1:58 PM, Saturday July 9th 2022
Hello Kabachuha, congrats on completing lesson 3, I'll critique your homework.
Arrows
Starting with your arrows , you've generally handled these pretty well, they're drawn with confidence and you're not afraid to let them ovelap.
Leaves
The confidence is still shown here, you let most of the leaves move and wrap around believably , you're also drawing every single piece of edge detail as its own separate stroke and a single trajectory, aside from a couple of cases in the taro leaf where the edge detail end up a little more jagged and wobbly.
You've skipped a stage when drawing the storax leaf (always start by making the most basic leaf shape you could possibly do), but you've rectified that with the fern leaf and stuck fairly well to the premise of drawing the leaf in separate stages, being careful to define their relationship, good job!
As far as texture is concerned, be careful not to Copy your reference, specifically when drawing the veins of the leaves; try instead to imply its presence by drawing the shadows they cast on the leaf itself , it helps to outline the shape of those shadows first and then fill them in ,no matter how thin they are.
Branches
Moving onto branches, aside from the first one,I see you're applying the segments as highlighted in the lesson notes, good work.
I noticed that your lines sway a little at at times, but what i'm most worried about is your ellipses, which often end up wobbly.
Be careful about the principles of markmaking of lesson 1, and remember to keep up with warmups, it will improve with time
Plant constructions
Starting off with the first plant ,the mushroom:I can't be sure unless I could see the reference, but I'll remind you of this lesson 1 paragraph.
In this case the relationship of the ellipses seems inversed, I say seems because if (in the reference)the cap were pointed away from the viewer or simply bent in a specific way, your approach would be entirely correct , but if it were facing towards the viewer it would look off; you can look at the mushroom demo from drawabox if you wish to expand on this topic , as its shown quite well there , notice as the ellipses get wider and wider as they approach the bottom of this mushroom in said demo.
Moving on,what I noticed is that the leaves had a prominent drop in quality, which is understandable due to the drawings being a good 2-3 weeks away from the exercise itself, but do be careful about this.
The hibiscus,lavander, potato plant and lilac are fine as far as the main leaf shape is concerned, they have a sense of flow and movement to them, the other plants' usually feel far more static, sometimes even flat.
What I see in all of them however, is that you're not adding any edge detail, at all.
While textures are optional, edge detail is not, as it's a key component in showing how the leaf sits in 3D space.
This isn't much of a problem , you've shown that you are capable of drawing the leaves well, and I'm sure you just need to give the drawings and the instructions a little more time in order to make full use of your abilities.
Keep in mind that you don't need to finish a page the same day you started it and you're encouraged to give as many sittings/days to a drawing as it needs; I'm aware it's difficult at first , and frankly I'm struggling with giving drawings more time myself, but it's good to keep in mind and take back control of our focus when it inevitably slips away from us.
I've also noticed you are not drawing the branches as instructed in some plants, the Spruce being the most obvious case where you draw the entire length of the branch in just a couple of strokes, I'd also reccomend using this method in order to draw forking branches, instead of just making an ellipse and extending another branch from the original one; if you struggle with this, try to draw a few more ellipses to delimitate your branch, if you use too few of them and too far apart from each other , it makes drawing the segments a lot more difficult.
However , you do a good job of observing your plants, you've drawn the rose using a pentagram as a guide , which shows a good deal of experimentation, and you're still adhering to drawing in steps , you've also drawn ellipses for all leaves to use as guides and drawing them in their entirety, which is great.
The last thing i want to mention is in regards to cast shadows, specifically the potato plant and lilac; it's easy to get the wrong idea when watching the demos , but you're not meant to fill the darkest and deepest areas of the plant in black , you should aim to use said shadows to define the relationship between the leaves and/or branches, which I can see a hint of you doing in your hibiscus demo.
Now, this is my second critique ever, my apologies if it sounded harsh at times, but I truly believe that you can knock this lesson out of the park with a few revisions, as most of the mistakes in your work are either because of a lack of time ,a misinterpretation of the instructions, or simple forgetfulness.
As such , I'll be assigning some revisions below.
Feel free to take as much time as you need on these, and if you have any questions feel free to ask them.
Next Steps:
-
1 Page of branches
-
1 Page of leaves
-
4 Pages of plant constructions, be sure to add edge detail to all of them, while drawing in steps.
Texture, including cast shadows, is optional, I'd recommended to just focus on construction.
Try not to work on more then one construction in one day, you're encouraged to spread a construction over multiple sittings/days as needed.