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7:37 PM, Thursday August 20th 2020

Starting with your arrows, these are certainly flowing confidently and fluidly through space, and this is a feature that carries over nicely into your leaves exercise as well. You've done a good job of establishing how the leaves not only sit in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy, capturing a strong sense of motion.

There are a couple issues I want to point out however:

  • First and foremost, while this image in particular is admittedly rather small in terms of resolution, I am seeing a tendency to loosely 'sketch' your lines, building them up more gradually rather than executing your marks with a single continuous stroke from end to end. While we do indeed learn to apply a similar technique during the branches exercise, what we do there is far more controlled - it's not meant to be an excuse to just chicken-scratch our linework all the way through. Make sure you adhere closely to the mark making principles covered back in Lesson 1.

  • When adding more complex edge detail to some of your leaves, such as the bottom right leaf on the page, you ended up zigzagging that wavier edge back and forth across the simpler edge from the previous phase of construction. This creates a fairly loose and insubstantial connection between the phases of construction, where instead they should be building upon one another directly, creating strong relationships between them. You've done this more correctly with some of the others, but as explained in these notes, zigzagging back and forth across the previous line is not a good idea. Additionally, try and build up these bumps/waves individually - instead of taking a single stroke back and forth over the full length of the edge, add each individual adjustment as its own separate stroke, rising off the previous silhouette and returning to it.

Your branches are largely looking quite well done. You're adhering to the methodology for executing the lines in segments correctly (despite being less controlled about it in the leaves). One thing that did jump out at me however is that you're rather liberal with drawing through your ellipses. Drawing through ellipses is good, and important - but you shouldn't be doing so more than 3 full rounds. Ideally, try to stick to just 2 (no more, no less) as explained here.

Looking through your plant constructions, you are mostly doing a very good job, though there are a few issues I do want to address. Firstly, when drawing flower petals, like you've done on the drawings on this page, make sure you draw them in their entirety as a fully closed form - often these petals will seem to sprout out of a central element, but don't be afraid to draw the petal such that it actually penetrates into that central form, so it can close itself fully. Doing so will help us better understand these petals as complete forms, and well help us grasp how they sit in 3D space and relate to the other forms around them. Leaving them open-ended up against another form tends to make us think of them as being more two dimensional.

I mentioned this already, but I just wanted to take the opportunity to point out the issue within your plant constructions - looking at the more complex edges on the leaves of the left drawing here, you'll see how you zigzagged those edges back and forth across the previous phase of construction. Here it's quite obvious that you're replacing the simpler form. Construction is not about replacing one phase's result with another. It's about building on top of it directly.

Similarly, we can see here where you're drawing through your ellipses way too much, especially at the base there. It can become very easy to draw through an ellipse so many times that we can no longer pin down precisely which ellipse it was meant to be.

Aside from these points, your work is coming along quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:32 PM, Thursday August 20th 2020

Thanks for the critique!

I was a bit nervous during this lesson which must of affected my line confidence. Ill try to change my mindset to be more accepting of mistakes that might happen while doing the lesson.

Ok, I think I see what you mean about some leave edges replacing the previous phase of construction lines. So then having some variety of leaf edges poking out and falling short of the previous line be better instead?

5:16 AM, Friday August 21st 2020

For now, don't worry too much about adding variety - focus on getting the structure down solidly. In the case of that leaf, it doesn't really demand anything beyond the bounds defined by that initial simple shape, so stick to that.

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