Starting with your arrows, you've done a decent job of drawing these with an amount of confidence and fluidity. Just don't forget to compress the gaps between the zigzagging sections as shown here. I noticed that you tend to compress them horizontally, but the gaps in the depth dimension of the scene tend to remain roughly the same.
Continuing onto your leaves, you've captured the same sense of fluidity here, which has helped you to establish not only how the leaves sit in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. That said, this page definitely comes off feeling somewhat half-finished. Not only is there a lot of empty space throughout the page, but aside from a couple of cases where you experimented with more complex leaf structures, you appear not to have played around with any edge detail (like what is shown here). As far as the leaf construction steps shown here, you stopped at step 3.
It is extremely important that you take each exercise to its fullest extent, and that you make full use of the space available to you on the page.
Moving onto your branches, you're not doing too badly, but there are definitely a few things that are making this exercise a bit more difficult:
Your ellipses are a bit on the loose end. Make sure that you're applying the ghosting method and drawing them from your shoulder, and also try to limit yourself to drawing through them two full times - no more, no less. This will help you keep the benefits of drawing through your ellipses, without letting them get out of hand.
In a number of places (though not all), you aren't quite extending your segments fully half way to the next ellipse. This, in combination with making sure your next segment overlaps this last chunk of the previous one helps to achieve smoother, more seamless transitions from one segment to the next. You can see this demonstrated in these instructions. If your previous segment goes way off course, overlapping it will definitely make things harder immediately, but you'll learn a lot more from it, and you'll improve more quickly.
Now, let's look at your plant constructions. At its core you are largely following the correct procedures, but there are a number of issues that I'd like to call out that should keep you moving in the right direction.
Firstly, looking at some of your drawings like this one, I noticed that your drawing seems to be separated into two different sets of lines. You've got the lighter ones - like the flow lines of your leaves and branches - and the darker outlines of the various forms. The dark ones appear to be drawn visibly more carefully and hesitantly, which makes them appear more stiff. In general, try not to do this. Instead, draw all your lines with confidence, and don't worry about making some darker or lighter than others. All we're doing here is focusing on construction, which is an exercise to improve your spatial reasoning skills. Sometimes students fuss over this sort of thing when they're trying to make their drawings cleaner, which isn't our goal here. Towards the end of the drawing process, you may go back and add line weight to your drawing, but this does not mean going back over the entirety of your silhouettes. Line weight is reserved just for key, localized areas, to help clarify how one form might overlap another. That line weight then blends back into the original lines as shown here.
As I outlined here, when drawing the leaves of that potted plant, you skipped a step. After the flow line is established, we create simple outlines for the leaf. Then you build up the wavier edges on top of that, creating separate curves coming off the earlier edge and returning to it. Don't jump right into the higher level of complexity without first establishing enough scaffolding to support it.
Another minor point - when drawing those cylindrical flower pots, always construct them around a central minor axis line. Then be sure to draw each cross-section as an ellipse, confidently from your shoulder using the ghosting method to keep them evenly shaped. You approached that part decently, but the ellipses definitely looked somewhat stiff and uneven, rather than confident and smooth.
I also noticed that in a lot of drawings you stopped drawing through your ellipses altogether. Make sure that you draw through them two full times before lifting your pen, and that, again, you draw them confidently to ensure they come out evenly shaped.
Now, I've given you a number of points to address. Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see a few pages of revisions, to give you the opportunity to apply what I've listed above.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
1 page of leaves
4 pages of plant constructions
Thank you for taking the time to go through my work, I have done the revisions and also included my refrerence for the snake plant bc I am having trouble creating the leaf and then adding to it as you told me to
You're headed in the right direction, but this set isn't quite complete. Your page of leaves has loads of empty space where you could have added more leaves, so that leaves a lot to be desired. I understand that for your snake plant, you were confused, but in truth you were largely on the right track.
You laid down the basic structure and then built further complexity on top of it. What you didn't do, was simply finish the rest of the drawing. Include the flower pot (using a central minor axis line and ellipses to build out every aspect of that form, including an inner/outer ellipse to imply the thickness of the rim), and instead of having the base of the leaves suddenly stop with an opening, carry that whole leaf form through (closing to a point beneath the soil). Then have the ellipse representing the soil intersect with the leaves, cutting across them to show how those two forms relate to one another.
This one is coming along alright, although your flower pot is just a basic cylinder. Your reference image no doubt has more complexity to that, with the rim itself having some thickness to it. Throughout the set, there is a pretty big impression that you're just trying to get away with doing the bare minimum (whether it's intentional or not), and unfortunately that won't get you too far. Push each drawing as far as its construction will go - each phase builds upon the one before it.
Lastly, when it comes to texture, make a point of capturing every textural mark using this two step process. This will force you to draw a shadow shape rather than getting away with just making a simple stroke. As discussed back in lesson 2, we want to avoid working in line/outline. Furthermore, lines tend to have less dynamism than shadow shapes, as shown here.
Overall you're headed in the right direction, but sometimes students don't realize that their drawings aren't necessarily finished within the first 15 minutes. Each drawing takes as long as it needs, but it is up to you to push yourself harder, and ask more of yourself.
Additionally - even if you don't understand how to tackle something, an attempt should still be made, taking it to its logical conclusion, rather than stopping at the first sign of resistance. I'll be here to help once the attempt is complete, but it does have to be made in its entirety.
So! I'm going to assign the same revisions again.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
1 page of leaves
4 pages of plant constructions
Where the rest of my recommendations tend to be for specific products, this one is a little more general. It's about printer paper.
As discussed in Lesson 0, printer paper (A4 or 8.5"x11") is what we recommend. It's well suited to the kind of tools we're using, and the nature of the work we're doing (in terms of size). But a lot of students still feel driven to sketchbooks, either by a desire to feel more like an artist, or to be able to compile their work as they go through the course.
Neither is a good enough reason to use something that is going to more expensive, more complex in terms of finding the right kind for the tools we're using, more stress-inducing (in terms of not wanting to "ruin" a sketchbook - we make a lot of mistakes throughout the work in this course), and more likely to keep you from developing the habits we try to instill in our students (like rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach).
Whether you grab the ream of printer paper linked here, a different brand, or pick one up from a store near you - do yourself a favour and don't make things even more difficult for you. And if you want to compile your work, you can always keep it in a folder, and even have it bound into a book when you're done.
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