12:00 AM, Tuesday May 11th 2021
Starting with your arrows, your initial linework appears to be drawn with a good deal of confidence, and achieves a good sense of fluidity - but as soon as you add a lot of that extra line weight, you end up stiffening up your lines. The upper-right arrow (the pink one) where you only added line weight around the overlapping sections is much more correct - you've focused on applying it in just a localized area. Additionally, being sure to execute it confidently, using the ghosting method (instead of tracing hesitantly) will help you achieve a more tapered end to the stroke, which will help it blend back into the original linework.
Continuing onto your leaves, your process is by and large once again solid, but it's the line weight phase where you undermine yourself. You're still maintaining the original fluidity, which helps you capture how each leaf moves through 3D space, but things do get more stiff when you trace back over them to increase the line weight. You also appear to be building up your complexity appropriately - adhering closely to the previous phase of construction rather than zigzagging across it or treating it like a loose suggestion.
What you shouldn't be doing is viewing later phases of construction as an opportunity to redraw the entirety of the leaf. Construction is about building things up bit by bit - you don't need to re-solve problems that have already been addressed. Once you've determined how the leaf moves through space, your only focus is on adding the slight deviations to the edges, drawing in the parts that change, and leaving the rest alone as shown here.
Continuing onto the branches, it seems to me that you're not quite following the instructions to the letter. This exercise focuses heavily on having the segments overlap, having one stop halfway to the next ellipse, and the next start at the previous ellipse, using that last chunk as a runway before shooting off towards its next target. As shown here, this helps immensely in maintaining a smooth, seamless transition. While your transitions generally look fine, it's important that you follow the instructions to the letter.
Continuing onto your plant constructions, while as a whole you're doing okay, there are key issues to point out:
-
In this flower, you are indeed falling into the mistake of zigzagging your edge details as a single continuous line, an issue that is specifically addressed here in the notes.
-
Just a minor point about this one - back in Lesson 2, we mentioned that we would not be employing any form shading in the drawings for this course.
-
On the banana plant, you're pretty inconsistent in the use of the techniques explained in the leaves exercise. In some cases, you don't employ a flow line at all. In others, you jump straight from flow line to the edge detail, without first building the simpler silhouette which is intended to take the movement through space and extend it into a basic footprint. The point of that is so you already have that problem solved, leaving you to just add the deviation of the edge detail, instead of having to solve several problems at the same time.
-
When drawing your cylindrical flower pots, be sure to construct them around a central minor axis line. Also, draw through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen. You have flower pots that are okay in some pages, but there are others - like the rubber plant - where it seems you may have forgotten about the basic mechanics of how cylinders work. The end closer to the viewer should have a narrower degree, and the ellipse on the far end (forming the base) should be wider. If you're unsure why that is, take a look at the more recently updated ellipses video from lesson 1. It's mentioned in a number of places prior to lesson 3, but I think that new explanation is the most succinct.
-
Lastly, the line weight. I know I've beat this horse to death, but I wanted to bring it up one last time not only because it is a prevalent issue throughout the drawings, but also because your approach in some of these -specifically where you worked with an "underdrawing" (in pink) and then went back over it with blue basically makes it impossible not to make this mistake. Do not use underdrawings, do not use multiple colours for a single drawing, and do not trace back over your linework. As soon as a mark is on the page, it is committed - it only receives line weight if it needs it to clarify a specific, localized overlap.
I think you have it in you to do quite well at this lesson, but you've taken the wrong turn in a number of places, enough so that it you will need to complete some revisions. I'll assign them below.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
-
1 page of leaves
-
3 pages of plant constructions
If pink and blue are the only colours you have access to, use the blue. If you've specifically chosen to use those colours over something like black, and do have access to a black fineliner, use that instead.