10:07 PM, Sunday May 24th 2020
Alrighty, so I'm going go down the list of assigned exercises and critique them one at a time.
Starting with the 1 page of organic arrows, it appears that this page is missing from your submission. This is the same exercise that was at the beginning of Lesson 2, but it serves as a good way to transition into the leaves with a focus on flow.
To that point, you have indeed done a pretty good job of capturing a sense of fluidity to how your leaves flow through space. Your lines have a little bit of hesitation to them, but they still carry a sense of motion and movement. What I'd like you to continue working however is to ensure that your shapes - that is, the shapes of the leaves themselves - are more fully enclosed. Right now there are a lot of gaps, as shown here.
In general, it still comes down to mark making. One thing I may not have mentioned in past critiques is that if you're worried about overshooting/undershooting your lines, it can help to get used to lifting your pen off the page when you hit that end point, instead of trying to slow to a stop. Lifting your pen is an action that can be performed more reliably and responsively than slowing down, and it also avoids the inevitable hesitation that occurs when reducing speed.
Moving onto the branches exercise, I think you misunderstood a key component of this exercise, resulting in you doing it incorrectly. Basically, as I demonstrate here, you are to draw your first segment from the first ellipse, past the second, halfway to the third. You do this part correctly. Then you start your second segment from the second ellipse, past the third, and halfway to the fourth. You instead start your second segment where the previous one ended.
The overlap we get between the two segments when doing it as I described is important because it allows is to treat the last chunk of the previous segment as a runway, overlapping it directly before shooting off towards the next target.
In addition to this, you're also neglecting to draw through your ellipses, which you should be doing for each and every ellipse you draw for these lessons.
So the issues I've outlined above address a number of similar concerns in your plant constructions, but there are some other things I should point out. I believe the primary issues all come down to remembering things that have been pointed out or stressed in previous lessons. Drawing through ellipses is definitely one of them, but there are a few others.
Firstly, while this lesson focuses on plants, all the lessons are really just about constructional drawing. That means that if something is not specifically a plant, you should still be attempting to draw it as a series of forms to the best of your ability (if you choose to draw it - you could always choose to leave those forms out entirely). In this drawing, you drew the wooden pieces that hold up the flower pot as flat shapes purely from observation, instead of attempting to construct them as a combination of box forms as we've explored in previous lessons.
Secondly, again about the flower pots - it's important that you really look at what is present in the image. The pots themselves are not paper-thin. They have thickness to them, and some of them even have inner pots. We can achieve this by constructing more than just a basic cylinder, and instead inset ellipses within other ellipses to create the illusion of thickness.
Here's a quick breakdown of what I mean.
Skipping down to this drawing, I just wanted to mention that here you broke away from the simple leaf construction process outlined at the beginning of the lesson. I've demonstrated here how you should be applying the constructional approach to these kinds of leaves. Remember above all else that construction is all about building up from something simple, to something complex. The simpler structure from the previous phase serves as a scaffolding to support whatever we add in the next phase. If there is not enough structure to support what we want to draw, then we simply build up that structure, then tackle it in the next phase.
Also, notice how I put a little arrowhead on the end of my leaf's flow line. Sometimes we end up stiffening up a little when we're focusing on capturing a specific leaf from a reference image, and it can cause us to lose the sense of fluidity and movement. Adding a little arrowhead to the end of the flow line can help us to remember that this line's purpose is to capture a sense of movement.
One last thing - in the same drawing, you decided to fill in the soil portion of the construction with ink, making it fully black. As a rule, save your "filled" shapes for cast shadows only. Don't use it to fill in the surface of a form, just because it appears dark to you. Instead, treat the objects we're drawing as though they're all made up of the same flat white material.
I'm going to leave the critique at that for now, and I'll give you some room to apply what I've explained here. I've listed the revisions I'd like to see below:
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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1 page of the leaves exercises - the leaves you did last time are coming along well, but I think there will be some benefit to drawing some leaves with more edge detail and complexity to them, like the one I demonstrated in my critique.
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1 page of the branches exercises - as I pointed out, you'd handled the segment overlap incorrectly, so I'd like to see this again.
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2 pages of mushroom drawings - I noticed you didn't tackle any mushrooms, so it may serve as an interesting change of pace.
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1 page of flowers (something with petals)
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1 page of leafy plants.
For the flowers and leafy plants, you aren't required to draw the whole thing. If you'd like to focus on a specific section, you are welcome to do that, if it gives you more room on the page to work through the spatial problems involved.