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

Arrows

Starting with your arrows you've done well in this exercise, linework is looking confident and nicely executed, this is greatly important for arrows as it communicates to he viewer the sense of fluidity these objects have as they move across the world.

Your use of foreshortening is well executed and the placement of your hatching is correct, this all helps solidify the illusion of depth you with to achieve with your arrows. Your hatching is also well executed and it's great to see that for the most part you're making use of additional lineweight in order to reinforce overlaps, just don't forget to always apply it.

Leaves

Moving on to your leaves they're looking quite confident and energetic as the fluidity present in your arrows carries over nicely into these new structures, you're not only capturing how they sit statically within space but also how they move across the world they occupy.

Your application of edge detail can be improved upon, while it generally seems you're not trying to capture more than one bump or piece of detail at a time, you still sometimes fall into the habit of zigzagging your edge detail. Another thing that should be mentioned is that you're not respecting your previous construction with your addition of edge detail as you often cut back into your construction and leave gaps, overshoots and many stray marks going inside of your leaf structure. Edge detail should be build up gradually on top of your previous marks, making sure your new line starts at the outer edge mark, comes up, defines the form that you need, then goes back down, integrating into that underlying line as seamlessly as possible, this is one of the principles of mark-making and it's shown here in this part of lesson 1.

Still on the topic of edge detail, generally you'll want to construct it additively whenever possible, in the cases where you cannot achieve the proper leaf form without working subtractively you should keep these notes in mind.

For a couple of your leaf structures you're jumping into complexity way too and skipping construction steps, which causes your structures to be less tight and specific than they could be, make sure to look over these extra notes on the complex leaf construction method.

There is not much use of texture in your leaves not in your plant constructions, but from what I've seen it seems you're leaning towards drawing it explicitly, as such I'd like to point you towards these notes on leaf texture.

Branches

Your attempt at the branches exercise is coming along pretty decently, although there are a couple of things I'd like to mention.

While it's good to see that you're generally extending your line segments, when you start a segment you don't always start it at the ellipse point, this leaves some gaps between the edge of your branches and their inside, this leaves the relationships between your forms vague and undermines some of their solidify. This also effectively removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve and that's also stressed in the instructions.

Remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse, extending it past the second ellipse and fully to the halfway point to the third ellipse, afterwards you'll start a new segment, making sure to place your pen at the second ellipse and repeat the pattern until your branch is complete.

For your your ellipses it's good to see that you're generally drawing through them twice, although not always, so make sure to always ghost through your ellipses as many times as you need, and to draw through them two full times. While you have some variation in your ellipse degree's shift it's not something that's always present, and some of the degrees are looking too consistent which is a mistake and flattens your forms, so keep pushing the variety in your degrees.

Plant Construction Section

Continuing on to your plant constructions, you're starting to understand and apply the concepts of construction introduced in this lesson, but your work has a couple of problems that are holding you back, and there are some things I'd like to point out that are going to improve your work if addressed.

Firstly I must remind you that when tackling these exercises you want to be entirely focused on the task at hand and follow the instructions exactly as they are written. So if you're going to be tackling plant constructions you'll want your entire page to be made up of plant constructions, with no leftovers of other exercises such as arrows or planes present.

Make sure that you're always constructing your forms in their entirety, as well as using the methods and techniques introduced in the lesson. For this page you don't construct the stems through the use of the branch construction method which leaves the relationships between your forms vague and undefined, it also causes you to lose control over your marks and inconsistency in the volume of the stem, which hurts it's solidity. You also don't really construct the plant on the far right, it has no sense of flow, form, or shape, in part it seems like you gave up on this construction not long after starting it, in this case remember that once you commit to a drawing you must finish it.

There are a couple of cases in your constructions where you don't start your branch structures with a minor axis, this makes it more difficult for you to keep your ellipses aligned to each other, harder to ghost them and thus draw through them twice. You're also largely foregoing the extension of your segments here.

All of these are mistakes. This course is full of incredibly dense lesson material and you'll encounter a lot of information, but don't worry as at no point are you expected to absorb this knowledge all at once. However it's still incredibly important that you're always applying as most of the instructions for the exercises as you can in order to get the most out of this course, make sure to go through these exercises at your own pace, taking as much time as you need and always revisiting previous lesson material and the instructions for specific construction methods in order to refresh your memory.

Never forget that your ellipses should be drawn from the shoulder, with the ghosting method, and drawn through twice.

Another thing that heavily impacts the quality of your work seems to be the fact that you're drawing way too small, while it's difficult to gauge if the size of your page is A4 or A3, based on your last pages and the size of your ellipses it seems you're drawing on a regular sized page in this case this is harming your progress by artificially limiting the space of your page and doesn't allow you enough room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises, due to the fact that your page is often times being accompanied by other exercises. Not only that, but drawing bigger will allow you to fully engage your whole arm when drawing.

So draw bigger, as big as it's necessary for you to be able to properly engage your brain and arm when drawing, and make sure to invest as much time as its necessary into that construction.

Never leave arbitrary gaps between your phases of construction such as in your branches or gaps between your flow line and your outer edges.

Treat your ellipse's outermost perimeter as the defining part of the silhouette in order to keep any stray marks confined to the inside of the form, as cutting back into your ellipses can accidentally undermine the solidity of your construction, something that happens in your page of mushrooms.

For this construction you didn't construct the inner stem.

• It's incredibly important for you to draw through all of your forms, as small or as unecessary as you might believe them to be, forms don't stop existing when they become obscured by other forms. Think of it as building a house and having a full X-ray view of the building, it's a tridimensional puzzle that cannot exist before the foundations are laid out, the roof cannot exist before the walls, and the walls cannot exist before the foundation, in that same vein tips of leaves or parts of a construction cannot exist by themselves, they still exist as full forms even when they're partially obscured by other objects. Therefore you should make sure you're always drawing forms in their entirety, this will help you develop your sense of spatial reasoning and make all of the relationships between phases of construction in your drawing clear and defined.

In general you're often skipping one aspect of the leaf construction method in your plant constructions, and that is edge detail. Despite it's name edge detail is actually another part of construction as can be seen in the instructions for the exercise and only the last step of drawing leaves, texture, can be opted out of.

Final Thoughts

Your work has a lot of potential and your constructions are showing a good deal of solidity and understanding of the illusion of 3D spave we want to capture in this course. Your homework is only being held back because of the points mentioned above, in the future, follow the instructions as closely as they ought to be, so you can get the most out of these exercises.

I'm going to be assigning you with some revisions, as it's necessary that you show that you understand these instructions and how they should be approached by adding them to your work.