Starting with your arrows, these are drawn decently, in that you've constructed the arrows with a fair bit of confidence behind your lines, which has helped you to capture a sense of fluidity. There are two issues I'd like to call out however:
Be sure to compress the gaps between the zigzagging sections as they move farther away from the viewer, as shown here.
The area you filled in with hatching doesn't really help at all to clarify how one section of a given arrow folds over the other. If you take a look at how I actually handled this myself in the instructions, you'll see that I didn't put the hatching in that overlapping section, but rather just outside of it.
Moving onto the leaves, you do a pretty decent job of carrying over the same sense of fluidity from the arrows into here, and capture not only how the leaves sit in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. I'm also pleased to see how you approached building up greater complexity, both in terms of complex edge detail and more complex leaf structures - except for this one, which was very clearly not following the steps of the exercise. That said, since you did it correctly for a number of other complex leaf structures, I assume that was just a little slip-up.
Continuing onto the branches, you appear to have done a pretty good job with these. I do feel your lines are a little stiff here, so I do want to make sure that you apply the ghosting method to each mark you draw, ensuring a confident execution to produce smooth strokes. That goes both for straight lines and ellipses.
Looking at your plant constructions, overall you've done a pretty good job in applying the concepts from the lesson. There are definitely a few places where drawing bigger would have helped a great deal, most of all this bluebonnet drawing. When we purposely restrict the amount of space we have to work in, we limit both our brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, and the ease with which we can engage our whole arm while drawing. This results in clumsier linework. Fortunately most of your drawings didn't take it that far, but in general if you've got more room in which to work, take advantage of it.
It does however appear that you only submitted 7 pages of plant drawings, 5 of which were done from my demonstrations. In the homework section, I mention that drawings you've done along with the demonstrations should constitute less than half of your plant drawings. In other words, you should have done at least 5 pages of your own.
As such, I'm going to ask that you submit the remaining 3 pages of your own drawings. Take your time with these, and take full advantage of the space available to you. I'm definitely noticing that you're less confident when working directly from reference, rather than following along with my steps, so I will be keeping an eye out for that.
Next Steps:
Please submit the missing 3 pages of your own plant drawings.
Link to my own plants
There are a few things I want to point out about these:
When drawing your petals, don't leave one side open. Even if it means drawing the leaf as interpenetrating whatever's at the center of the flower. Having our forms intersect is pretty normal in constructional drawing, and drawing forms in their entirety is important to help us understand how they exist as 3D forms in space, and how they relate to one another.
When drawing your rose, there are places where your petals extend beyond the end of your flow line. That flow line declares how long that leaf or petal is going to be, and how it moves through space. Once that is committed to, you need to stick to it.
Keep working on driving the idea that the flow line establishes how the whole thing moves through space. Draw it with confidence, and thinking about how it represents motion. One thing that helps me to do this is to add a little arrow-head on its end as a reminder.
For the sunflower's stem, and any other situation where a form gets cut off the page, you should not be leaving those forms open-ended. Cap them off (in this case with an ellipse) to close it so you're left with a solid 3D form, not a flat shape on the page.
Draw through all of your ellipses, going around the shape two full times before lifting your pen. This goes for every ellipse you draw throughout this entire course.
On the sunflower, you appear to have neglected the principles of texture from lesson 2. You opted to outline every little bud instead of focusing on the shadows cast by each form on its neighbours, and that made it impossible for you to transition from one level of textural density to another.
You're moving in the right direction but I think there are enough separate concerns that I'd like you to do three more pages of plant constructions. Really invest as much time as you need into each individual mark you draw. Don't approach these drawings with the expectation that you're going to get them done in a set period of time. Just focus on doing everything to the best of your ability, and following the instructions from the lessons and from my critiques to the letter.
Next Steps:
Please submit three additional pages of plant constructions.
Alright I think I had a breakthrough. I just sat and drew leaves over and over and finally understood how to apply the information in the lessons. I focused on how they move throughout space and are actually 3d shapes instead of lines on the page.
I stopped trying to draw a 'realistic leaf' and focused on constructing something that looked like it had volume. Not sure if that makes sense, but it does in my mind.
These may not be perfect, but I at least think it's a huge improvement..
Let me know what you think!
Also thank you for the critique!
Let me know what you think of these new plants.
When it comes to technical drawing, there's no one better than Scott Robertson. I regularly use this book as a reference when eyeballing my perspective just won't cut it anymore. Need to figure out exactly how to rotate an object in 3D space? How to project a shape in perspective? Look no further.
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