11:39 PM, Friday March 4th 2022
Starting with your arrows, these are looking great - you've drawn them with a great deal of fluidity, with helps to sell the sense of motion with which they push through all three dimensions of space. This carries over quite nicely into your leaves as well, which capture not only how each one sits statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy.
I did have a few things to call out however:
-
When building up edge detail, be sure not to zigzag back and forth across the existing edge, as you did here. You can read more about this issue in these notes.
-
With this attempted complex leaf structure, you ended up skipping over the stage of defining the simple leaf shapes for each of the individual arms, which would then be merged together. Instead, you jumped from flow line straight to the overall profile of the leaf. You can read more about this here
-
It's best not to have your lines get thicker as you step through the phases of construction. Try to keep them to roughly the same thickness. You can always add line weight later, although this should be focused only on clarifying how different forms overlap one another. You mentioned you struggled with adding line weight to longer sections - normally this is not necessary. As shown here with some overlapping leaves, you can reserve the line weight for only the localized areas where the overlaps occur, which is generally much more manageable.
Continuing onto your branches, you're generally doing a good job here, but there are a couple things to keep in mind:
-
Try to avoid arbitrary widening/tapering of your branches - for the most part you don't run into this, but when it does occur, it can undermine the solidity of the overall structure.
-
Remember that the degree of those ellipses should be shifting wider as we move farther away from the viewer, as explained in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.
-
Keep in mind that the way in which the edge segments should be drawn is quite specific, as explained here. You're pretty close, but sometimes you start a little farther ahead with your next ellipse, or stop too soon with the previous one, which minimizes the overlap and in turn reduces the seamlessness of the transition from one to the next.
Moving onto your plant constructions, honestly you've done a great job throughout these. I only really have a couple minor concerns:
-
When constructing cylindrical structures like flower pots, be sure to build them around a central minor axis line, to help with aligning all the ellipses. Kudos to you by the way, for jumping right in with all the ellipses you'd need to establish the overall structure - many students cut corners by only drawing a basic cylinder.
-
Avoid drawing the earlier phases of construction more faintly, as you did here on the right. It makes is more susceptible to feeling like we need to redraw the entirety of it, whereas we should instead be letting those earlier marks stand for themselves where they can. Line weight itself serves its own specific purpose, as discussed earlier in this critique, and isn't something to be applied globally and generally to split your drawing into an sketch and a clean-up pass.
Aside from that, nice work! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.