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9:14 PM, Friday May 1st 2020

Starting with your arrows, they're definitely flowing quite well, though keep in mind that as the width of your ribbon gets narrower (due to perspective), that same perspective will be compressing the distances between your arrow's zigzagging sections. One cannot happen without the other, otherwise you'll end up with contradictions within your drawings.

Moving onto your leaf drawings, you've done done a pretty great job here. You've carried over the confident flow and fluidity of your arrows and applied it to concrete, real objects. A lot of students get caught up in the idea that they're drawing something real, and end up focusing too much on how the leaves sit statically in space. You have instead gone further and captured how those forms move through the space they occupy. You've also applied construction very fastidiously, making a point of adhering to the underlying structure whenever adding further complexity - at no point do you add anything that is not supported by the structure already present, so you're not skipping any steps and ending up with complexity that flattens out the drawing.

One thing to be mindful of however is that you've got a few where you're just allowing the leaf's edges to stop arbitrarily before they actually enclose the whole form. While this is less of a problem when dealing with leaves (because they are already flat). If you do this to a form with more volume to it however, it'll end up flattening out the form. In these cases, always cap the form off (so if we're talking about a cylinder, you'd just cap it off with another ellipse instead of leaving the edges open). With a leaf, I'd just draw a line across to enclose the shape.

Your branches are looking pretty well done, aside from one major issue: you're drawing them really small. Throughout this entire course, drawing things larger and taking advantage of the space the page affords you is critical. Our brains require more space to think through spatial problems, and it also helps us to engage our whole arm when drawing more. It also looks like you're not necessarily drawing through your ellipses consistently, so remember that you should be drawing through each and every one you draw for these lessons.

Overall your plant constructions are pretty well done, with a few smaller issues I noticed. The main thing is that your petals and leaves flow nicely, and your structures feel fairly solid. You're definitely mindful of how the forms all relate to one another in space, and how they fit together.

The biggest issue that stands out to me is that similarly to your branches exercises, it feels like you're drawing at least some of these plants quite small. Now, it's hard to be sure since you've cropped to each plant so tightly, but judging by the thickness of the linework relative to the whole drawing it does appear that at least some of them are quite a bit smaller. This makes things like capturing texture more difficult, since you're dealing with effectively less resolution in which to work.

Another concern I have is that your linework in a number of places - including this drawing - you tend to put down initial lines with a much lighter stroke (which end up looking quite sketchy and rough), and then you go back over them in order to commit your lines, or in effect to replace them with your "clean" and final linework. This approach of an underdrawing and a clean-up pass is something I discussed back in Lesson 2, a little in this section and also moreso in the form intersections video, as being something to avoid. Every mark you put down is part of the drawing - adding line weight is not about redrawing an existing line, but rather to emphasize parts of a line that already exists, specifically to clarify how certain overlaps between forms work. In general, you don't want your lines getting excessively thick. Line weight itself should be quite subtle, as it's all about the eye picking up on relationships between lines, noticing where one is slightly thicker than another. It's a matter of whispering to the subconscious, not screaming in one's face.

Really thick lines - as you can see here - can very easily start to flatten out a drawing by making things more "graphic".

What I mentioned before about texture is quite apparent in this drawing, where where I can see that you've attempted to add little bits of texture into your form shading, but it really comes out as something indistinct and unclear, not actually effectively conveying the texture of those surfaces. This is of course because there isn't nearly enough room to actually dig into that texture. More importantly though, I mention back in Lesson 2's texture section that you should not be adding form shading to your drawings. That section does include the caveat that you could ostensibly use it specifically to convey textural information, but given the limited space you have to work here and the way the results turned out, it does seem to me more that you were more focused on shading the forms, rather than the conveying of texture being your top priority.

While I've touched on a few different points that you should definitely keep in mind as you move forwards, I think you're still doing a pretty good job overall. As such, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4. And when you submit that lesson, make sure you take full pictures of each page, rather than tight crops of each drawing.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:57 PM, Saturday May 2nd 2020

thanks a lot for your critique .... I'll be doing my best to avoid the points you pointed out and do better in lesson 4 thx again

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Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens

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Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.

Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.

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