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

Arrows

Let's start by talking about your arrows, you've done an incredible job here, your linework here is looking confident and smooth, that greatly helps sell the feeling of fluidity that arrows have as they move through the world. You're making good use of the depth of the page with your application of foreshortening and your hatching is looking very well made as you keep it neat and tidy, it's also correctly placed which helps solidify the illusion of depth you wish to achieve in this exercise.

The only thing you can start doing from now on in this exercise is to push yourself out of your comfort zone more with new types of arrows and the kinds of overlaps that are possible, remember that arrows are very flexible and they have an entire world available to them, make use of that.

Leaves

Moving onto your leaves they're looking pretty well made, the fluidity present in your arrows is translating nicely into these new structures. You're not only capturing how they sit statically within space but also how they move across that space from moment to moment. Your aplication of edge detail is really well made, you're not trying to capture more than one bump of edge detail at a time which allows you greater control over your marks and to create a more specific and solid construction.

Be wary of unnatural bends. Remember the concepts introduced in the arrows exercise of how to make a flat object feel tridimensional, leaves are very flexible along their lenght, but not so much along their width, this is because of the spine of the leaf, so consider that when drawing your outer edges, considering the size consistency of the leaf and whether a real leaf could bend this way, or if it would break.

I've noticed that you're adding texture to your leaf structures, you can find here some good notes on how to think about leaf texture.

Branches

For your branches while it's good to see that you're generally extending your line segments you're not very consistent with it, sometimes drawing your edges in a single stroke which is a mistake, you also don't always extend it completely up to the halfway point between ellipses. As explained more in depth here it's important to keep your ellipses far enough away to ensure your halfway point has enough of a lenght of runway in order to engage your whole arm and avoid visible tails in your branches.

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.

Moving onto your ellipses it's great to see that you're drawing through your ellipses, but make sure that you're always drawing through them two full times. It's also good to see that you're aware of the ellipse degree shift which helps solidify the form of your branches.

Plant Construction Section

Now let's move on to your plant constructions, you're doing really well in these exercises as you make use of the construction methods introduced in the lesson to great effect, which greatly helps with giving your constructions that sense of volume and tridimensionality that Drawabox seeks to help you develop.

I hope that the pointers I give you today will help you take your work to the next level as you fix some issues and improve in some aspects.

As mentioned previously you're not making full use of the branch construction method as its laid out, this undermines some of the solidity of your branches as it causes the size of the branch to be inconsistent, so don't forget to revisit the instructions for the branch construction method.

For these mushrooms you're trying to capture the subtle changes along their silhouette, but you're approaching this with something similar to the leaf construction method, where you start a mark that lifts off from the edge and comes down back to it, but edge detail as introduced in the leaves exercise only applies to flat objects because when it comes to organic forms we need to consider that the smaller forms also have their own volume, and as such should be constructed with this in mind.

You should also keep in mind that you should never attempt to change the silhouette of your forms that aren't flat because its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form here.

Still speaking of mushrooms, when drawing them around a minor axis make sure to also include that axis for the mushroom cap, as they're also often cylindrical in nature.

And make sure that all of your new forms feel tight and specific, this shape at the base of the mushroom doesn't wrap around the stem convincingly as explained in the context of sausages in this section of Lesson 2, it's form is also inconsistent, which harms it's solidity.

You're drawing through your forms which is good, this helps to make your work feel tridimensional as well as helping you develop your sense of spatial reasoning further.

When making use of edge detail in your leaves, make sure that you're approaching this step of construction additively whenever possible, as this often makes us think more about the flat shapes on the page, rather than the solid, 3D edges of forms in space that they represent.

For this cactus you cut back into your construction sometimes, you're also relying on too many contours, those kinds of contour that sit on the surface of a single form, only serve to take a form that can already be interpreted as tridimensional, and clarify it. In truth, they're useful for introducing the concept of a contour line, but in practice their usefulness is somewhat limited. While you have some good contours such as the one in here which helps you communicate the thickness of the cactus more clearly, you also have cases such as in here where you have too many contour lines, all of them wish to indicate the same thing but they clutter the image and due to small inconsistencies between them, they act against one another in what the volume of the form that they define actually is.

In this case you might consider making use of less contour lines, sticking only to the minimun amount possible in order to communicate your intent and create a solid looking form, this will be very important in the following lessons.

It's great to see that you're constructing your plant pots fully, instead of only sticking to their primitive cylindrical shape, but going further you might like to add another ellipse inside the ellipse that establishes the outer rim, that's because this inner rim will define the inside of the pot, where it starts and where it ends.

Your birds of paradise construction is really well made, the only thing I can point out is that in it you do attempt to change the silhouette of your main form after constructing it by extending it, however when you do this make sure to construct the next part of the structure as it's own solid form and establish how that form intersects with the preexisting structure.

Final Thoughts

You've done very well in this lesson, you're applying the methods correctly for the most part and while there are some things that can be improved, you're showing a great understanding of the concepts that this lesson seeks to teach and a good sense of spatial reasoning already.

I believe you're ready for the next lesson and as such I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete, don't forget to add these exercises to your warm up list and apply the feedback to your future work. Good luck in Lesson 4.