12:58 AM, Tuesday May 3rd 2022
Starting with your arrows, great stuff - you're doing a good job of executing each of these with a fair bit of confidence, which helps to achieve a greater sense of fluidity in how the arrows move through space. I can see that you're executing these with individual marks, rather than a single zigzag - that's perfectly fine, although there is something from the branches technique (which unfortunately you missed) which would help with this. We'll talk about it shortly.
Getting back to that confidence, it carries over nicely into your leaves, where you're capturing not only how they sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the spaces they occupy. You're also doing a great job of adding edge detail to your leaves with one mark at a time, rising off and returning to the previous edge. On occasion you'll be a little off, with a mark not quite getting back to the edge, but generally you're demonstrating a great deal of control, and I expect that this only really happens when you lose a bit of focus (or due to the occasional mistake, which do of course happen).
Moving onto the branches, the point you're unfortunately missing here is that as explained in the instructions, each edge segment must start at one ellipse, continue past the second and stop halfway to the third, with the next segment starting at the second ellipse and repeating the pattern. Currently you've got your subsequent marks starting roughly where the previous one ends - eliminating the overlap, which is very important when it comes to establishing a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next. This would also help you in drawing your arrows without the slightly jarring jumps where one segment attempts to flow into another, but simply doesn't have the runway to do it smoothly.
As for your plant constructions, by and large you're doing quite well, but there is a small handful of points I want to call out:
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When constructing cylindrical flower pots - or any cylindrical structure - be sure to build them up around a central minor axis line, as this will help you in lining up your various ellipses. I am however pleased to see that you're not limiting yourself to just the basic opening/base, but rather also including another one inset within the opening to establish the "thickness" of the rim. That said, another to establish a separate level of the soil can be quite helpful too.
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While I do think that the bushy kind of stuff you encountered with your bonsai tree is probably outside of the scope of what we're doing in this lesson (at least in terms of the treetops - the branching trunk structure is great, and you handled it quite well) - one recommendation I'd have here is to build up your "busy" edges right on the initial organic masses you started with. In essence what you've done here is build up masses, then tell the viewer to completely ignore them in favour of a new, more complex set. What you want instead is to build that complexity onto the existing masses, developing them further rather than replacing them.
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In this one you made some pretty strange use of filled areas of solid black. Generally these would be used for cast shadows - which require a surface upon which to be cast - but here it looks like you've filled the negative space between the leaves towards the top, and in the bottom, they look more like cast shadows that are just floating. Not sure what the intention was here, but it definitely went in a weird direction. That said, the leaves themselves are quite well done. Same goes for the grapes - rather than focusing on how cast shadows are their own, separate, intentionally designed shapes who, in that specific design convey the relationship between the form casting them and the surface receiving them, you've just filled in the negative space behind the grapes. Try to avoid doing this in the future.
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And lastly, on your more complex leaf structures here I have two comments. Firstly, you appear to be skipping the flow line. While you still handled them fine, the purpose of every drawing we do throughout this course is to be an exercise, and so following the intended steps is still important. Don't skip them! And secondly, every step of the construction is a decision being made - don't override or change them after the fact, as you did with some of the smaller leaves that go past the edge of the larger footprint from earlier in the process, as we can see here towards its end. That larger footprint establishes how far out the leaves will go - and so we draw flow lines extending right to its edge, and then draw leaves that stop at the tip of their corresponding flow lines.
Anyway, as a whole you're still doing quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.