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3:14 AM, Sunday July 12th 2020
Your work throughout this lesson is largely really well done. There are some issues I'm going to address, but by and large you've shown a good grasp of the material.
The first thing that jumps out at me is that your mark-making, especially throughout the arrows and leaves is incredibly concise and specific, whilst maintaining really confident strokes. I am noticing however a tendency to exaggerate some of your line weight, and there are some definite places where it looks like the line weight might be a lot thicker specifically to help consolidate and hide mistakes where you may have drawn a line that didn't come out quite right. This is a hunch, but it is a common pattern I see from some students. Just keep in mind that correcting mistakes is a bad habit - doing so like this sacrifices control over where you get to put your line weight in your drawing, and can create unintentional focal areas. If you make a mistake, just leave it be, don't worry about it and keep going.
Moving onto your leaves, these are basically knocking it out of the park. They flow extremely well through space, and you're employing an excellent grasp of construction when building up details in a way that clearly adheres to the underlying scaffolding from the previous phase. You don't ever stray too far from the structure that you've already put in place, and so everything holds together with a strong sense of solidity and believability.
While your branches are largely quite well done, there's one issue that I'm seeing here and there that is worth mentioning. While there are a number of spots where you do indeed extend your line segments fully halfway towards the next ellipse (resulting in a nice healthy overlap/runway for the next segment), there are quite a few spots I could see where you only extended the previous line a little ways past the previous ellipse. The shorter the runway that the next segment gets, the harder it is to create a smooth transition between the strokes, so getting the full half length is important.
Moving onto your plant constructions, there are a great many things you're doing correctly in terms of the overall approach to how they're structured (especially this rose, which was quite well done), but there are a number of smaller mistakes I'm seeing:
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For this one, when adding the little textural forms along the surface of the plant, you've forgotten about the principles covered in lesson 2's texture section. Specifically, the fact that we do not outline our textural forms - we imply their presence by capturing the shadows they cast.
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For this drawing, the stems leading off to the leaves themselves should still not be basic lines - they should be three dimensional forms, even if very narrow ones. A line isn't something that exists in the world, after all, everything has thickness to it.
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In this drawing, you captured the pattern along the surface of the flower. Patterns - that is, something made up of the local colour of a surface rather than actual little forms present along the surface - aren't things we usually capture in our drawings. Instead, we largely ignore matters of local colour entirely ,since we have no capacity to actually show that something is red, blue, yellow, green, etc. Our focus is entirely on texture, and the filled black shapes we draw should be reserved only for cast shadows.
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For the same drawing, the way you drew the thorns doesn't really establish them as 3D forms with clear relationships with the branch to which they connect. Here's a better way of approaching it.
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As far as texture goes this banksia was a good attempt, but the approach was flawed. Specifically it was flawed because you attempted to capture a large number of different textural forms with a more generic, overall strategy. It didn't actually describe the textural forms at all, or establish their relationships to the surface to which they rested, and so it didn't really give an accurate impression of what that surface feels like. Unfortunately these kinds of shortcuts don't really work - you'll ultimately have to focus on each individual textural form, capturing the shadow it casts on its surroundings, and then moving onto the next.
All in all you've a lot of major moves in the right direction, but struggle a great deal when it comes to tackling matters of texture. As such, I strongly recommend that you review the notes from Lesson 2 (specifically those that talk about implicit drawing techniques, using cast shadows rather than outlining textural forms on their own). That aside, I am largely pleased with your results, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 4.
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Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens
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.