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6:34 AM, Tuesday January 19th 2021

Starting with your arrows, you've done an excellent job of drawing these with considerable confidence and an excellent sense of fluidity, and also applied line weight quite well (with a nice taper on the ends of those strokes to help blend them into the underlying marks). Do remember however - you'll want to have the gaps between the zigzagging sections compress as we look farther back in space as shown here.

Continuing onto your leaves, you do apply a similar level of fluidity to the leaves, and do a pretty good job of capturing how they move through space. When it comes to adding edge detail, it's clear that you're adhering closely to the structure of the simpler edge, though I strongly recommend that you avoid redrawing the edge in full with a single continuous line. Instead of giving the impression that we're replacing one phase of construction with the more complex results of the next, it's best to focus just on adding the little bumps as individual strokes rising off the previous edge and returning to it, effectively only adding the parts that change.

Moving onto your branches, you're moving in the right direction, but be sure to more consistently extend your segments fully halfway to the next ellipse. A shown in the instructions, this helps us transition more smoothly and seamlessly from one segment to the next. Additionally, making a point of overlapping the last leg of the previous segment with the next one (instead of drawing the next one where the previous one ought to have been, in the case of little mistakes), helps us learn from those mistakes more directly and ultimately improve more quickly.

Moving onto your plant constructions, the first thing I really want to stress is that when you've got a bunch of forms that overlap one another, it is still important that we draw each and every form in its entirety. This helps us to better understand how each form sits in space, and in turn how they all relate to one another within that space. After all, a form does not cease to exist when we are no longer able to see it.

Furthermore, make sure that when you do draw through your forms (which you certainly do in some drawings, and not so much in others), that you do so with a confident, consistent stroke. In this drawing your underlying construction appeared to be drawn more faintly and hesitantly, with a lot of broken lines. It's very clear that you went out of your way to approach this drawing "cleanly", tracing back over it afterwards with heavier strokes to separate it from the construction. This approach, as discussed back in lesson 2, is not something you should be using in this course. Each drawing is not done in pursuit of a pretty end result. They are each of them exercises focused on developing your spatial reasoning skills, first and foremost.

Tracing back over linework tends to focus too much on how it sits on the flat page, rather than how those lines represent edges moving through 3D space, It also encourages more hesitation in one's execution. Of course, every mark we draw here should be done so using the ghosting method to achieve smooth, confident marks.

The last thing about this particular drawing is that while you definitely exhibited awareness of the textural techniques discussed in lesson 2, you still kind of tried to side-step them by first laying out the outlines of all the little pebbles/bits of dirt within the pot. Lesson 2's principles (which should of course be applied throughout the course) are all about focusing in on individual forms without putting them down on the page and functionally locking yourself into a particular textural density. Instead we have to think about how those textural forms exist along our object's surface, and how they might cast shadows on their surroundings to imply their presence.

Moving forward, your approach to constructing the flower pot in this drawing was definitely much more successful than the previous drawing's (in that you drew complete ellipses and a complete form, rather than leaving the bottom open-ended), though your ellipses were definitely pretty rough. This is actually understandable given that larger ellipses can be very difficult. In the future, be sure to draw all your ellipses from your shoulder, using the ghosting method to improve the overall quality, though this sort of thing will definitely require practice regardless. Additionally, be sure to construct any cylindrical objects with multiple such ellipses around a central minor axis line to help keep those ellipses aligned to one another.

So! I've pointed out a number of things I want you to work on, but all in all you're still headed in the right direction. Above all else, just be sure to hold to the principles covered in previous lessons about executing all your marks confidently, avoiding the underdrawing/clean-up pass approach, and focusing on each drawing as an exercise.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:40 AM, Friday January 22nd 2021

Thank you so much!!! I will work to improve everything you mentioned.

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The Art of Blizzard Entertainment

The Art of Blizzard Entertainment

While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.

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