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6:47 PM, Saturday July 18th 2020

Starting with your arrows, you're generally doing a pretty good job in capturing how these arrows move through space, although I am noticing some very slight hesitation in your linework that imbues it with the slightest degree of stiffness. It really is incredibly slight, but I do get the impression that you draw your marks just a little more slowly than you should - you maintain a fairly steady hand, but there's still these very very slight wobbles in the stroke that show signs of attempting to steer the marks with your eyes.

I really can't stress enough how slight this is - to the point that just thinking about drawing more confidently may do the trick.

Moving onto the leaves, I feel like that touch of stiffness does become a little more noticeable - again, it's still not to that significant of a degree, but it is important that when you draw the initial flow line for each leaf, you're not worrying about how you're going to draw the leaf around it. Instead, focus only on how this is a line that moves confidently through space, that captures just how this leaf is actually moving. Try to push the idea that your flow line represents the actual movement of wind - one thing that can help this idea of the line representing an actual force is by getting in the habit of adding a little arrow-head at its tip. This often helps me remember that I'm really capturing something more abstract and fluid - not something concrete.

Additionally, drawing the leaves to be a bit bigger, and giving your brain plenty of room to think through these spatial problems can also help. It both gives your brain the freedom to maneuver, while also engaging your whole arm while drawing.

Lastly, you've got some cases where you've delved into more complex structures and more complex edge details (especially the top left and the bottom right of the page), but in the top right and bottom left corners, you've got more complex constructions where you're not quite maintaining the sort of tight, well defined relationships where the complexity is built directly on top of the previous phase of construction. We always want to treat that earlier phase as a scaffolding, so our more complex elements are built right off those edges, always returning to them. No little gaps, no loose or arbitrary relationships. You can find another example of how to approach these complex constructions here.

Continuing onto your branches, the first thing that jumps out at me is that these are all very, very small. Like before, this is limiting your brain's ability to think through spatial problems, and is likely encouraging you to draw more from your elbow or your wrist at times. For now, we want to make sure that you're taking full advantage of the space on the page - having more room to draw lots of branches is not actually as useful as drawing a moderate number of branches with lots of room to work through their particular challenges. This, again, will also help you to draw from your shoulder, both in the ellipses and the individual strokes. It's not that we only draw from our shoulder when drawing big - it's that it will give you a greater opportunity to continue to build up that habit and comfort level, so that you'll eventually be able to apply it more easily to shorter lines.

Additionally, I'm noticing some areas where you don't extend your line segments fully halfway to the next ellipse. I got the impression of this when looking at most of your line segments, but because the distance from ellipse to ellipse is usually quite short, it seems more like you were achieving that requirement of the instructions without necessarily intending to. There are however several cases where you've only extended slightly past the previous ellipse.

The reason this is a problem is that it doesn't provide you with much overlap between that segment and the next - something that is shown in the instructions to be extremely important, specifically in getting those segments to flow more seamlessly together.

Moving onto your plant constructions, these are by and large pretty well done. Again, they are definitely smaller than they should be, but I'm seeing a lot of nicely flowing petals, solid branch structures, and general adherence to the constructional principles covered in the lesson. I do still see some areas of stiffness though, especially in this drawing, where I suspect you may have been too hesitant when adding line weight? I'm actually not sure whether it was an attempt to add line weight, or if you were adding really tight wavy edges to your petals in places. If that's the case, then remember you should not be zigzagging wavy edges, and instead build them up with individual marks rising off the original edge and returning to it.

You also show a stiffness on this page where it is more clearly due to line weight. Remember that even when adding line weight, you should still be applying the ghosting method. This is specifically so you don't focus too much on tracing over the line. Tracing is a process that focuses too much on how that mark exists in 2D space, not how it flows smoothly through 3D space, and therefore can seriously flatten out a drawing, and also rob it of life. The ghosting method may not yield perfect accuracy, especially not immediately, but that is fine. These drawings are all just exercises after all, and we need to be prioritizing what we learn from the doing of it, over what will make the end result look nice.

I've laid out a number of areas in which you can certainly stand to improve, but I think all in all your work has come along quite well, especially in the application of constructional concepts. I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
9:11 PM, Saturday July 18th 2020

Thank you! Great feedback that I will address with more practice! Agreed on all points.

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Ellipse Master Template

Ellipse Master Template

This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.

I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.

No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.

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