1:23 AM, Thursday October 6th 2022
Starting with your arrows, nice work. You're drawing them with a great deal of confidence, which helps you push the sense of fluidity with which they move through the world. This also carries over into your leaves, where you're capturing both how they sit statically in 3D space, as well as how they move through the space they occupy from moment to moment.
The main issue I'm seeing with your leaves comes down to how you're actually applying your later steps - you have a tendency to lean into redrawing the entirety of the leaf (at least in large part) at each step, treating these steps as opportunities to replace the previous structure rather than actually adding new things onto it. This also leads to you drawing with singular, continuous, zigzagging lines, which as discussed here results in weak relationships between the phases of construction, and breaks this principle of markmaking from Lesson 1. While reviewing those notes and keeping them in mind is very important, on a simpler level, avoid increasing the thickness of your linework as you progress forwards through the steps of construction, as it'll encourage you to redraw more than you need to.
Remember - what we're doing here is not putting down a rough sketch to use as a guide. We are effectively introducing a structure to the world, as though it were a simple leaf shape cut out of a piece of paper, and as we add edge detail to it or build up its structure, we are actively making physical changes to that existing form. If we want to add spikes to its edge, we're physically adding more pieces of paper to it. If we want to create a wobbly edge, we are physically drooping and lifting sections of its perimeter in 3D space. And if we want to cut into its silhouette, then the lines we're drawing represent the paths a pair of scissors would follow to cut it out, as shown here.
Continuing onto your branches, you're generally handling these pretty well, although you may not be quite as attentive to the specific instructions here as you could be - mainly in that you tend not to always extend each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, and sometimes you start the next segment a little further down than you should. Additionally, be sure to draw through all of your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen as discussed in Lesson 2, and don't forget that the degree of your ellipses should shift wider as we slide further away from the viewer, as noted in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.
Finally moving onto your plant constructions, by and large my concerns are really the ones I've already called out. Setting those aside, there aren't any other major issues with your approach - although the points I've already raised are by no means inconsequential, and will have to be addressed (though being a matter of approach, it's really just a matter of adjusting the decisions you're consciously making as you approach this work). There are just a couple other minor things I want to point out:
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When it comes to how many drawings you put on a page, it's totally okay to have just one as long as it is making full use of the space available, and nothing else is able to fit in the space that remains. So for example, this is fine, but here the space is not being used as well as it could. Either you gave that plant as much room as it required of you, in which case you should then consider what else you can fit in the space that remains, or you would have benefited from drawing that first plant larger, in which case it is important to do so. Drawing smaller than we need will constrict our brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage our whole arm while drawing.
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It appears that you built up the lower section of these plants using a sort of tube - would have been a good opportunity to employ the branches technique, from building around a central minor axis line, to building up the side edges with separate strokes (and of course you should be drawing through those ellipses). Always reflect on the tools you have in your toolbelt while considering how you're going to approach a given construction.
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When constructing cylindrical flower pots, like this one, be sure to do so around a central minor axis line to help in aligning the various ellipses together. I also noticed that you drew the base with a narrower ellipse - it should be wider, due to it being farther away from the viewer, thus having more of its surface oriented towards them. Again - if you're unsure as to why this is, consult the Lesson 1 ellipses video.
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In terms of the really thick area of solid black along the bottom edge of this mushroom's cap, I'm unsure of what specifically you meant to convey here. Either it's an application of form shading (which as discussed here in Lesson 2 should not play a role in our drawings for this course, with filled areas of solid black generally being reserved to establish shadows being cast from one form onto another surface, or it's a use of line weight, in which case it should be kept very subtle as noted here and generally focused on clarifying how different forms overlap one another, being limited to the localized areas where that occurs as explained here.
Fortunately the issues are fairly superficial and easily addressed, so I'm going to assign some revisions to allow you the opportunity to demonstrate your understanding. You'll find them listed below.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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1 page of leaves
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3 pages of plant constructions