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10:53 PM, Thursday March 4th 2021

Starting with your arrows, you've got a bit of a mix here. Towards the left side of the page, you're showing the ability to draw your arrows with a strong sense of confidence and fluidity, although in the bottom right you're getting much more hesitant and stiff, and towards the upper right your attempt to build the arrows up with separate segments doesn't work out too well. I'll assume those issues are primarily a matter of experimentation, and focus on the fact that you did demonstrate several times that you can draw your linework confidently.

Just keep one thing in mind - the gaps between the zigzagging sections should get narrower as we look farther back, as shown here.

Moving onto your leaves, you've carried that same sense of fluidity and confidence very nicely, and have been able to pin down how these leaves both sit in space and how they move through the space they occupy. So as far as the first two steps of the instructions for this exercise, you're doing great.

Unfortunately, that's where it stops - it seems that you decided not to go any further than the second step. Note that in the instructions the third stage is not listed as optional. You should be playing with building up more complex edge detail on top of the structure you've constructed.

Continuing onto the branches exercise, I'm seeing another instance here that you're not following the instructions as they're written. As shown here, you are to draw your segment from the first ellipse, past the second and halfway to the third, then start your next segment at the second ellipse, going past the third and stopping halfway to the fourth. The resulting overlap is critical to help the segments flow more smoothly and seamlessly from one to the next.

Moving onto your plant constructions, there's definitely a lot of variety here, and I can see that you were extremely enthusiastic about filling your pages. I do however have a few things to point out to keep you going in the right direction, and I did notice that in the attempt to ensure every page was quite filled, I'd say there is definitely a tendency not to really push your constructions as far as they could go.

That isn't inherently a mistake - our focus is of course on just building structures with forms that feel solid and three dimensional, and doesn't speak to necessarily how complex they need to be - but it isn't uncommon for students to simply be unaware of the fact that their drawings could be pushed farther. I pointed this out to another student who submitted their revisions recently, and I feel I can use their work to better illustrate this point to you. The student drew from this reference, and this was their result. It's not entirely accurate, but that's not really an issue right now. As far as construction goes, it's fine - they built up their structure with successive forms, and the result feels fairly 3D. But as shown in this quick demo I threw together to illustrate this point, there are a lot of individual steps one could be taking to glean more information from the reference. It's not entirely accurate either (again, not really an issue here), but it does show how we can step by step break down the structure of the plant, and work to build it up one piece at a time.

It's easy to just look at the overarching elements and throw them together quickly, but we need to instead slow down and spend much more of our time observing that reference to find the elements of nuance, and to determine where additional stages might help build up more structure to support those forms better.

Now, here are the smaller issues/suggestions I wanted to call out:

  • You've got a few instances on this page where when adding more edge complexity to your leaves/petals, you basically try to replace the entire edge, ignoring the one from the previous phase of construction. In doing so, you end up zigzagging your lines and breaking the third principle of markmaking from Lesson 1. Build every little bump such that it comes off the simpler structure and returns to it. Do not attempt to outright replace previous phases of construction, build on top of them.

  • Also worth mentioning, the flower in the bottom right of the page linked in the previous point jumps ahead too far in how its petals are drawn. You appear to try and draw the initial structure for the petal and its wavier edge detail at the same time. Constructional drawing is all about breaking complex problems into simpler individual ones that can be solved one at a time. Always work from simple to complex, and don't build any complexity that the existing structure can't support.

  • On this page you've got a couple flower pots. For the lower one, be sure to always "cap off" any forms that get cut off, rather than leaving them open-ended. In this case, that'd mean drawing an additional ellipse to close off the bottom. For the flower pot to the upper right, this one came out reasonably well, but I have two recommendations. Firstly, make sure you draw a full ellipse for every part of the form - even when we'd only ostensibly be able to see a partial curve for the base of the rim. Drawing through our forms like this helps us better grasp how they exist in 3D space, and how they relate to the other forms around them. Secondly, construct your cylindrical structures around a central minor axis line to help keep all those ellipses aligned to one another.

  • I didn't see this issue come up much, but since it did at least once, it's worth mentioning - on this page, the flower on the upper left. Here you cut each petal off where it was overlapped by a neighbour. Instead, you should be drawing each petal in its entirety (as you do properly for most of your other plants). Like with drawing the ellipses in their entirety, this is all about understanding how our forms sit in space and how they relate to one another. After all, a form doesn't stop to exist where we simply cannot see it.

Now your work is coming along decently, but since I get a pretty strong sense that you're focusing more on quantity over quality in a lot of areas, I'm going to assign a few additional pages. Here I want you to focus first and foremost on drawing big. Give each drawing as much room as it requires first and foremost, then assess whether another will fit alongside it. If not, that's fine. Giving your drawings more room will give your brain more space to think through spatial problems and will also make it easier for you to engage your whole arm while drawing.

Next Steps:

Please submit the following:

  • 1 page consisting half of leaves, half of branches

  • 3 pages of plant constructions, being sure to take each drawing as far as you reasonably can with ample observation of your reference material to help inform where you can push the construction further

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
8:30 PM, Wednesday March 10th 2021
6:31 PM, Thursday March 11th 2021

These are looking better! Nice work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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