It took longer for me to finish this than I expected. The branch exercise was really hard, but I kept doing it in my warm-ups, and it got better than I first started. But still, I have to improve a lot. I hope I understood the core ideas presented in the lesson enough to continue.
Thank you for the critique and your time in advance.
For some of your plant constructions you made most of the lines very heavy and dark. This does help make the actual flower stand out from the scaffolding (sketch marks in construction) but it can go against the depth of the drawing overall. If you only darken a short part of some lines this makes it so you'll have to do less work and it would help with the depth of the drawing. What I mean by that is: in some lessons, we are recommended to darken lines regionally. If something is in front of something else and the lines intersect, then you can darken the line of the object in front of the other. However, you only need to darken it in the region where they intersect, instead of darkening the whole object. This means you won't have to darken every line you put down previously and it can help establish which lines are in front and which are in the back.
Thank you for your critique. This is definitely something I am struggling with. Next time I will be more careful not to do this mistake.
Hello!
I think it was impressive that for your first leaf exercise you drew them dynamic. A lot of other people (myself included) tend to draw them very stiff to start of.
You seem to struggle with line confidence is some of these, especially the branches can be a bit wobbly and inconsistent relative to the circles. So it's good that you're already aware and working on that in your warm ups. For future plant drawing and studies maybe lean towards some more branch heavy ones so you can put that into practice as well.
In some of your drawings I have a really hard time resting my eyes cause they don't know where they're supposed to go. Especially with the rose and the bell flower, the lines and shapes are fighting for attention and it's making it very cluttered and hard to look at. So I would maybe read over the potato plant again because there he mentions visual hierarchy and he refers back to how we use line weight in the 250box challange. I think the marker or brush ben you use might be a bit too much. Especially for the outline of the large parts of the piece instead of a more focused focal point.
But I think your plants look really good. Even though I critiqued some of your drawing for having busy line I think some are really good and impressive. The mushroom has fun variation in the cracks and texture. The water lily is also really really good with nice framing of the center with the shadows and more sparing but effective lineweight on the leaves.
Hope this was of help :) .
Next Steps:
As mentioned in the critique and by yourself I would say that doing the branches exrcise as a warm up is recommended. Drawing branch heavy plants can be really good too. Maybe also while doing those drawing try and keep focus in mind and not clutter too much
Thank you for your time and critique. It is full of helpful advice. I have a hard time understanding the line weight and the visual hierarchy. I find it really hard to understand the concepts so, I struggled a lot. Also, my line confidence got worse as I keep studying for some reason. That's why I was honestly surprised to get positive feedback on some of my plants. Thank you. At some point towards the middle of Lesson 3, I felt like I wasn't doing as instructed in the lesson materials, so I decided to start from lesson 1 and get an official critique. I hope I will figure out what and why I am doing wrong.
But that's great that you're aware of your weaknesses and use that to try and fight them.
:D
If you have time and are willing I'd be super happy if you'd be willing to critique my second or third lesson homework. If not that's totally fine.
Have a good one and good luck on your future assignments! :)
I will look at them as soon as possible. :)
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.
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