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4:50 PM, Sunday May 30th 2021

Starting with your arrows, very nice work - you're drawing them confidently, and capturing a strong sense of fluidity in how they move through space. Just one small thing - when adding hatching line, be sure to stretch it across from edge to edge. Generally having hatching lines end at an arbitrary distance tends to look a bit clumsier.

Moving onto your leaves, that same confidence is carry over quite nicely to capture not only how they sit statically in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. You're also doing an excellent job of building your more complex edge detail on top of the existing structure, rather than attempting to redraw the leaf in its entirety and replace the existing structure. This, along with your fastidious attention to how you apply the same kinds of steps to capture more complex leaf structures, shows a good deal of respect and understanding of the constructional method's core principles.

Continuing onto your branches, there's not much to be said here - it looks like you've followed the instructions to the letter, extending each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, maintaining healthy overlaps and achieving smooth, and relatively seamless transitions from one segment to the next. Very nicely done, and the tendency to keep the branches consistent in their widths really helps maintain the illusion of solidity for each branch structure.

As I scroll through your plant constructions, there are very few things that actually stand out as issues. I can see a couple things, which I will call out, but at its core your submission is very well done. You're achieving solid, believably three dimensional constructions, and are demonstrating an excellent understanding of how these forms exist and relate to one another in three dimensions of space. You're capturing a strong illusion that we're not just looking at a series of flat drawings on a page, but rather that the page itself is a window looking out onto a three dimensional world.

Here are the couple of things I did want to call out:

  • One thing that I try to keep an eye on is whether or not students are giving their drawings enough room on the page. Drawing small is a common issue that comes from students who aren't confident in what they're doing - they'll cramp up and squeeze their drawings in a small space. In other circumstances, students may allot a certain amount of space per drawing on a page ahead of time. Whatever the cause, drawing small can impede one's ability to think through spatial problems, and can also make it much harder to engage one's whole arm while drawing. Fortunately this isn't a side-effect I noticed in your work - but I did notice that there were a number of pages - like this one - where there was indeed a lot of room left over on the page. Your drawing was fluid and three dimensional, so you obviously gave the flower as much room as it required - but since there was plenty of space left over, you should have followed up by using up that space with more constructions. I understand that one might feel a little nervous about adding another drawing to the same page - one might be worried that they'll "ruin" the page. That is, however, a mindset one must move beyond, accepting each drawing as an exercise and nothing more.

  • The other point I wanted to raise isn't really of much significance - but I did notice that in this flower's petals, you did jump into capturing more complex waviness to their silhouettes too early, effectively jumping from step 1 (flow line) to step 3 (edge detail) and neglecting to first establish a simple silhouette. Be sure to go through all the steps - constructional drawing (as I'm confident you do already understand), is about breaking complex problems into a series of smaller, simpler problems that can build upon one another. We want to avoid, as much as possible, having to solve a ton of things all at once - in this case, you were solving both how the petal mirrors the trajectory through space defined by the flow line, and how the edges of the petals vary in that wavy manner.

Anyway, all in all you're doing very, very well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the great work!

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:51 PM, Sunday May 30th 2021

Thank you very much for your critique Uncomfortable, I'll try my best to follow your advices! Have a great day

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Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens

Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens

Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.

Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.

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