12:04 AM, Thursday October 6th 2022
Starting with your arrows, great work. Your linework is confident, and through that you convey a strong sense of the fluidity with which each one moves through the world. This carries over nicely into the base structures of your leaves as well, where you're capturing not only how they sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy.
When it comes to adding edge detail however, unfortunately there are some notes you may have missed. Right now you're adding the edge detail more loosely, resulting in more zigzagging back and forth (which as noted here should be avoided). This results in a weaker relationship between the phases of construction.
Remember - what we're doing here is not putting down a rough sketch to use as a guide. We are effectively introducing a structure to the world, as though it were a simple leaf shape cut out of a piece of paper, and as we add edge detail to it or build up its structure, we are actively making physical changes to that existing form. If we want to add spikes to its edge, we're physically adding more pieces of paper to it. If we want to create a wobbly edge, we are physically drooping and lifting sections of its perimeter in 3D space. And if we want to cut into its silhouette, then the lines we're drawing represent the paths a pair of scissors would follow to cut it out, as shown here.
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.
In your work, you appear to follow this rather inconsistently - sometimes not extending fully halfway to the next ellipse, other times not starting back at the previous ellipse. Regardless, there's a lot of minimizing of those important overlaps. Additionally, you should be more mindful of drawing through each and every ellipse two full times before lifting your pen.
Continuing onto your plant constructions, overall you're doing fine, with the big concern here really being that a lot of the smaller leaves you end up drawing have some rather hesitant linework that sometimes wobbles or otherwise undermines some of the structures' solidity. My concern here however isn't actually that your linework is hesitant in these circumstances - that's pretty normal at this stage. Rather, it's about the situations you put yourself in, which result in this (though that is also not something I'm blaming you for).
There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. In drawing smaller and artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing.
Normally I bring this up in the context of students cramming a lot of drawings into a single page, causing each one to be smaller and more cramped. In this case, the best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.
In your case however, it's an issue that's even easier to accidentally fall into. Right now you appear to be drawing as much of your chosen reference image as you can. Many of these are quite large with a lot of different elements at play (many of them repeating throughout the structure), and so each individual leaf ends up quite tiny on the page. Similarly to those students trying to pack lots of different drawings into their pages, this comes from a desire to push your limits, so it's certainly laudable - but a bit misguided.
Instead, it's perfectly okay to curate what it is you pick out of a reference image, for the sake of ensuring that what you do study from it is given ample room. So, in cases where you've got a lot of different elements, you can certainly choose to focus in on a particular branch, or a couple connected sections. Ultimately you decide what you want to study, not the reference, so feel free to zero in on smaller areas and blow them up big.
Now, we are going to need to revisit those leaves and branches exercises, and I would like to see how that impacts your plant constructions - so I've got some revisions assigned for you below.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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1 page of leaves
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1 page of branches
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2 pages of plant constructions