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3:31 PM, Monday February 6th 2023
Hello Goosum, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.
Arrows
Starting with your arrows your linework is executed with great confidence, this helps to communicate the fluidity that arrows have as they move across the page. Your added lineweight can use some more confidence, but your shading is well made and added to the correct side of the bends, which helps reinforce the illusion of depth you wish to achieve.
A big thing that you can improve in this exercise is to not be afraid of letting your edges overlap as this is unnatural and flattens your forms.
Another thing is to start going a step further and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, your arrows have little overlaps to them and are all very similar which suggests you're avoiding more challenging types of arrows. But don't be afraid of adding more bends and overlaps to these structures, as this is the thing that push you to engage your brain and think critically about how these objects work, not only how they look, which will help you develop your spatial reasoning skills even further.
Leaves
Moving on to your leaves they're looking a bit mixed and there are a couple of things which need to be addressed going forward.
The firts thing is the fact that your lines aren't as confident as they could be, they're shy and hesitant which makes your leaves feel stiff amd awkward, especially with your addition of contours/texture.
The second thing is something which isn't an outright mistake but does end up missing the point of the exercise and what it seeks to teach you. As explained in the intro to this exercise leaves are objects which are very easily influenced by outside forces such as the wind or gravity, as such when approaching this exercise, think of the forces that push through these leaves, and draw them with an awareness of how they flow through space, this includes drawing them bending and folding over themselves.
This is especially important because when tackling actual plant structures you'll find that it's very rare that all leaf structures in your reference will have no folds or bends, so it's very useful to start tackling these kinds of leaves as early as you can, otherwise they start to feel like flat stickers, glued to your page, instead of the tridimensional and free-flowing objects that they are.
You're not making a lot of use of edge detail, if we revisit the instructions for this exercise we can see that even though edge detail is referred to as detail it's actually a different step of construction. Considering this you should try your best to add it for your leaves, with only the last step, texture, being optional.
Another issue present in this page is the fact that you're skipping construction steps by not making use of the
complex leaf construction method and in your more complex leaf structures attempting to capture complex edge detail immediately, instead of starting with the basic footprint of the leaf and then building up complexity on top of the preexisting structure.
Branches
Your branches are coming along very decently as you're generally following the instructions for the exercise, it's really good to see that you're generally extending your lines, although your line confidence can definitely be improves as well as the size consistency of your branches.
There are some small visible tails in your compound strokes but overall you've done a pretty good job of superimposing them on top of one another.
For your ellipses it's also great to see that you're often drawing through them, but just as with your lines the confidence in your ellipses can still be improved as you have some slight wobbles and hesitation which shouldn't be there if you were drawing swiftly and from the shoulder.
The last issue that you can address which is currentlt heavily impacting the solidity of your branches is that your ellipses degrees barely change when they should due to how the ellipse degree shift works, as shown here. Remember that as a cylindrical form shifts towards or away from the viewer, the degree of the ellipses within that structure will also shift.
Plant Construction Section
Onto your plant constructions you're starting to understand the concepts this lesson seeks to teach and develop your sense of spatial reasoning, but there's a couple of points that I believe will help you get more of of these lessons if addressed.
The first one is that you're skipping some construction steps by not making use of the forking branches method in this construction and not drawing the extra stems with the correct branch construction method as there's no minor axis drawn, which makes it more difficult to keep your ellipses aligned, and all of these contribute to making your construction feel less tight and solid.
The same point about the minor axis applies to this this orchid, but going further you also skip construction steps here by not drawing your branches gradually with ellipses.
Make sure that you're always constructing the forms present in your work fully, and that you're always defining the relationships between all of the forms in your construction clearly, you're not supposed to capture how these objects look, but instead truly understand how they exist in a tridimensional space.
When drawing cylindrical objects make sure that all of their ellipses are being aligned to a minor axis, this includes nushrooms caps, and not just their bodies.
When making use of lineweight keep in mind that it should not be this thick, extra lineweight should only be applied to key areas, with a single confident stroke superimposed on top of another in order to differentiate between overlaps. Thick lineweight can feel cartoony and remind the viewer that they're indeed just looking at lines on a page as it becomes easier to identify different parts of a construction as drawings when the linework is inconsistent.
Another point that you can improve in your work is the fact that you're drawing way too small which doesn't leave you enough room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises.
So draw bigger, as big as it's necessary for you to be able to properly engage your brain and arm when drawing, and make sure to invest as much time as its necessary into that construction.
Final Thoughts
Your work is moving in the right direction but you're facing a couple of obstacles which are slightly hurting the quality of your work, in part because you're not always applying some of the instructions as closely as they should.
As such I'm going to be asking you for some revisions so you can have another chance to tackle these concepts before delving on more complex techniques.
Next Steps:
1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.
2 plant construction pages.
Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens
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.