I really enjoyed this lesson! I had to resist the urge to keep working on it until I had only pretty drawings to submit--8 pages of plants feels like a walk in the park after the box challenge.
BUT, I am going to be drawing leaves for my warmups until I can properly draw them facing/folding away from the viewer. Enjoy my many attempts here!
Starting with your arrows, these are quite well done - you're drawing them with a great deal of confidence, which helps to drive the linework to capture a strong sense of fluidity. This carries over quite well into your leaves as well, where you've captured not only how they sit statically in the 3D world, but also how they move through the space they occupy.
You've also done a great job in applying the additional edge detail. The only one that stood out as potentially a bit off was this one. It's not necessarily wrong, I just noticed that the way you added those marks resulted in a very sudden change in the silhouette's edge flow. If this was intentional, and the leaf actually has a sudden change like that (which it very well might) then it's totally fine. Alternatively if it doesn't, then you might have the additions flow out of the previous edge more smoothly, as I've marked in, to avoid the sudden change. Again - the way you did it may well be fine, as long as it was intentional.
Continuing onto the branches, these are largely very well done. You're doing a great job of overlapping the segments, working towards smooth, seamless transitions. There were a few places where you didn't quite extend your edge segments fully halfway to the next ellipse, so do keep an eye on that. Also, keep pushing yourself to draw through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, as with all the ellipses you freehand throughout this course.
Moving onto the plant constructions, as a whole you continue to do well, although there are a few points I want to call out to keep you moving in the right direction:
For the flower on the left side of this page, remember that construction is itself a rather strict process, with specific relationships maintained between the various steps. That ellipse you started with serves a purpose - to define how far out the petals are going to extend. So once you draw it, you've made that decision, and need to stick to it, being sure to draw all of your flow lines so they end at that ellipse's perimeter, and then in turn, drawing each petal so it stops at the end of its given flow line. Don't change those decisions later on, as this can add contradictions that will undermine the viewer's suspension of disbelief.
Remember that construction is all about simple to complex - so for this petal on this flower, you technically skipped a step. Not a hugely important step in the grand scheme of things, but since these drawings are all just exercises in spatial reasoning, it is important to always work in this manner throughout the course and avoid skipping things.
Aside from that, your work is coming along well, and the fluidity and confidence of those early exercises are helping you to achieve lively, believable results in the more complex constructions. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
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.
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