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5:56 AM, Tuesday November 10th 2020

Starting with your arrows, it looks like you're largely doing a pretty good job of pinning down how these flow confidently and fluidly through space. Don't forget about how the spacing between the zigzagging sections ought to behave, getting narrower as we look farther back, though. You can see this demonstrated here.

Moving onto your leaves, I don't consider this page to meet the bare minimum of what I'd hope to see for this exercise. These look somewhat half-finished, without any real thought going into how these leaves are meant to actually flow through space. To make matters worse, I'm also not seeing the assigned page of branches included in your work. I will be expecting to see both of these completed before I can mark this lesson as complete. For the leaves, you can get an idea of what your completed page should look like from the thumbnail of the associated video, or from looking at other students' work.

Despite that, your actual plant constructions are in large part fairly well done, though not without some issues to point out:

  • The biggest issue I want to note is that it is incredibly important that you take care to give each drawing as much room as it requires. Forcing a drawing to occupy a small corner of a page can seriously impede our ability to think through spatial problems, and can also make it more difficult for us to engage our whole arm, and instead fall back to drawing from the elbow or wrist. That is precisely the reason that the drawings on this page came out looking vastly more clumsy than your others. While packing as many drawings into a page as you can is admirable, you should instead focus on giving one drawing as much room as it requires. Then if there is enough space to include another, do so, otherwise it is entirely okay to have a page with just one solid drawing.

  • Line weight and cast shadows on this page would have helped a great deal to have established a more solid structure. This one was definitely going in the right direction, but seems largely unfinished. Focusing on construction doesn't mean presenting a half-finished drawing - it just means not getting into texture. Construction can easily be pushed quite far to capture a great deal of complexity and solidity whilst continuing to focus on the major forms.

  • Also, regarding the same page as above, utilizing the "pole" approach can help make ball forms feel more three dimensional, as explained here.

  • This page has a couple good examples of where you leave the relationship between the different phases of construction quite loose and unspecific. Construction is all about very clear answers being given to questions. For example, when drawing the ellipse the flower, it serves a concrete purpose - to define the extent to which the petals will radiate. By deciding then to draw those petals to entirely arbitrary distances around that ellipse makes it largely irrelevant. Once the answer has been given, you need to adhere to it, otherwise you'll introduce contradictions to your construction that will undermine the viewer's suspension of disbelief. Similarly, the leaves on the bottom right drawing have a rather loose relationship with the simpler outline from the previous phase of construction. That, in combination with the numerous lines that just extend out to arbitrary distances make the leaves feel less solid and more like just a drawing on a flat page.

  • Also worth mentioning, always draw through your forms - if you've got a bunch of leaves layered on top of one another, draw each one in its entirety, rather than drawing them only where they're visible. Being hidden underneath another form does not cause it to cease to exist - by drawing them each entirely we get a full understanding of how they exist in space, and how they relate to one another within that space.

  • When getting into any kind of textural detail, don't forget that every textural mark is a cast shadow shape. Don't draw them as simple lines, as you've been doing for many of the "ridges" along your leaves and petals. Lines don't capture the kind of nuance, as you can see here. Always draw these things as shadow shapes, using this two step process for your textural marks to help avoid falling into the trap of just drawing stray lines without thinking.

  • Even when drawing particularly thin stems like on the far right side of this page, don't draw them as lines. A line will not capture the kind of solidity we're after - it has to have a silhouette, and needs to be a 2D shape. Thin branches/stems are particularly hard to draw, but it cannot be avoided. At best, you can make the drawing itself bigger, and with practice drawing narrower stems will become easier.

Now, before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to submit another page of leaves, and a page of branches.

Next Steps:

1 page of leaves, 1 page of branches.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
9:31 PM, Tuesday November 10th 2020

I've thought I had uploaded the page of branches. Sorry for the inconvenience, I should have double checked. I've reupload it with a new page of leaves.

3:17 AM, Thursday November 12th 2020

That is certainly an improvement. Your leaves are admittedly still a bit weak, but they have improved. The main thing I want you to keep an eye on is all the gaps you're leaving between your lines. They might seem like nothing, but in the context of these exercises having a visible gap where your edges touch at the tip of a leaf, or where construction lines really ought to meet to create a fully enclosed silhouette will undermine the solidity of your form. So be sure to put more time into the preparation and planning of your marks.

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

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:31 PM, Thursday November 12th 2020

Thank you for your critique!

And for the patience as well :)

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The Art of Brom

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