10:29 PM, Thursday January 21st 2021
Starting with your arrows, these are flowing very confidently and fluidly across the page, although at first it was a bit hard to tell. Overlapping your arrows is fine, but avoid scratching anything out. There's no good reason to do so. Mistakes happen, scratching one out doesn't make it go away. Instead it's best to avoid that kind of a habit, so you don't accidentally use it where it might matter more.
Moving onto your leaves, while these do capture an element of the confidence and movement from your arrows, I don't really consider this exercise to be completed, in that you stopped at step 2 and didn't really explore any complexity in regards to edge detail nor more complex leaf structures. Additionally, these lines you added on the surface of your leaves were particularly sloppy and purposeless. Understanding what you're aiming for with a mark is really important, and it's part of the first step of the ghosting method (planning). We must always be aware of precisely what the mark we're drawing is going to contribute to a drawing, so we can appropriately approach it in a way that accomplishes that goal.
Here it seems unclear whether you were trying to draw contour lines (which help define how the leaf flows through space), or were trying to imply detail on the leaf's surface. Because this intent wasn't clear to you when executing the marks, it didn't accomplish any of these particularly well, and seemed more like a throw-away mark that shouldn't be a part of any of our drawings.
If it were meant to be a contour line, it should stretch from edge to edge (from the flow line to the outer edge of the leaf), rather than floating arbitrarily on the surface. If it were meant to be detail/texture, there should have been more effort put into both observation (as explained here) and in actually using implicit drawing techniques to capture the information you derived from your reference image.
As a whole, this exercise doesn't accurately represent what you're capable of.
Moving onto the branches, these are decently done, but there are a couple things I want to stress:
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Draw through all of your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, as introduced back in lesson 1
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Make sure your segments extend fully halfway to the next ellipse, as shown in the instructions here. This allows for a more substantial overlap between segments that helps them transition more smoothly and seamlessly from one to the next. Your transitions are actually pretty good, but this was a fairly important part of the instructions that was missed.
Now, moving onto your plant constructions, your work here is actually largely well done. In regards to your concerns about "what constitutes a full page", the answer is this - my biggest focus is on you giving each drawing as much room as it requires. Not all drawings are equal - some require far more space than others, in order to ensure that we're able to fully engage our spatial reasoning skills, and to avoid accidentally slipping back to drawing from our wrists instead of our shoulders. We start by drawing our first image as large as it needs, and then we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, great - we continue with another drawing beside the first. If there isn't enough room, however, then it is entirely okay to move onto the next page.
As far as this is concerned, your pages are certainly full enough. I'm also pleased to see that you've been applying a fair number of concepts from the lesson quite effectively, although there are a couple things I noticed:
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Aside from the kinds of marks I called out in your leaves exercise, on this page you're not doing a bad job of adding the wavier edge detail, but you are doing so with a single zigzagging mark. I am pleased to see that you're building it right off the simpler edge, but instead it should be drawn as a series of separate marks, each one coming off that edge and returning to it, as shown here. Each little "arrow" signifies a separate mark. What we're doing here is drawing the parts that change, not redrawing the entire edge from end to end.
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On the right side of this page, just a minor point about the branch structure. Try to keep the width of the branch structure consistent throughout its length, avoid the pinching that you've got going on there. If you want to build up a structure like this, the key would be to build a thinner branch, then "add" a new form at every ellipse to build up the bulk in that area as a separate step. Construction is all about building things up one step at a time, and avoiding complexity in any one specific stage.
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I'm noticing a bit of tentativeness/hesitation with your linework - not in the sense that you're not drawing your marks confidently, but like your pen is afraid to actually touch the page, resulting in circumstances where the line has little breaks at points along its length. Committing to your strokes and drawing each one to be complete and smooth is important. Often times signs like this suggest that a student is afraid of making mistakes - which is normal, but of course we cannot allow such fears to impact our results. If mistakes happen, they happen - but reacting to the fear of that eventuality will cause us to more minor mistakes all the time.
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Looking at your sunflower, you've forgotten about the textural concepts from Lesson 2 and I strongly suggest you review it. You should not be outlining your textural forms - you should be capturing the shadows every such textural form casts on its surroundings.
All in all you're doing very well, but I do want to see that leaves exercise completed properly. I'll go ahead and assign another page of those below.
Next Steps:
Please submit 1 page of leaves.