Hello 4Ketchup, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.

Arrows

Let's get into this critique by talking about your arrows first, your lines are mostly looking confident without major wobbling, but you still have some signs of hesitation present throughout your work, which suggests you're not executing your lines as swiftly as you could. Besides more practice, you should also remember to always execute your lines from the shoulder, ghost as many times as you need and, once you feel confident, execute your mark in one fell swoop.

Your hatching is applied to the correct side of the arrow's overlap which helps push the illusion of perspective in these objects, it's good that you're also adding lineweight at the top of the overlaps, but you don't always apply this finishing touch, don't forget to do so.

Your arrows are looking very tridimensional in your page as you make good use of it's depth, but they're all very similar in their orientation, types of overlaps, and rates of foreshortening. Don't forget that arrows are flexible objects, they can move in all sorts of ways across the world, you must experiment with that in order to further your understanding of 3d space and how objects exist in it.

Leaves

For your leaves the hesitation present in your arrows can also be felt here because of stiff and shy flow lines which also affect the rest of your arrow's construction. Remember that above all else, confidence is key, and you must let go of the fear of making an inaccurate line, otherwise your marks and your leaves will continue to feel stiff.

It's great that despite the issue mentioned above, that you're still exploring how leaves exist in 3d space and, how they move across it from moment to moment and how they'd look like in different orientations, and not just drawing how they would sit statically in the page.

Your application of edge detail is pretty good, you're capturing each individual bump and piece of detail with it's own mark, instead of trying to capture several at once with a single line ( which would be a mistake ), slowing down like this allows you to be more thorough and create more tight looking constructions as a result.

Branches

Moving onto your branches they're turning out decently as you're generally following the instructions to the exercise, but they can be strengthened at a couple of points. When working on your extended segments make sure to always start them back at the ellipse point, in order to allow enough of a length of overlap between the lines in order to ensure a smooth transition.

You should also make sure not to cut back into your ellipses, always start your new line at the furthest part of the ellipse from the middle, even if your previous line has cut back into it, in order to respect your construction, don't undermine it and don't ignore it, follow it specifically.

For your ellipses it's good that you're drawing through them twice as that allows for a much more confident and smooth form. Something you should look out for as you work on your branches is the ellipse degree shift, as you're not varying them as the form shifts away from the viewer and they look a little bit too consistent, which hurts the believability of the structure.

Plant Construction Section

Looking through your work it's looking a little bit mixed as it seems you're not making proper use of all the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson previously, which leaves you to struggle on your own as you go through these structures and try to figure out how to construct them, but by not making use of what you've learned before your work is left flat and unspecific.

I'm going to be mentioning some of the places where these issues are present and how to fix them, I hope that you'll be able to address them the next time you tackle these exercises.

As mentioned before one of the major issues present in your work is the fact that you're not making use of the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson. Remember that the material shown here is not to be treated as loose guidelines or suggestions, they're tools which have the explicit purpose of helping you work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises, helping you break objects down into their most primitive forms in a way that'll allow you to understand how each part of that structure exists in 3D space and further your skills.

If you don't make use of the methods your work will not only feel flat and stiff, but you won't learn as much, for example, you never make use of the correct methodology for drawing branches in your plant construction pages nor do you follow the forking branches construction method which leaves your structures feeling flat and unspecific, the relationships between the forms aren't clear and thus it isn't very believable that the construction you're drawing is a truly tridimensional object.

Besides not making use of the branch construction method, you haven't made use of the leaf construction method when approaching the structures in this construction.

Considering that you've mostly applied the instructions for both of these methods correctly in their respective pages, but didn't do so for your plant constructions, this leads me to believe that you're either partially aware of the instructions and how they should have been applied, and decided not to make use of them, or you forgot the specific instructions.

Regardless, make sure that you're always revisiting past exercise pages and rereading, it's important that you understand how these methods should be applied in theory so that you can always apply them to your work.

One of the structures in your work that feels particularly flat is this mushroom construction, because the branch method is not used, as well as the fact there's a small gap in your branch as the line doesn't properly connect between ellipses, and the ellipse for the mushroom cap is not drawn through, which leaves an opening on the form which undermines it's solidity.

The cap also feels particularly flat because an ellipse, by itself, does not denote a form, it only denotes a silhouette, it's the start of a structure in 3d space, but not the end of it. In order for an ellipse to properly convey forms you must fully construct the structure, for example, in the [King oyster construction demo]() you'll find that Uncomfortable fullt constructs the cap of the mushroom with several ellipses, clearly denoting plane shifts along the cap as the bottom transitions to the side which transitions to the top, it's a cylindrical, slightly thin form which is wider at the bottom than it is at the top, I highly recommend checking this demo out in full, and following along with it.

• When approaching cylindrical structures such as plant pots or mushrooms, making use of a minor axis will help you keep your several ellipses aligned to each other more easily. Going further, it's great to see that you're already adding an inner ellipse for the opening of the plant pot, you can take this further by also constructing the rim often found in plant pots around their opening.

You're not really adding any kind of edge detail to your leaf structures in these pages, but keep in mind that edge detail is another step of construction and not optional, always make sure to add it to your work when applicable.

This structure is left flat because of similar reasons to the mushroom, you make use of an ellipse to try to capture the form, but that doesn't convey any sense of volume or depth, instead, in these cases make use of organic forms in order to both maintain soilidity and a sense of flow in your forms.

Final Thoughts

In general you're not able to reach your full potential because you're not making use of the methods and techniques as thoroughly as they should be applied.

You must shown that you understand the instructions for these methods, how and why they should be used by applying these techniques to your work. As such I'm going to be assigning you some revisions so that you can tackle these exercises again and address these issues before moving on to more complex construction methods. Revisit the relevant lesson material in order to refresh your memory, and once you're done please reply with:

1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.

4 plant constructions.