9:44 AM, Tuesday April 13th 2021
Starting with your arrows, you've done a great job of drawing these with a good deal of confidence, capturing how they move through space. This carries over fairly well into your leaves, although I am noticing the slightest bit of hesitant in how you execute your lines. This is more visible in some cases than others, but if you look at the bottom right corner of the first page of leaves, there definitely is a bit of a wobble to those marks. Remember that the use of the ghosting method is particularly important, because of how it focuses on ensuring a confident execution free from all hesitation. Make sure you're employing it correctly.
When it comes to building up more complex edge detail, you're doing pretty well, and I'm glad to see that you're adding each little bump as a separate mark. Do however take a little more care in ensuring that bump comes off the existing edge and returns to it. You've done a good job at that in most cases, but there are definitely some like here where there's some visible sloppiness that could have been remedied with a greater investment of time.
I'm also pleased with how you're approaching the more complex leaf structures, so good job there.
I actually just noticed that you did a second page of leaves - here your linework is actually much more hesitant. I'm not entirely sure what's changed here, but you're either executing your marks a bit too carefully, or you might be drawing more from the wrist.
Continuing onto your branches, your work here is moving in the right direction, although I have two suggestions:
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Make sure you're extending those edge segments fully halfway to the next ellipse. You often do, but there are some that fall short.
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Overlap the last chunk of the previous segment directly, using it as a runway, instead of drawing the next segment where you felt the last one ought to have been. This will make the immediate task more difficult, but it'll force you to deal with the mistakes, rather than identifying but otherwise ignoring them.
These instructions explain both of these points.
Looking over your plant constructions, you're moving in the right direction for the most part, but there are a number of small issues I want to point out:
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When adding the more complex edges on your ginko leaves, you end up zigzagging back and forth across the previous phase of construction. You should instead be building each bump separately onto the existing structure. Also, avoid adding too much complexity all at once. As shown here on another student's work, you may sometimes want to build an intermediate level of structure to help support further complexity.
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Not really a big deal, but don't scratch anything out, even if you feel it's gone in the wrong direction, as you did here.
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I'm not entirely sure of the size of your sketchbook (it feels kind of small, but it's hard to say), but these individual drawings feel as though they're getting especially tiny. Make sure you're giving each drawing as much room as it requires. Drawing smaller can limit your brain's capacity to think through spatial problems, and can also limit how easy it is to engage your whole arm when drawing. Both of these factors can result in more hesitant, more stuff, and more clumsy linework.
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When drawing flower pots, as in this page, as with everything else, use the principles of construction. That means starting simple (building up a cylinder), and then adding additional complexity to that simple structure. In this case, you'd draw a full cylinder (with a complete ellipse for the base), another ellipse inset into the mouth to establish the thickness of the pot's edge, and another for the base of the rim. You may also want to place one for the level of the soil itself, depending on where that is.
While there are issues here, overall they're each fairly minor. I believe this are things you can address yourself, so I am going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I do however want to encourage you to draw on printer paper instead of a sketchbook. Having to deal with the pages wanting to fold back over you as you're drawing is just an added tax on your focus.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 4.