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12:05 AM, Tuesday April 20th 2021

Starting with your arrows, you're doing a good job of drawing these with a good deal of confidence, establishing how they flow smoothly and fluidly through space. I'm also generally pleased with how you're adding line weight, as you're doing so confidently (prioritizing its flow over accuracy), although avoid letting it get especially thick as it does here. Keep line weight subtle, just a light touch, and a whisper to the viewer's subconscious to help them better understand how the forms in your drawing overlap.

Lastly - be sure to compress the gaps between the zigzagging sections as we look farther back in space, as shown here.

Moving onto your leaves, I'm quite happy with these! You've done a great job of capturing that same confidence and fluidity, capturing not only how the leaves sit in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. I'm also pretty pleased with how you've approached both more complex edge detail (building the detail directly onto the structure from the previous step) and how you're approaching the more complex leaf structures.

Continuing onto the branches, here you are indeed following the steps correctly (extending your segments fully halfway to the next ellipse), but honestly I feel the linework here is kind of rushed, and as a result you're ending up with segments that seem to "flick" off into a different direction just as they end. Try making a point to lift your pen off the page as you end the stroke, as this may help you keep from going off your intended path. And of course, in general, just invest more time into the use of the ghosting method.

As a whole your plant constructions are coming along well, but there are a few issues I want to call out which need to be addressed:

  • As mentioned previously, avoid going too heavy on your line weight, as you did here with the bellwart. Line weight really should be left very light and subtle, and getting too heavy can risk flattening out your drawing into a sort of graphic shape.

  • With this drawing, there are a few things that I feel were just done.. kind of poorly. It seems like you were drawing more on instinct, not necessarily thinking about how you were plotting out the flow lines of your petal forms, or how you were shaping the outer edges of each petal structure. Given that these were drawn pretty sloppily, you went back over them with a darker line, effectively redefining them right on top. As a rule, throughout this entire course, don't approach your drawings in this manner. Firstly, take the time to plan out your marks intentionally, and once they're on the page, do not simply choose to ignore and redraw them. You've made your decision, and as per the principles of constructional drawing, you must build upon it. Line weight, as mentioned previously, is just about helping the viewer understand how forms overlap one another. It should be limited to localized areas, addressing specific overlaps, and should noot be used to simply reinforce the entire silhouette of a form, and definitely shouldn't be used to redefine that silhouette either.

  • For the zebra succulent, I noticed a couple things. Firstly, you've got shadows being cast both to the left and to the right - stick to a single consistent light source. Secondly, the hatching lines on the flower pot would be better off drawn vertically, as explained here.

Overall I am very confident that you are fully capable of executing these drawings better, but you didn't necessarily invest as much time as you really could have in order to do so. As such, I'm going to assign a few additional pages below.

Next Steps:

Please submit the following:

  • 1 page of branches

  • 3 pages of plant constructions

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
4:18 AM, Wednesday April 21st 2021

Thank you for the feedback! I tried to keep in mind all the points that were made when I did the exercises. I tried redoing the mushroom one, but I'm not sure that there's much improvement

https://imgur.com/gallery/zBnDimq

4:52 PM, Thursday April 22nd 2021

These are looking much better! You've definitely put much more effort into capturing the structure of each plant in a step by step manner, without skipping important parts.

In particular, I do feel that the mushroom was much better this time around, although one thing you didn't quite capture was the thickness of the star shapes. It seems that you did draw the side planes of those sections, but by filling them in with black, you ended up making that part of the image visually confusing. As a rule, try to reserve the areas that are filled with black for cast shadows only. Do not attempt to capture any kind of form shading (making one set of faces darker than another based on their orientation relative to a light source), as this will make things quite confusing for the viewer, given our limited access to pure black and pure white.

Also, if you do decide to start out with that larger outer ellipse, do your best to stick to it. You seemed to be treating it more like a loose suggestion rather than a concrete part of the structure, and that does somewhat undermine the solidity of the result. Always make sure that you yourself know what you want a particular mark to represent, structurally, and then stick to it all the way through. Make sure the relationships between the various elements of your drawing are very clear and consistent as well.

The other thing I wanted to mention is related to your flower pots. It looks like you drew the base ellipses with a slightly smaller (or roughly equal) degree to the end closer to the viewer. This is incorrect - as we move farther away from the viewer, the degree should get wider, for the reasons explained here in the new ellipses video for lesson 1.

Also, don't forget to define the thickness of that flower pot's opening with a smaller ellipse set into the larger one. Right now you're giving the impression that the flower pot is paper-thin.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.

Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.

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