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8:41 PM, Thursday May 20th 2021

Starting with your arrows, your initial linework for these is good - but when you start applying line weight, things get rough. The thing to keep in mind here is that line weight is a specific tool, and serves a specific job. We use line weight to help clarify how specific forms overlap one another, and we limit it to those specific, localized areas. As with all of our linework, we want to avoid tracing hesitantly, and instead use the ghosting method to make the mark confidently. Confident strokes tend to taper towards the ends, which helps the stroke blend into the existing linework, and since it's localized, it'll be shorter and easier to execute.

Moving onto your leaves, you start out well, pushing with a similar sense of confidence to how you draw your arrows, and capturing the fluidity of the leaves as they move through space. Once you're done those first two steps however - drawing the flow line and establishing the initial simple silhouette of the leaf - you (to varying degrees) start leaning much more into a looser relationship between phases of construction, often zigzagging your edge detail rather than building it up with individual marks that adhere closely to the existing structure.

Think of the previous phases of construction like a scaffolding - you're not replacing them with the next step, you're simply building on top of them as shown here. Similarly, you also shouldn't be going out of your way to make those later phases noticeably darker. Line weight is something we'll add at the end, only where it's needed, and generally when you've got different forms that overlap.

Continuing onto your branches, your work here is generally pretty decent, with the only real issue being that the ellipses are pretty loose. Keep using the ghosting method to help improve your overall control, and be sure to execute those ellipses from your shoulder.

Finally, your plant constructions. I think it's pretty noticeable that over the course of your homework, you have a significant shift from being somewhat messier (with more zigzagging of edge detail, or generally not treating previous phases of construction with as much regard as you should) to being considerably more considerate of the underlying structure upon which you're building.

There is still a great deal of looseness here, and you need to slow down to really think through each and every mark you draw, taking greater care not to just put marks down without thinking, but as a whole I see a fair bit of improvement as you move through the set. As far as process goes, there isn't really anything that I haven't already called out. It all comes down to respecting the ghosting method and the general principles of markmaking that were laid down in previous lessons.

This is one of those situations where I could assign more revisions for you to demonstrate your capacity to do that more correctly, but I feel confident enough that you will be more mindful of how you approach drawing your lines. As such, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, and leave you to demonstrate your understanding of what I've said here as you move into the next one.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
9:54 PM, Monday May 24th 2021

Thank you for looking over my work! As I was reading this, I noticed that just about everything pointed was something that I noticed when I would evaluate my assignments once completed. I will take the appropriate steps moving forward to make sure I am implementing this advice into my work going forward.

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Color and Light by James Gurney

Color and Light by James Gurney

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