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6:26 PM, Sunday July 26th 2020

Starting with your arrows, they're flowing quite nicely and fluidly through space. Since a lot of the trajectories of these arrows are a bit more erratic (rather than simple repeating zigzags) it's hard to judge whether or not you grasp how the negative space should behave in regards to foreshortening - although there is that one rather small zigzagging arrow you drew where it seems no foreshortening was really applied at all. In general, try and make a point of exaggerating the size of the end closer to the viewer, and shrinking the end farther away, both in terms of the arrow itself and the gaps between its sections.

Continuing onto your leaves, you've done a good job of capturing the same sense of fluidity here, establishing not only how they sit in 3D space, but also how they move through that space from moment to moment. You're also making good use of the constructional process where you add more complex edge detail that adheres closely to the simpler edge from the previous phase of construction, rather than attempting to treat it more like a loose suggestion. Those strong ties from phase to phase are important, and you leverage them well. Just keep in mind that you should not be zigzagging back and forth with a single continuous stroke. As explained here, each bump should be drawn separately. This also helps you to adhere to this rule of markmaking.

Your work on the branches is coming along well. You're doing a good job of extending your segments fully halfway towards the next ellipse (many students seem to miss this for some reason, perhaps the instructions aren't clear enough). I do have a few suggestions however:

  • It's totally normal to have the visible tails you end up with here and there, but one thing you can do to help eliminate them is to purposely use the last chunk of the previous segment as a runway for the next stroke, overlapping it directly before shooting off towards your next target.

  • It's important that you keep in mind that the ellipses you draw should be aligning to the central line, using it for their minor axis. That means that it should cut each one into two equally symmetrical halves down their narrower dimension. The ellipses' degree also represents that cross-section's orientation in 3D space, with narrower degrees suggesting that the branch is flowing across our field of view at that point, and wider degrees suggesting that the branch is moving towards or away from the viewer. This can, and will naturally shift over the length of a given branch. I can see a lot of areas, in the bottom-most branch of this page especially where you didn't handle the ellipses' alignment correctly, and where you may not have been thinking about their degrees. The second page definitely shows improvement on this front, however.

Moving onto your plant constructions, your work here is largely quite well done. You're fastidious in drawing through your forms (not shying away from drawing each leaf in its entirety even when there are a lot of overlapping ones), and you capture a good sense of how the leaves and petals flow through space, adhering closely to the constructional steps from the exercise (although on this page I feel you may have not done as good a job of it, since those leaves tend to feel more flat - always remember the purpose of that initial flow line, don't get distracted from it).

One recommendation I have is that on this page you definitely ended up drawing things too small. It's important that you always take full advantage of the space available to you on the page, as this will help you think through spatial problems and engage your whole arm when drawing. Drawing smaller, purposely forcing yourself to work within a certain subsection of the page will actually make things more difficult. If, after drawing the first one, you have space enough for another, you can feel free to add a second drawing to a page. If you don't have room however, don't worry - it's okay to have pages that consist of just a single drawing.

The only other thing I really wanted to suggest is actually a fairly minor point. With these mushrooms, specifically the texture along the underside of their caps, you sought to convey that texture primarily through the use of line. Always, as a rule, draw texture using shapes. Sometimes the shadow you perceive may be very narrow, seeming to just be a line, but all the same, draw it with this sort of two-step process where you first draw the outline of the shadow shape, then fill it in. This will help you achieve a greater dynamism and a stronger focus on the idea that these are in fact shadow shapes, not just individual lines.

Aside from that, your work is looking good. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:07 PM, Wednesday August 19th 2020

Thank you! The tip to draw texture with shapes is an amazing insight into my drawings. For this drawing (https://imgur.com/9APtE1j) I completely agree that it looked flat. The frustrating part is that the plant doesn't have much to work with in my eye! (it just kinda hangs: https://leafandpaw.com/2018/02/19/how-to-propagate-monstera-deliciosa/) Trying to wrap my head around how to give it a 3d form - will redraw on my own. Thanks again!

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