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7:11 PM, Monday October 17th 2022

Leaves

This is definitely better, in terms of reducing the tendency to zigzag back and forth across the edges, and having your edge detail marks establish a stronger relationship with the previous phase of construction than before - this can still be improved, but it's headed in the right direction. That said, I am noticing two issues of note:

  • There are places where you're still capturing several bits of edge detail with a single stroke (far less than before, but I do see it on occasion. Every individual bit of edge detail must be its own separate mark. You generally still lean pretty heavily on having each phase of construction completely replace/redraw the one before it. That is incorrect, and tends to encourage more zigzagging.

  • Rather than having your edge detail marks flow smoothly and seamlessly back into the existing edge, you frequently have them continue on a little, overshoot past, or just stop short.

You can see both of these issues illustrated here with your strokes marked out in different colours - specifically in how your strokes do not end flowing into the existing edge, and the tendency to have a single stroke covering more than it should. Take more care in executing each individual stroke, and being more mindful of where they start and end.

Branches

You are still not following the instructions for this one. Go back over my past feedback and the instructions I linked you to for this and compare it to your approach. If anything is unclear, you can certainly ask.

The rest

Aside from the points I raised above, your plant constructions are fine - though I would encourage you to prioritize drawing bigger and giving each one as much room as it requires on the page, over packing them all in.

I raised this issue in my past feedback, not because you were cramming a bunch of drawings into a page (you were handling that part fine), but because of other related concerns. It seems you've 180'd in this regard and gone in opposite direction instead. I think you're definitely going to want to reflect upon how exactly you're approaching processing the feedback you receive. Both the lessons and the feedback in this course can be quite dense, requiring multiple readthroughs, and some students benefit from taking notes. Whatever it is you need to process the information being shared with you - it is your responsibility to identify those strategies that work for you, and put them into action.

As to your dragon fruit, you made the right call in approaching those structures as leaves. Ultimately this course arms us with a series of tools, but it's still up to us to decide which ones should be used in which situation. Sometimes you might find a very nail-like screw - in that case, reaching for a hammer may be more fitting than a screwdriver, despite what the object in question might be called on paper.

I'm going to leave you to continue working on your leaves as well as the scale of your drawings yourself, but I will need another page of branches before I can mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Please submit one more page of branches.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
9:59 PM, Wednesday October 19th 2022
edited at 10:02 PM, Oct 19th 2022

Thanks Comfy - The feedback is always appreciated,

I get the impression you feel as if I really missed the mark on my branches, which is somewhat of a surprise to me. While I'm aware my branches have obvious issues, your response does create some confusion on my end.

I definitely have some outstanding questions which pertain to both your feedback and approaching the course as a whole, I was wondering if you could provide some clarity/guidelines in this regard, and my latest branches attempt is a good example.

I definitely read through both your feedback and reread the exercise instructions for this latest attempt. Here was my approach from my perspective:

1) Read through your feedback and focus of the points raised. In this case, specifically the nature of my lines

2) Reread the exercise instructions to see if theres anything I overlooked

3) Attempt the exercise again (to the best of my current ability) while focusing on the following points

- be sure to draw through my ellipses twice

- be mindful of their degree as it relates to how they sit in 3d space

- take more time when creating my lines to focus on flowing them into one another as described in the lesson

4) Be disappointed in my results but submit anyway.

This last point is where the heart of my question is, should I have redone the exercise until I got a page I felt was worth submitting? Or should I submit anyway because it is "to the best of my current ability"

You mention this often, how students will do an assignment over and over until they get it perfect, how this is a waste of time, and how they should simply do the assignment to the best of their ability so they can move on. So what would have been the appropriate action for me in this case?

It is obvious to me that my branches (more than my other exercises) lack depth and sturdiness, something I usually do relatively well. However I can't seem to get them to feel solid.

Is there an issue with the degree of my ellipses? That wasn't in your feedback so I would think thats not the main issue

Do I just need to practice flowing lines into one another so I don't have any chicken scratchiness? I'm not sure given that you say that this issue is almost unavoidable and bound to happen to an extent.

I genuinely want to succeed in this course and want to follow its methodologies, but I sometimes struggle to know the right next step. I hope that is clear if nothing else. Any thoughts or guidance in regard to both my approach as a whole or the branches exercise specifically would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for the time you've invested, I'll be sending over more branches.

edited at 10:02 PM, Oct 19th 2022
10:43 PM, Wednesday October 19th 2022

Excuse the brevity of this response - I've still got a number of critiques to get through, so I have to keep this short.

I've pasted my original feedback below, and bolded the section you're not applying:

Continuing onto your branches, there may have been some similarly missed points here. As noted here in the instructions, the manner in which the edge segments ought to be drawn is quite specific, as it's a particular focus of this exercise. Each segment starts from one ellipse, continues past the second and stops halfway to the third, with the next segment starting at the second ellipse and repeating the pattern from there. This leads to a healthy overlap between them of about half the distance between ellipses, which helps to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from segment to segment.

Each segment starts at an ellipse. You are minimizing the overlap between them by starting many of your segments an arbitrary distance behind the end of the previous one, rather than all the way back to the previous ellipse.

That is the main issue, though you do tend to fall short of drawing through your ellipses two full times as well. I also have some concerns that you may not be applying the ghosting method consistently for all of your marks, leading to some issues with control and wobbling at times, but the only issue resulting in revisions is the main one I stated above.

This last point is where the heart of my question is, should I have redone the exercise until I got a page I felt was worth submitting?

No - and this situation highlights the reason why. Had you kept at it yourself, you would have focused on the issues you listed and not the one I had called out in my original feedback.

That said, it does seem like you may have been seriously overthinking this issue, in trying to discover the mystery of what was wrong. I didn't elaborate on the issue, because it was the same as what I'd addressed previously, so I instructed you to go back and read the original feedback, where the issue was specifically described and laid out.

The points you hypothesized might be the main concern, however, were not things I mentioned at all.

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