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7:14 PM, Thursday November 26th 2020

All in all your work here is quite lovely, but there are a few issues that I'd like to point out, where there is definitely room for improvement.

Starting with your arrows, you've got them flowing very confidently and smoothly through space. This carries over quite nicely into your leaves, where you've not only captured how they sit in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy, capturing a strong sense of motion.

I'm also very pleased to see that you played with complex edge detail as well as more complex leaf structures. There is just one issue I want to call out here. Right now it appears that, especially when adding more complex edge detail, you kind of looked at the various steps of construction as each being an opportunity to redraw the entirety of the leaf, often with heavier line weight. That's a common misconception, but when we build up a subsequent phase of construction, we don't redraw things that don't require it - we merely add the parts that change, as shown here on another student's work. You can also see an example of this here.

So, when adding more complex edges, like wavy or serrated patterns, be careful not to simply zigzag a continuous stroke back and forth. Instead, build each individual bump/spike/feature separately as shown here. This will also help avoid the mistake of falling into a sort of auto-pilot rhythm as you draw the line, which can result in it being perceived as more flat and two dimensional, rather than as an edge that moves through 3D space.

Continuing on, your branches certainly do appear to have been suffering from the whole dying-pen phenomenon, which does get in the way a little bit. From what I can see, the exercises has largely been done well, though I think I'm seeing a number of cases where you've not quite extended a given line segment fully halfway to the next ellipse. As shown here, extending fully halfway helps provide a more significant overlap between segments, allowing them to transition more smoothly and seamlessly from one to the next. So if you indeed weren't doing that each time, keep it in mind.

Also, when your pen starts to die, it's best to grab a new one so all your marks are rich and bold. It's an important part of why we use fineliners.

Continuing onto your plant constructions, your work here is by and large quite well done, and you're clearly doing a great job of building things up from simple to complex. There is just one minor point I want to draw your attention to:

When drawing your leaves, there are a few places where you allowed the relationship between your phases of construction to get kind of loose. You actually didn't do it that often, but it's still worth pointing out how here the flow lines weren't quite used as the end of the petal. Instead there were little arbitrary gaps between the end of the petal and the end of the flow line, and one case where the flow line shot further out. The key thing to remember is that each phase of construction asserts an answer to a question - in this case, how the petal moves through space, and how long it will be. It is critical that you abide by the answer given, rather than changing it, when moving onto the next phases of construction, even if it results in you straying from your reference image. We want to avoid any kinds of contradictions where we give one answer at one point, and then provide a different answer later on. Similarly, the initial ellipse in this drawing tells us how far out those petals are going to extend, so the flow lines themselves should stop right at its perimeter. These are not loose suggestions - they're solid assertions. This isn't a rule you need to follow in general, but it is one you need to follow when performing these constructional drawings in this course, as here they are exercises pursuing a specific goal.

So! Aside from that, your work is looking great, and you've approached both construction and texture very effectively. 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.
8:31 PM, Friday November 27th 2020

Thank you for the critique!

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Staedtler Pigment Liners

Staedtler Pigment Liners

These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).

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