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8:03 PM, Friday July 17th 2020

Starting with your arrows, you're doing a pretty good job of capturing a sense of fluidity and motion. Most of these are also doing a good job of capturing how foreshortening applies to both the ribbon itself as well as the spacing between its zigzagging sections, and largely do a good job of capturing the depth in the scene.

That sense of fluidity carries over very nicely to your leaves, where you've done an excellent job of capturing not only how they occupy 3D space, but also how they move through that space, giving a sense of lively motion and the impression that in the moment prior to, and after the one that has been captured, they'll be in a different position entirely. You're also applying the principles of construction very effectively, building them up in successive phases rather than jumping ahead to complexity too soon.

Your branches are coming along fairly well, though there's one key issue - you tend to be inconsistent in terms of where you start and end your line segments. The instructions state that you should be drawing each segment from the first ellipse, past the second and halfway to the third, then starting the next segment at the second ellipse, past the third, and halfway to the fourth. This results in a nice overlap between them of about half the distance between ellipses. This overlap is critical to help those lines run seamlessly together, with the second treating the last section of the first as a runway before shooting off towards its own target.

Continuing onto your plant constructions, you've largely done a pretty good job. You've definitely hammered out a great many drawings - although in doing so, you did end up drawing a number of them quite small, which itself can be a problem. Our brains benefit from being given lots of room to think through our spatial problems, and purposely cramming drawings into a smaller space than they really need from us can definitely make things harder than they need to.

Now, I actually don't see a lot of those particular signs here, so it seems you are indeed comfortable drawing at that scale - it's just something to be aware of. This is also of course something that we improve with over time, but if you find things getting too stiff, make sure you give yourself more room.

There are actually a lot of excellent habits on display here - you're not at all afraid to draw each and every form in its entirety, and to adhere to all the steps of the constructional process. You also show a good deal of respect for the decisions you make earlier in a construction, and adhere to them rather than attempting to re-answer questions that have already been addressed. When it comes to adding a little more detail - for example the fiddlehead fern, remember that we're not actually drawing the little protrusions along its surface - we're drawing the shadows they cast. I can see that you tried to draw them as little triangles, which suggests that you were focusing on the edges of the little thorns themselves, rather than thinking about the shadows they project. I did a quick comparison for another student recently that demonstrates the same idea here: https://i.imgur.com/h8xaTqc.png

I can see that you tried working with cast shadows when drawing the peace lily, although I think the shadow shapes came down a little more erratically (probably due to the small size in which you were trying to maneuver). Keep in mind that cast shadows are flexible - you don't need to draw each and every shadow, but instead can have the middle section of that rounded form be quite sparse, and focus the shadows along the sides.

Aside from these relatively minor points, I'm very pleased with your results. I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
11:53 PM, Friday July 17th 2020

Thank you very much for the detailed feedback! I was indeed having some trouble controlling my lines (especially my ellipses for stems and branches) with the smaller drawings, so I will try to work at a larger scale going forward.

Now onto... shudder INSECTS

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The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"

It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.

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