9:23 PM, Thursday March 26th 2020
Starting with your arrows, what stands out to me most is that your linework is quite shaky. This suggests to me that you're drawing your marks quite slowly and carefully - not with the kind of confidence you demonstrated back in parts of Lesson 1. This is actually something I raised as a concern in Lesson 2:
The only thing I did notice however was that your linework is definitely still a little stiff and hesitant, so keep working on drawing with more confidence, not allowing the fear of making a mistake hold you back. This will ensure your marks come out more smoothly. Even if it also results in less control, that will improve with practice.
Executing your marks with confidence and avoiding any hesitation whatsoever is critical. That is ultimately what the ghosting method focuses on above all else, by splitting the process of mark making into several distinct phases. We're able to take our time with the planning and preparation phases, doing what we can to give ourselves the best chance of hitting our targets, but ultimately the moment our pen touches the page to execute a mark we must push through without second-guessing ourselves, relying entirely on muscle memory and not steering our marks with our eyes as you're doing here.
This carries over into your leaves, where the construction itself is adequate but the lines themselves being jittery with hesitation undermines the perceived solidity of these forms. Every little bit of complexity in our shapes serves to remind us that what we're looking at are just marks on a page, and not real, solid, 3D forms. Keeping our lines smooth and consistent is a first important step to keeping those shapes simple, and being able to establish the illusion that what the viewer is looking at is a real form in 3D space.
Moving onto your branches, the same issue is present but I'm also seeing a tendency not to extend your line segments very far past a given ellipse. In the instructions, I mention that you should be extending each segment fully halfway towards the next ellipse. This gives us plenty of runway to overlap with our next segment, ensuring that they flow smoothly together before shooting off towards the next target. Because your linework is already somewhat stiff, you have been able to keep them consistent throughout, so the sides of your branches do often appear to be made up of a single continuous stroke. That does kind of defeat the purpose of the exercise however - it's all about learning how to make the strokes flow seamlessly into one another while maintaining a smooth, confident line. So once you're able to draw with greater confidence, this issue would become more significant.
Also worth mentioning, you appear to not be drawing through your ellipses. This should be done for each and every ellipse you draw throughout all of these lessons.
For the most part, your plant constructions are essentially fine, once we get past the shaky linework. You're building up your forms properly in many cases, although there are a few areas where you're skipping important steps. Drawings like the magnolia are well done - despite the jittery lines, you've still captured a pretty decent sense of flow with the petals (though make sure you treat the end of your flow line as the end of the petal - try not to leave that gap between your flow line's arrow head and the actual tip of the petal/leaf.
When drawing anything cylindrical - like a flower pot - do so around a central minor axis line. Also, draw the ellipse on both ends of the cylinder. In your cactus drawing, you drew only the top ellipse and ended up leaving the bottom with a very shallow curve. Drawing both ellipses is known as "drawing through your forms" and helps to establish better how that for sits in space and how it relates to those around it.
Now, as I've probably implied already, your linework is the main problem here and needs to be addressed. I'm going to reassign a number of pages of the exercises from this lesson, and your focus should entirely be on drawing your lines with confidence, as you've demonstrated in the past. We can continue building upon a line that misses the mark a little, but a line that wobbles serves as an unsteady foundation.
Next Steps:
I'd like to see:
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1 page of arrows
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1 page of leaves
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1 page of branches
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Two pages of plant constructions