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11:38 PM, Tuesday February 25th 2020

It's not good that It looks like some of my drawings look like I only took 10 minutes; I know I took longer than that. I'm not attempting to change the process consciously - maybe I'm doing it without thinking.

I've been trying to ghost my lines more carefully but, I get nervously when I actually put the pen to paper. it seems like I end up making the marks the wrong way or worse yet they look like I have done no planning in spite of trying to ghost them several times.

https://imgur.com/a/ML20Qhj

This time I included the source images for the plants. Hopefully that will make it easier to tell where my weaknesses are. I can't stress how much I want to learn how to construct things properly. I feel like if I can get that down I can really start to improve.

The Palm tree has chaotic looking leaves, and I've planned out the limitations of the branch/leaf areas.

The Rose was mostly an exercise in ghosting the lines i needed multiple times.

The other two plants were a bit more complex.

2:11 AM, Wednesday February 26th 2020

Here are some notes about your leaves. On there, I also pointed out that you're zigzagging your lines around the underlying structure when adding wavier edges, which is something I specifically address here.

A key problem with your leaves is that you're leaving a lot of gaps, not actually allowing them to be fully enclosed forms, and instead reminding the viewer that they are merely a collection of lines. Notice the difference between how I draw in my little demonstrations on top of your page - my leaves are fully closed, and my lines are drawn to be specific. Yours still appear more to be somewhat instinctual, as though you are sketching and trying to rely on your gut. Don't forget about the use of the ghosting method for every single mark you put down - if we look at leaves like those on this page, it'd be hard to argue that the ghosting method was used for any of the outlines of the leaves.

For this drawing, when drawing the fern, you zigzag your lines back and forth throughout in many cases, which breaks this principle of markmaking. You need to be drawing each segment individually, so you can actually design how they move through space. By zigzagging, you end up focusing again on how the lines exist in the two dimensions of the page, not how they move through 3D space.

Overall, the problems are at their core the same as before. You're not following the instructions as they're written, and you're allowing yourself to be loose and approximate, instead of building directly upon the marks you put down. This comparison of two leaves in one of your plant drawings captures the issue fairly succinctly. There's no reason that the leaf circled on the left was approached differently than the leaf circled on the right.

Now it is entirely normal to get nervous when putting a mark down, especially in ink - but that is part of the exercise, to still your mind and step back when you feel frazzled. I think instead of having you immediately do more plant drawings, we're going to take a bit of a step back to some earlier exercises.

Next Steps:

I'd like to see the following:

  • 4 pages of ellipses in planes. Do not rush these. Invest as much time as you need into every single mark you put down. Apply the ghosting method, draw from your shoulder, and so on.

  • 2 pages of organic arrows.

  • 2 pages of freely rotated boxes (like the box challenge, including line extensions)

Since you ought to have been doing plenty of these past exercises in your warmups (as explained back in lesson 0), this should not be anything new. Regardless, make sure you read the instructions for each of these exercises before doing the assigned pages so they're fresh in your memory.

Once you've done that, do the following:

  • 1 page of leaves

  • Just 1 plant drawing. Show me that you can apply the concepts covered in the earlier lessons, that you can build directly on top of your various phases of construction and respect the fact that everything you draw is being created in three dimensions, not just as lines on a page. And pick something simple. There's no need to draw something complex and challenging.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
5:09 PM, Thursday February 27th 2020

I see.

My lack of improvement is really troubling. I have had lots of trouble attempting to use the techniques that the course teaches outside the course.

What exercises should I attempt again?

8:52 PM, Thursday February 27th 2020

They are listed underneath the critique I gave, in orange, under the heading "next steps".

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