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9:43 PM, Monday October 24th 2022
Starting with your arrows - nice work. You're capturing a lot of confidence in the execution of this linework, which helps to sell the sense of fluidity with which they move through the world. This carries over very nicely into your leaves, where you're capturing not only how they sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. That said, I did notice that you notably neglected to experiment with any edge detail here, so a lot of the notes laid out on this page never really have an opportunity to be tested. In such cases I look further down into the plant constructions to see how the given student will have tackled the edge detail there, but unfortunately it seems to be quite limited there as well.
Continuing onto your branches, we run into some similar issues. The approach to be used when laying out your edges in this exercise is quite specific, as laid out here in these instructions. Each segment starts at one ellipse, continues past the second, and stops halfway to the third, with the next segment repeating this pattern from the second ellipse. It results in a healthy overlap between the segments, allowing for a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next. Currently you appear to minimize those overlaps, having your later segment start not at the previous ellipse, but right around where the previous segment ends.
Another more minor point I wanted to call out is that in this branch you mistakenly aligned your ellipses' major axes to that central minor axis line. Remember that the minor axis passes through the narrowest span of the ellipse, not the widest.
Now, despite these admittedly unfortunate missteps, the actual plant constructions are by and large very well done - at least, setting aside the issues I called out above. You're adhering well to the core principles of construction, of building things up in stages, your linework is mindful, intentional, and confident, and the manner in which you're building things up shows that you're thinking about these spatial problems correctly. It also helps that you demonstrate a good deal of patience and care with the majority of these drawings.
I am going to assign some revisions to address the points I'd raised previously, but we're going to keep them quite limited, as I do not think this is something that will take much time to address. Just be sure to go through all the instructions more closely and carefully in the future.
Next Steps:
Please submit 1 page, half of leaves, half of branches. Be sure to add edge detail on the leaves, and experiment with more complex leaf structures as well.
5:40 PM, Friday October 28th 2022
5:40 PM, Monday October 31st 2022
Overall you're doing much better, but the one thing I wanted to call out is that for this leaf down here, if you're going to lay down flow lines coming off the central one to establish individual "arms" to the leaf, then you should go through with using the approach shown here completely - meaning, define each arm as its own simple leaf shape, then merge them together. Approaching it as you did here largely resulted in you redrawing the entire leaf structure all at once for that last phase of construction, resulting in a weaker relationship between the phases of construction. It's not so much that this is a mistake, just that the complex leaf structure approach would help avoid certain pitfalls.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 4.
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Sakura Pigma Microns
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.