4:44 AM, Friday May 7th 2021
Starting with your arrows, these are pretty well done. They're clearly drawn with confidence, so they push through space fluidly and with a sense of motion. There is something that immediately catches my eye here however, and it's kind of difficult to put my finger on. I think you may be pressing too hard with your pen, but I can't be sure.
The weird thing is that usually pressing too hard goes hand in hand with a lack of confidence and flow, but here you definitely have that down well. So I'll have to leave this up to your own self-diagnosis. If you feel you're pressing particularly hard on the pen, then try to ease up on it. Same thing if you're gripping the pen too tightly. If you're not doing either of these things, then I suppose it's just something we'll have to keep an eye on.
Moving onto your leaves, these are not really finished. You've drawn them with the same sense of confidence and fluidity, so you've done a good job of capturing not only how they sit in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy - but as far as the instructions go it seems you stopped at step 2 and did not engage in the addition of any more complex edge detail. You've also got some pretty generous gaps on the page where you could have drawn more leaves of the same size, suggesting that you're deciding when the page is "finished" somewhat arbitrarily, and robbing yourself of ample opportunity to practice the exercise further.
When you do this exercise in the future, after you complete this stage of establishing the basic leaf construction, be sure to reach for some reference to help you explore different kinds of edge detail - waviness, jagged/serrated edges, etc.
Continuing onto your branches, I'm noticing that your ellipses appear to vary in quality. Those on the top-left branch are really tight and confident, whereas some others come out more stiff and uneven. For the smaller ones, it's likely that you're slipping back to drawing them from your wrist rather than executing them from your shoulder. Remember that all such marks which rely on smooth, consistent flow and confident execution should be drawn from your shoulder using the ghosting method.
Another point to keep in mind is that the degree of your ellipses should be shifting as you slide along the length of the form, as you would with any cylinder. This is explained in the more recently updated video for the lesson 1 ellipses section.
As far as the main focus of this exercise - that is, having your edge segments flow smoothly and seamlessly from one to the next, there are two things that help with this, and you definitely need to be trying to do it more consciously. Firstly, extend each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, and start the next one at the previous ellipse. Secondly, use this remaining "chunk" of the previous segment as a runway, overlapping it directly before continuing onto your next target as shown here. You've definitely got a number of cases where edges fall way off course for whatever reason. While ghosting will continue to help with this, and generally preparing more, forcing yourself to then incorporate whatever mistake occurred into the trajectory of your next mark will force you to learn from them more directly.
In a lot of ways, your plant constructions are coming along quite well. There are however some key issues I want to point out:
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On your daisy construction, there are a few issues. Firstly, you opted to start with that ellipse, but then decided to largely ignore its presence. Constructional drawing is all about making decisions with every step of the process, and then adhering to them. Meaning, if you decide to use this tool which defines the perimeter to which each of your petals will extend, you must then use it by drawing your flow lines to that ellipse's edge, and then drawing each petal so that its extends only as far as its flow line. The second issue is more straightforward - you should be drawing through that ellipse two full times before lifting your pen, as you would any other in this course.
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On this hibiscus' petals you attempted to capture the subtle ridges in the petals (basically their texture) using lines. You should be applying the principles from Lesson 2's texture section, employing implicit drawing techniques like cast shadow shapes to define those textures, not arbitrary lines. In general, do not draw texture using line. Furthermore, with any lines you do draw, employ the ghosting method to plot them out. It seems like there are definitely places where you allow yourself to get sloppy, just putting certain marks down haphazardly instead of giving each of them the time and patience they require to be drawn at your best.
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A couple things about the flower pot on this page - be sure to construct any cylindrical structure around a central minor axis line to help align its ellipses, and be sure to use as many ellipses as you require to construct all of that form's elements. For example, the mouth of a flower pot itself has a rim with thickness to it - drawing another ellipse inset within the opening can help you achieve it. Lastly, don't forget your perspective here - that base ellipse should be smaller and wider than the top, which is closer to the viewer.
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On the same page as the previous point, you've got a leaf there that has some particularly wavy edges. That's the sort of thing you should be building up to, rather than jumping into it immediately, as shown here (i also snuck in a quick flower pot construction there as well). This is what the leaves exercise was supposed to explore - your flow line establishes how the leaf moves through space, then you expand that into a basic leaf shape that follows the flow line as it moves through space. With that in place, you can then build upon it to achieve any other variation you need. Working this way means you don't need to worry about solving multiple problems at once - while adding the waviness, you've already got how the leaf flows through space on its own solved, and can follow what has already been established.
As a whole, while you're moving in the right direction, there's enough that you need to work on that I will be assigning revisions. You'll find them below.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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1 page, half of leaves, half of branches
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3 pages of plant constructions