Starting with your arrows, you're definitely drawing these with a great deal of confidence, which helps to capture how each one pushes through space. This carries over very well into your leaves, where you're not only capturing how each one sits statically in 3d space, but also how it moves through the space it occupies. I'm also very pleased to see that you've done a great job of building up edge detail one step at a time, with each 'bump' being added as a separate element, otherwise maintaining the structure from the previous stage.
Similarly, your branches are coming along quite well - you're extending each segment halfway to the next ellipse as noted in the instructions (this is actually something a lot of students miss), which is helping to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition between them. One quick point though - remember that based on where along the cylindrical structure we're looking, the ellipses are going to get wider and narrower. The reasoning for this is explained back in Lesson 1's ellipses video, but the simple rule of thumb is that as we move farther away along the form, the cross-section gets wider.
Continuing onto your plant constructions, by and large you've maintained the same trend. It's not so much that your work is amazing - though it is well done - but it's that you've really followed the instructions as closely as you reasonably can, and that is exactly what I want to see from students. I do however have a few little things to call out:
Two things about this potato plant demo drawing. Firstly, make sure that you're drawing each leaf in its entirety. In this course we try to draw all of our forms completely, even when they're hidden from view, so we can fully understand how they sit in space, and how they relate to the other forms around them.
Secondly, when you've got some forms casting shadows, we need to ensure that all (or at least the vast majority) of the forms in the scene cast shadows, os as to maintain a level of consistency. Right now since the other leaves aren't casting shadows, it looks like the filled areas of solid black in the upper middle of the drawing are just arbitrarily filled in - when they're meant to be shadows being cast in an area that is so densely covered that it fills up all that dirt underneath.
Also, keep in mind that the cast shadows do need to be consistent in terms of which direction they're cast in, as they're all coming from a single consistent light source. In this one you've definitely got quite a bit of inconsistency in your shadow placement.
With these you tend to leave a bit of a gap between the tip of your flow line, and the end of the corresponding leaf. We always want to maintain tight, specific relationships between the phases of construction, so avoid any sorts of arbitrary gaps. Where the flow line ends determines where the leaf itself will end - each step of construction asserts choices/decisions being made, and once they've been made, we have to stick with them, lest we add contradictions to our constructions which undermine the illusion of solidity.
Aside from that, very nice work! I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
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