BlueBowlsHayStack

You did a really good job on showing the forms of each of these plants!

The only thing I would say is to add some contour lines to plant 3 and also to the rounded top of plant 2.

The wonkyness in the plants you mentioned was probably caused by slow, careful lines drawn by your brain instead of your hand. Quick, confident lines are the key here. Ghost the path between each ellipse along the stem before committing to it. (I understand the growing impatience from constantly doing this and sometimes one can't help but to skip the ghosting and try drawing the entire stem in one go. But that's how wonky stems happen)

The same with the leaves and petals. When drawing them, do it in one smooth stroke. (which I see you've done for most of them barring plant 6, which has jagged petals) It seems you did indeed draw smooth lines at first for these, but ran over them to give extra line weight and that's what undid your previous confident stroke. Remember when adding line weight to your petals to not be sketchy with your pen/marker. Ghost over the line, then draw one complete smooth confident line. (It does take practice to succeed in keeping it on track with the existing line, but if it is not an exact duplicate don't worry, the new line is darker and that is the line the viewer will pay attention to) Also use the same technique of ghosting between the ellipses for the stems when adding line weight (with the line overshooting each ellipse slightly)

Try varying the line weight in your drawings. I can see that you went over every one of your lines with the same thickness in a lot of these. I'd just add line weight to anything that does not look clear or is getting lost in a mess of intertwining lines.

But all in all you did great with displaying forms which was the main focus of this anyway so I'd say move onto lesson 4 : )

With the organic arrows exercise, regarding the areas where the arrow curves, you use a straight line for most of these.

Curve the line to match with the arrow. I can see you've done this with at least one of them (the last one you drew?) so I'm sure you've noticed how much better it looks.

The organic shapes look good, remember to ghost your ellipse contours several times before committing.

The textures are great! I understand the pain of how time consuming the texture exercises are...

The only thing I can say about them is to practice the smoothness of the transition from dark to light.

But form is more important at this stage anyways so don't sweat it.

Your intersections are perfect!

I'd invest in a brush pen or sharpie to help fill in the shadows : )

Thank you for the effort you put into this critique, I really appreciate it : )

Yes, the ellipses are something I'm struggling with and it'll probably take a while before i can draw them well...

The scratchy lines are a bad habit that I'm in the process of breaking at the moment.

With the freehand perspective exercise, I did not even realise that I had been automatically drawing the lines back to the vanishing point until it was too late, and I had already completed the two pages in that way. (Which I'm very annoyed about actually, but I had to move on as per uncomfortables instructions on not grinding the exercises)

And thank you for pointing out that some of the boxes stay the same size in the organic perspective exercise. I suspected that was the case... I think I was getting frustrated with how strange the boxes were turning out, and I was trying to fix that while the growing box size became an after thought.

I'm certain I'll be much better at that exercise after the 250 box challenge though.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to write this.

I automatically drew the lines back to the vanishing point on the rough perspective exercise without thinking and only realised after i had done the two pages, but by then it was too late and I had to move on...

Thank you for pointing out that some of the boxes in the rotating box exercise were not actually rotating.

I knew something was causing the diamond shape but I couldn't figure out what.

As for the drawing over the same lines thing you saw...

That's a habit I'll have to break