the size of your arrows consistent, while still keeping your lines confident and smooth is by constructing your the second line of your arrow in segments, make use of the ghosting method to plan out your curves and then execute them, connecting your lines by overlapping them and creating the illusion of a single stroke.

It's good to see that you're making use of hatching as that helps you clarify how your arrows twist and turn in space and reinforce your spatial reasoning skills, but when adding hatching to your remember to keep the principles of mark-making and ghosting in mind, make sure your lines are parallel to one another and that they have clear end and start points, and that they don't end at arbitrary points or float in the middle of your arrows.

As a finishing touch, don't forget to always make use of added lineweight on top of the overlaps to reinforce their depth.

Leaves

The sense of fluidity present in your arrows is translating quite nicely into the way you're approaching your arrows, they have a nice feeling of energy and you're not only capturing how these structures exist statically in space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.

Moving on to your usage of edge detail, you're simply not adding it to your work. Despite it's misleading name edge detail is actually another part of the construction process, it just simply focuses on the smaller forms found at the edges of your leaf structures, it's important to make use of it and as clarified in the instructions for this exercise, only the last step of construction, texture, is optional.

It would have been nice to see you tackle some complex leaf structures in your work.

Branches

For your branches they're coming along quite decently made, as you're following the instructions to the letter and creating quite solid and tridimensional structures which feel organic and believable.

The only recommendation I can make is that you might find it easier to draw your edges in segments if you limit the amount of ellipses in your branches and place them further apart, currently they're too close together, which doesn't allow for a nice length of runway between ellipses, by placing your ellipses further apart you'll make it easier to create a seamless transition between marks, as well as engage your shoulder when drawing.

For your ellipses it's good to see that you're putting in the effort to always draw through them twice, for the degree shift of your ellipses, it's goodnto see that you seem aware of this concept, but it can still be pushed a bit further in your page, as sometimes the ellipse's degrees barely change. So push the degree of your ellipses a bit more, 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. You're moving in the right direction as you're making use of the methods and techniques introduced in this lesson, which helps you create structures which feel more solid and believably tridimensional, you're certainly demonstrating that you understand the concepts this lesson seeks to teach, and you're developing a good sense of spatial reasoning.

In general you're doing really well, so here are some of the things you can keep in mind whenever you tackle these exercises again so that you can take your work into the next level.

Something I've noticed throughout your work is that you have a habit to tackle some quite complex constructions, and focus in really large structures, such as this page which has several branches, stems, leaves and fruits all in the same page. This is not necessarily a mistake, but it can be a bit harmful to our progress as we work through the exercises in this course.

It's important to remember as we work through these lessons that Drawabox is not a course that is teaching you how to draw any specific thing, it's a course that focuses on some of the most important fundamentals of drawings things which feel believably tridimensional, more specifically, it focuses on spatial reasoning. It's not important that your work turns out good or aesthetic, we're not drawing plants or cars, instead we are simply using these structures as a base, a tridimensional puzzle that we can solve by using the tools introduced in this course.

Because of this sometimes a construction simply won't allow us to apply these techniques and methods properly, when this happens the root of our problems usually comes down to the fact we're not giving our constructions as much space as they need, and we generally have two options, we can either draw bigger, focusing on covering more of our page and making each phase of construction larger in order to be able to engage our brain as well as our shoulders when drawing.

Or we can focus on smaller sections of our structure, zooming into smaller sections of our structure will allow us to construct them more fully and thoroughly and focus on capturing each form with the construction methods introduced in the lesson.

In this rose construction you haven't drawn through most of your petal structures in the flower structure itself. Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms as not doing so limits your ability to work through the tridimensional puzzles present and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise as you're not able to truly understand how the object you're drawing works, where it comes from, what it attaches to, how it exists completely in a tridimensional space.

Looking through your plant constructions I've noticed that you made use of edge detail more thoroughly which is great, however there is one thing you must be aware of, and that is that when approaching edge detail make sure to do so additively. Construct these new forms on top of your preexisting structure, avoid cutting back into the forms you've already drawn as that can cause us to focus too much on the 2d shapes on the page, instead of the three dimensional edges they represent.

When it comes to your usage of lineweight it's sometimes a bit too heavy, especially around certain silhouettes Remember that lineweight itself should only be used to clarify overlaps, as adding too much of it can soften the distinctions between the different forms, almost as if pulling a sock over a vase - it flattens the structures out somewhat.

Final Thoughts

Your work shows a lot of potential here, it's clearly already looking tridimensional and you're starting to grasp and understand the concepts this lesson seeks to teach. By addressing the points mentioned here and applying it to your work more carefully, you'll be able to keep improving and take your work to the next level.

I'm going to be marking this submission as complete, good luck in lesson 4.