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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows your linework is looking smooth and confident, which helps sell the illusion of fluidity that arrows should have as they move across the world. You're making good use of the depth of the page and your hatching is correctly applied, both in it's execution and it's placement which helps reinforce it's feeling of depth.

It's also good to see that as a finishing touch you're adding extra lineweight at the arrow's bends in order to clarify the overlaps.

In general you've done really well in this exercise, your arrows don't have any major size consistency problems and they're reading as very tridimensional and fluid. Overall the only thing I can tell you so that you can keep improving your arrows is to make sure you're pushing yourself out of your comfort zone by varying your arrow types and rates of foreshortening, as shown in the example homework page. Arrows are very flexible objects, as such change.s an infinite amount of ways they can bend and move through space, and you should explore them.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves the fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely into these new structures, you're not only drawing them sitting statically within space, but also how they move across the world from moment to moment.

Your attempts at complex leaf constructions are very decent, although it would have been nice to see you tackling some different kinds of structures as well.

Your application of edge detail is a bit sparse - especially in your plant constructions, where there is only a single instance of you making use of edge detail in a construction - remember that edge detail is another step of construction, so it's not optional and must not be skipped, as this is an important step to comnunicate the smaller types of forms that greatly influence on the silhouette of these objects. Only the last step of construction, texture, is optional.

Onto your actual application of edge detail it's very well executed as you generally only draw a single piece of detail at a time, which allows you to capture a tighter, more specific construction, and you're also working on it additively most of the time, which ensures you don't accidentally undermine your previous construction or focus too much on altering shapes, instead of the edges those shapes represent. You're also adding your edge detail with the same line thickness as the initial construction which is good. Keep up the good job.

Branches

Onto your branches they're also looking fairly well constructed as you're following the instructions to this exercise, although there are a couple of points that can be addressed in your work.

Firstly while it's great that you're drawing your edges in segments you're not always extending your lines fully up to the halfway point, so don't forget to do this, as it'll help create a smoother and more seamless transition between marks.

• What are these? They're fairly present in your work and they don't have any new forms branching off from them, which leads me to believe they're not attempts at drawing [forking branches]() and rather something else entirely. But they undermine the consistency of your branch's forms, so avoid them, make sure your ellipse's sizes are fairly similar to one another, avoid adding ellipses too closely together, and do not add extra ellipses in this manner to your work.

It's good that you're making an attempt to draw through all of your ellipses, but make sure that when you do so, you're ghosting them from the shoulder and executing them swiftly, as several of your ellipses still have some visible wobble present which is a mistake. You don't seem to be taking into consideration the ellipse degree shift as you draw your branches which is a mistake, keep in kind that as a cylindrical form shifts towards or away from the viewer, so will the degrees in that structure also change.

Plant Construction Section

And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions. In general you're following the instructions to the methods and techniques introduced in this lesson and previous ones, which allows you to create more solid and tridimensional looking structures, you're starting to understand the purpose of these exercises and develop your spatial reasoning skills, but there are some things which must be addressed - not all of them are outright mistakes, but they are holding you back from your full potential and from getting the most out of these exercises.

• You seem to be avoiding plants with leaf structures which bend of fold in any way, as such you end up over-reliant on drawing leaf structures that are almost always completely turned to the viewer, with flow lines that are too straight and stiff, and all of this feels unnatural and flattens your work. Leaves are organic subjects - they're affected by all sorts of forces, from the wind to gravity and their own weight pulling them down, you must take this into consideration when analyzing your reference picture, are all of the leaf structures oriented in this manner? Or are there some subtle twists and folds you could capture more accurately? You'll improve your skills much more by going out of your comfort zone and thinking about the way these objects would look in different orientations.

All of your plant construction pages have two constructions in them, and sometimes there's a lot of white space in your pages. In general the size that you're drawing your work at is limiting your ability to fully think through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise as we tackle these exercise - an example will be provided below - and your ability to make full use of the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson, which in turn affects how much you learned after finishing a construction.

It's much more important that you're able to fully construct and understand a structure, carefully thinking about all of the pieces of that object, what are the primitive forms that make them up, and how each of them exist in a tridimensional space with one another than it is that you cram more work into your page, as more drawings do not equal better practice in this situation. So make sure to start your constructions as big as you need them to be, and only worry about whether you can fit more constructions into your page after you finished the first one.

It seems that at some points you're simplifying your structures too much to the point of relying on your memory and what you think a certain structure looks like, rather than fully breaking down your reference by analyzing and observing it, and using that information to construct your structure.

The first example of this is this construction where the form that attaches to the leaf structures at the top is not constructed. You can see in this image how forms like these must still be fully constructed, notice that in the image first a minor axis, or a pole, is established, and then ellipses are added in order to mark where the new form will extend from, and fully clarify how all of the forms exist in space as well as how they relate to one another. These relationships aren't clarified in your work, and thus the structure is left flat and less clear than it could otherwise be.

The second example of this is your daffodil construction, where your construction is very simple and that harms it's solidity, you simplify the flower structure with a cylinder and then add detail around the center - but there is so much more going on in this plant. The innermost part of a daffodil is still very leaf-like in it's nature, despite it's conical shape, as such it should be approached with the leaf construction method. There are two ways you can generally approach it - either by drawing different sections of this structure with the leaf construction method and then connecting the different leaves together in order to build the complex shape, or you can approach this plant by using a slightly tapered cylinder in order to construct the main body of the petal structure, then make use of the leaf construction method, constructing 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 this complex structure. I actually put together a quick demonstration of how this would look like for a different student once and I believe you will benefit from it.

Final Thoughts

In general you're on the right track, you're following the instructions, you understand how they should be applied for the most part, and you're making progress in building a strong sense of spatial reasoning, the only thing that's holding you back is the fact that you're not giving each individual construction the time it needs in order to be done to the best of your current ability, and thus you end up skipping construction steps, leaving forms, like ends of leaf structures, open ended, not drawing through ellipses, and generally avoiding things that might be too challenging, but all of this puts you at a disadvantage - you will learn less if you don't challenge yourself and make full use of the tools available to you.

I'll be marking this submission as complete, as you've shown that you are able to follow the instructions and understand their purpose, I don't believe you'll benefit from revisions - but I highly recommend that you follow along with all the demos available for that lesson, and that you join the discord community chat if you haven't already, so that you can ask questions and recieve live feedback from other students as you work on your pages. Good luck in Lesson 4.