Sorry about not rotating the photo's, whoops. Anyways, here they all are. I did all 8 demo's from DrawABox and 6 of my own plants. Hand issues as usual but I've definitely been improving over my hand/arm control.
Please let me know if you need anything else. Thank you!
Before I get into the critique, I will say that I understand you have a tremor, and that it is something you've made progress with - but that it'll be something you'll have to keep working at. As such, I'm not going to discuss any issues relating to hesitant strokes, as I don't expect there's much need to beat a dead horse. That said, I should mention that I think this is an area where you're showing a lot of improvement. There's definitely areas with shakiness, but there are quite a few that show a great deal of confidence, as we see here.
So! Starting with your arrows, while these are indeed quite shaky, I can see that the manner in which you're trying to draw your arrows has a lot of focus on the sense of fluidity with which they move through the world. Don't forget though - when the gaps between the zigzagging sections of the ribbon maintain the same spacing on the page, this means that the space is actually widening the further away we look, per the rules of perspective. That is to say, in order to represent the same distances in 3D space, that which is farther away should be represented with a smaller space on the page, as shown here.
Carrying onto your leaves, I'm a little puzzled as to what you're doing here - specifically when it comes to the more complex leaves. It seems like once you've got your 2nd step done (the basic footprint silhouette established), when you can either use that structure as the bounds to lay down a more complex internal structure consisting of different arms, or you can build edge detail onto that simple leaf structure... but you seem to do both. Basically, as shown here, I've highlighted two separate structures you could be trying to establish, at the same time. You seem to take this even further by trying to have what appears to be three distinct structures present simultaneously in this one.
I'm unsure of why you decided to go this route - perhaps you figured you'd get more practice by using the same structures multiple times, but this is only going to lead to confusion and a dilution of the exercise's concepts. As noted in Lesson 0, follow the instructions to the letter, and do not alter them.
Another point I wanted to mention is that the manner in which you're building up that edge detail can definitely be improved. I've made some notes here on the page, and numbered them 1-3:
Before I continue onto the next exercise, I want to take a moment to request that you avoid using flickr in the future, and that you ensure that the images you upload are as high resolution as you can manage. Flickr makes it rather difficult to grab the full resolution images so I can draw on top of them (it does have a download function but we specifically try to avoid downloading because it can be a security liability). While I can work with lower resolution images and screenshots of the page, it definitely makes things a lot more difficult, and can make it harder to even gauge your work and the specific choices you're making. I can glean a great deal from one's work in terms of how they were thinking through the challenges they were facing, but it becomes a lot harder when everything gets pixelated upon zooming in.
There's also the fact that flickr likes to sneak ads in between if I'm clicking through the album, which only makes it take longer to do these critiques. If you can use imgur, it's much better that you do, as I can scroll through the album easily, copy images directly, etc.
Moving onto your branches, you're drawing the edge segments correctly, ensuring that each one extends fully halfway to the next ellipse, and that the next segment starts back at the previous ellipse to allow for a health overlap between them. My only concern here is with your ellipses - you don't appear to be drawing through them two full times before lifting your pen. Also - in case you aren't already (hard to tell due to the tremor), be sure to use the ghosting method for your ellipses (as you would for all your marks), and engage your whole arm from the shoulder.
Looking at your plant constructions, I have a few notes that should help keep you on the right track here:
Be sure to maintain tight, specific relationships between the different phases of construction. So for your daisy demo, you've got an arbitrary gap between the end of your flow lines, and the end of the corresponding petal. This is in effect, a "loose" relationship, whereas having the petal end right at the flow line's tip would be a tight relationship. Avoid any gaps or looseness, so that the decisions being made earlier on in the constructional process can be carried forward and respected, rather than contradicted or adjusted. This will promote greater solidity in the result.
I also noticed that you weren't extending your edge segments on the daisy's stem as far as the branch technique requires, so keep an eye on that.
In regards to this one, be sure to draw every form in its entirety - there are situations where you have a lot of overlapping forms where you may be tempted to cut one form off where it is overlapped by another. This however causes us to think more in 2D space. Drawing each form in its entirety helps us to better understand how each form sits in 3D space, and how they relate to the other forms around them in three dimensions.
That about covers it for now. I'm going to assign some revisions below.
Next Steps:
Please submit 1 page of leaves, and 2 pages of plant constructions.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
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