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3:04 PM, Friday October 29th 2021
Hi Kawjia! I'll be reviewing your homework. Let's see:
Organic Arrows: They look great, fluid, with confident lines and lineweight, and they really feel like they're moving through space. Maybe some of them could've compressed more as they go back, but most of them do. Great job.
Leaves: Great job here as well, you followed all the steps in order, your flow lines are flexible and confident, although I see some zigzaging on the edges (and that will reappear on the plant drawings). Be careful with that, and remember that when we draw the edge detail, we make a mark, we reach the scaffolding's edge, we stop, and then we make another mark. Don't skip steps.
Branches: They look solid, but you're not overshooting your edge lines enough, and you are even starting to overlap them at random points. Remember that we make a mark from one ellipse, overshoot the next one, and then start the next mark from the ellipse we just passed, not from a random point, as seen here. Remember to be mindful of how your ellipses change its degree as well, although you did quite better on the plant drawings, in that aspect.
Plant Drawings:
You did a lot of them, they look beautiful and really clean, that's great. Occasionally, you skipped steps on the construction method, especially when it comes to edge complexity. Like on page 3 with the tips of the petals on the long-petaled lewisia, or your sweet pea on page 7. On page 4, the bishop's cap cactus looks awesome, but you didn't draw the form through for the left and right sections. Compare it with the original cactus demo and you'll see what I mean.
It's not always, but at times your leaves tend to get a little stiff, like on the left side of your century plant (page 4) or the right side petals of your nerine (page 5). Don't be afraid of letting your lines fold over themselves, let them flow the same way as any other line.
On your sunblest rose (page 6), you have some stiffness on your rightmost leave. But most importantly, your branches have almost no ellipses. While it is good to do few of them on skinny branches like these, all the ones you put are in the forking sections, and so the rest of the branch tends to look flatter than it should.
Your mushroom looks fine as well, but the intersection between the stem and the cap looks a little weird. It's a simple mushroom, but when we made the first mushroom demo, the stem stopped there because the cap was just one, solid form. In this case the cap seems to suggest, well, a cap, like the one found in most mushrooms. And if that's the case, remember that the cap folds over and falls like an umbrella, and so, your intersection with the stem should be, at the very least, a bit higher. The way it's drawn, it looks like the cap is just a solid form, and that's rarely the case with those types of shape. I could be wrong as well, there are some mushrooms like that.
Your final page doesn't have any problems, besides a couple of stiff leaves. Overall, your submission is really great, your contour lines are applied really well, and most of the mistakes look more like omissions than misunderstandings of the lesson.
That being said, I still caught one important detail, and that is that you are drawing quite small, and that can induce some errors when it comes to handling things like edge complexity or the ellipses on the branches. So, I want to ask you to submit two more drawings, one per page, just to be sure. One of a flower with a skinny stem and petals that tend to fold over themselves, something like this, but you know, with a stem. And the other of a mushroom (or mushrooms), something like this, to see how you would handle forms like those.
Remember that this are all exercises as well, which means our objective is to practice our construction, not for them to look beautiful or identical to our reference. Apply the corrections, draw them big and keep it up, you are doing a great work.
Next Steps:
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One big drawing of a flower with a skinny stem and folding petals/leaves.
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One big drawing of a mushroom/mushrooms with an umbrella-like cap.
PureRef
This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.