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9:07 PM, Friday June 5th 2020

This is definitely moving in the right direction, and I'm pleased with your results.

Your table of ellipses is looking good, and you visibly do better with larger ellipses, where you're probably more inclined to engage y our whole arm. The smaller ones tend to be a little more erratic, which suggests greater use of your wrist/elbow. To that point, when actually drawing objects, you'll benefit more from drawing them larger on the page, just so you can force yourself to engage your whole arm when drawing.

Your ellipses in planes do tend to get a little more stiff and erratic, which suggests to me that you are still somewhat influenced by the specific situation in which you're being asked to draw an ellipse. That's entirely psychological - it's not that you can't draw the ellipses reasonably well, it's that when you're forced to deal with additional restrictions and criteria you need to meet, it becomes overwhelming. The ghosting method really is key here, so keep working on using it to split the process of mark making into its individual phases.

Your ellipses do need to continue to be tightened up, so make sure you continue to make them a significant area of focus in your warmups. All in all, I think it's a clear step forwards compared to your previous results.

With your branches, again - you're forgetting to extend those segments fully halfway towards the next ellipse. Half way. You need to work to remind yourself of that whenever employing the technique. I'm not sure if I've given you these notes (they're the same instructions as in the exercise, just a more recent demonstration). Read them carefully, and save them somewhere so you can look at them again when you need to use this technique.

Lastly, your mushrooms are generally being constructed quite well. You're doing a good job of adhering to simple forms. The use of the branch technique is still not extending the segments far enough, but all things considered they're ultimately looking pretty good.

As I mentioned before, these are your last revisions for this lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:57 AM, Saturday June 6th 2020

I just have to say I am extending the segments in the branches but looking them over again I see they don't extend fully halfway to the next ellipse.

4:57 PM, Saturday June 6th 2020

Yeah, extending them fully halfway to the next ellipse is an important part of the technique.

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Sakura Pigma Microns

Sakura Pigma Microns

A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.

In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.

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