12:20 AM, Saturday October 30th 2021
Starting with your arrows, your initial linework is drawn with a lot of confidence and fluidity, which is helping you to better capture how each arrow moves through space. When it comes to line weight however, I think you're perhaps a little overbearing on how much you're applying, and it results in linework that is at times a little more hesitant, or a little more broken and scratchy, than we should be seeing here. There are a couple things to keep in mind in regards to this:
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First and foremost, you'll have more luck here when reserving line weight only for the areas where there are overlapping forms that need to be clarified. So for example, you can place your line weight at the zigzagging sections, and have it blend smoothly back into the existing strokes.
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Secondly, always employ the ghosting method when adding line weight (or executing any kind of smooth, fluid stroke), and be sure to engage your whole arm from the shoulder as well. This will help you achieve those confident strokes, as well as to have them blend a little more smoothly into the existing linework.
Moving onto your leaves exercise, these are indeed drawn confidently, but there are a lot of signs that show these have not individually been giving the time they each required to be executed to the best of your current ability. There are a few things that immediately jump out at me:
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You've definitely leaned hard on the quantity side of things. While filling up a page is great, it should not serve as a replacement for giving each individual leaf the time to be executed to the best of your current ability.
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The tendency to rush has led to a fair number of gaps in the silhouettes of the leaves you've been constructing, which in turn undermine their solidity and believability. When we see gaps like these and these - and even these where the silhouette was closed but the edges extended well beyond where they needed to and did not meet at a single point - we are more inclined to understand these as loose collections of lines on a flat page - not solid structures in a three dimensional space.
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Additionally, while there are a number of these where you explored more complex leaf structures (those with many smaller leaves inside of a larger structure), the vast majority of them basically stop after step 2 of the instructions and neglect to explore any more complex edge detail as explained in step 3. That step is of course not optional - only the last step where we add texture can be skipped if the student wishes.
Continuing onto your branches, the first page of these definitely follows a similar trend (where you visibly rush through them, and also have a tendency to forget to extend each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse as explained here in the instructions), your second page (which wasn't actually included in the assignment) is far better. Here you're definitely taking more time, and while I suspect you could still stand to slow down a little more, you're doing a much better job of constructing solid, cohesive tube structures. This is actually quite interesting, since it's a more complex version of the same exercise.
Perhaps you're prone to getting bored with simpler exercises, and as such, don't give them their due consideration. That simply means that you need to push yourself harder to pay appropriate attention to those simpler exercises, and not to overlook them as they are just as if not more important as those with greater complexity.
Continuing onto your plant constructions, as a whole I'd say that you do still demonstrate a tendency to be quick and perhaps a little wasteful with your markmaking (I'm pretty confident that you're not making consistent use of the ghosting method for each and every one of your marks), but you are still approaching these correctly for the most part. You just need to slow down, to give yourself a chance to execute each mark with the precision of which I know you are capable.
At their core, the steps you're employing as you build up these complex structures are correct. You just need to be more mindful of maintaining specific relationships between those constructional steps - for example, the ellipse used here is meant to define the boundary to which each of those petals reaches, and so each flow line should specifically end right at said ellipse's perimeter, not slightly beyond it.
Constructional drawing itself is a process that involves making decisions, or answering questions, then holding to those answers throughout the entire remaining process. When we put down an ellipse in this kind of manner, we're telling ourselves that this structure will feature petals that each right up to this point, and that the ellipse represents how they'll spread out from the center. If however we go on to then disregard it, or to treat it more as a loose suggestion, we end up providing new answers to this question, and in doing so, we cause contradictions to appear in our construction. Contradictions are what will undermine the viewer's suspension of disbelief, and will remind them that they're looking at a flat, two dimensional drawing - not a solid, three dimensional object.
So, I think the best course of action here is to give you some revisions in order to be able to address the issues I've called out here. We'll focus primarily on the leaves exercise, and then a few plant constructions to bring everything together, and to allow you to demonstrate your patience and fastidiousness with each and every step.
One last thing that is worth keeping in mind, is that some students have a tendency of feeling that the amount of time they can put into a specific drawing is determined by how much time they have. So for example, one day they might have 30 minutes, and thus might rush through a drawing to get it to a finished point before getting up. The next day they might have 2 hours, so they might pace themselves and take more care with each stroke.
This approach is of course incorrect - it is not the time that you have that day which determines how long the drawing will take. The complexity of the task before you is what determines how much time it demands - and so if you simply don't have as much time in a given day, you are always free to break a single drawing across multiple sittings and multiple days, as needed.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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1 page of leaves
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3 pages of plant constructions