2:42 AM, Friday May 7th 2021
Before I get to my critique, I want to point out one thing in regards to your frustration - the end result, and your satisfaction with it, is not and has never been the goal here. It's easy to get caught up in how things turn out in order to gauge their value, but every single drawing is just an exercise - specifically one in spatial reasoning. While sometimes these exercises will make their benefit more obvious, more often they will just seem like another drawing on the pile. Allow them to be what they are - no different than the boxes you drew for the challenge.
Starting with your arrows exercise, these have been drawn with a great deal of confidence, which conveys a strong sense of flow and fluidity. Just remember to exaggerate how the gaps between the zigzagging sections compress as we look farther back, as shown here. In your case most of your arrows more irregular in their paths, but in the cases where you did have a repeating zigzagging patterns, the spacing was more consistent. When doing this exercise, try to stick to a repeating pattern so you can explore how to depict the depth of space a bit more.
Moving onto your leaves, you've carried over that confidence and fluidity to capture how each of these leaves not only sits in space, but also how they move through it. I'm also pleased to see how you're building up your edge detail, attaching the individual bumps onto the existing structure, rather than trying to replace it in its entirety. With your textural detail though, don't forget about the principles from lesson 2 about using cast shadows and implicit drawing techniques. The leaf with all the veins shows why we don't just draw our texture with simple lines - using cast shadows allows us to control where we pack in the density of marks, and can allow us to convey the information without needing to necessarily overload it and end up with a noisy result.
Continuing onto your branches, it's a bit of a mixed bag. In some cases you're doing a good job of extending your segments fully halfway to the next ellipse, and starting the next edge at the previous ellipse to allow for a healthy overlap. In other cases, you're only allowing for a very minimal overlap, having one segment start just slightly before where the last one ends. Take more care to follow the instructions more carefully - if you find yourself doing something in a random fashion with no key reason for it, stop and reflect on why. As explained here, the overlaps are important to help transition more smoothly and seamlessly from one segment to the next.
Continuing onto your plant constructions, for the most part you're doing a good job, but there are some things I'd like to call out:
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For the hibiscus drawing, you end up treating each phase of construction as an opportunity to basically redraw the entire petal each time. You actually go into the process with this intent, drawing the simpler phases of construction with a lighter, fainter mark, then getting darker as you go. This is incorrect. Instead, you should only be drawing the parts that change from stage to stage, not seeking to replace the whole thing each time.
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Other than that however, I think the hibiscus is an example of a drawing where you invested a lot more time than many of the others - generally when you end up putting more than one drawing on a page, it seems like you're putting less time into each individual drawing. Remember that how you feel - your frustration, your goals, your intent, and your expectations - do not change how much time a drawing demands from you in order to be done to the best of your ability. Instead, take your time to execute each and every mark as well as you can, using the tools at your disposal. Use the ghosting method for each one, and apply the techniques - for example, the branches technique - as instructed. I understand that in your branches exercise you may not have been entirely aware of how it was meant to be used, but it did end up trickling down into aspects of other drawings.
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Another point that helps a fair bit is to make sure that you give each drawing as much room as it really needs on the page. Drawing small - as one often might if they intended to pack many drawings into a page - hinders our brain's spatial reasoning skills, and can make it harder for us to fully engage our whole arm while drawing. Both of these can result in more overall clumsiness. Focus first on giving the first drawing the room it requires, and once it's on the page, assess whether you have room for another. If there's no room for another drawing, then that's fine. But if there is room, put another in there. There's plenty of pages here where you did have room for another drawing the same size as those that were already present. This suggests you were pretty arbitrary in deciding when a page was finished.
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Lastly - at least for now - it seems that the vast majority of these drawings were done following along with the demos, or at least heavily based on the demos. The only ones that seemed entirely new was your hibiscus (which other than the point I raised before, was well done - probably one of the best in the set by a good margin) and one of your smaller mushrooms. In the homework assignment section of the lesson, I mention that while you can include drawings from the demos, they should constitute less than half of your total plant drawings.
As a whole, I think that while you are certainly trying, you may be undermining your own efforts by focusing on what you want to achieve overall (a sort of top down view) rather than simply focusing on each individual mark, what it is meant to represent, and how you choose to execute it to the best of your ability (a bottom up view). I'm going to assign some revisions below to give you the opportunity to do more drawings of your own (rather than those following demos completely or in part).
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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1 page of branches
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3 pages of plant constructions. Take your time. There are no rules or deadlines forcing you to complete your drawings quickly. If you can't finish a drawing in a sitting, don't rush it - you can always spread it across multiple sessions, or even days. Your only job is to complete each drawing to the best of your current ability, and you are not doing that right now.