12:46 AM, Tuesday May 3rd 2022
Nicely done! Jumping in with your arrows, you're doing a pretty good job of drawing these with a great deal of confidence, which helps to push the sense of fluidity with which they move through the space they occupy. This carries over fairly well into your leaves, where you're not only capturing how they sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. That said, I do have a few things to call out here:
-
You are still a little prone to zigzagging your edge detail back and forth across the previously existing edge, which results in a looser relationship between the phases of construction as explained here. Sometimes this occurs when you're being more limited in how you're building up edge detail (generally sticking to individual strokes, which are correct) - we see this in the central leaf where you generally did well, but did have a couple of zigzags across that edge. In other cases it occurs when you lean too hard into redrawing the entire leaf at every phase of construction, rather than allowing the earlier structure to stand for itself where it can - like in the upper right.
-
When it comes to texture, remember that the goal is not to simply decorate the drawing. On the larger monstera-type leaf towards the bottom left, you definitely went hard on form shading and generally trying to find reasons to add more ink to your leaf, which is not at all what we discuss in Lesson 2's texture section. The middle leaf is definitely much better in this regard, where you're focusing more on implying the presence of physical textural forms. Towards the upper middle, I can see you using those filled areas of solid black to fill in negative spaces, like holes and areas being cut in along the edges (or at least that's what it seems like - you could instead be trying to capture the local surface colour of the leaf, though I don't suspect that's the case). Regardless of which it is, in general try and reserve your filled areas of solid black only for cast shadows. Fortunately I think this is something you definitely improve upon throughout this lesson's homework.
Continuing onto the branches, this is looking pretty solid - just be sure to extend your edge segments fully halfway to the next ellipse. This is something you're not entirely consistent with, and as shown here it does help contribute to achieving a smoother, more seamless transition from one edge segment to the next.
And lastly, moving onto your plant constructions, your work is by and large very well done. I have just two points of advice to offer:
-
Avoid really heavy use of line weight. Don't see it as a way to commit to some lines over others (for example in this drawing your underlying construction is definitely more loose, before you really pin down your decisions. Rather, we shouldn't be thinking "on the page" - instead, every mark we put down should be equally confident and committed, with line weight only coming in later in a more limited fashion, being reserved for establishing how different forms overlap one another. As you can see here, it's more effective when we only use them in those localized areas where the overlaps occur.
-
And secondly, looking at the same drawing, keep in mind that the stages of construction must be tightly bound to one another, with clear, specific relationships. That means that when you use an ellipse to establish how far out a given flower's petals will extend, that's a decision you're making, and every subsequent flow line should extend to the perimeter of that ellipse, with the given petal then ending where the flow line does. This allows us to hold to our decisions, to avoid introducing contradictions in our construction, and to help transfer the solidity that comes from the simpler stages forward as we build up more complexity.
And that's about it! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.