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12:44 AM, Saturday December 25th 2021
Starting with your arrows, these are looking great. You've drawn them both with a great sense of confidence to help convey the fluidity with which they move through space, as well as a good sense for foreshortening, compressing the space between the zigzagging sections to better convey the depth in the scene. That confidence and fluidity carries forward nicely into the leaves, where you're doing a good job of not only establishing how they each sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy.
On top of this, you're also handling the addition of edge detail with individual marks, one at a time - as well as tackling more complex leaf structures - very well. You clearly paid a lot of attention to the instructions.
Continuing onto your branches, your work here is similarly well done, although do be sure to extend each edge segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, as explained here. Currently you're falling a little short in that regard. This is important to achieve a smoother and more seamless transition from one to the next.
Moving onto your plant constructions, by and large your work continues to be solid, though there are a couple of small things I want to call out:
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Be careful when it comes to adding edge detail in cases like this. Here you're falling more into zigzagging your edge detail, which results in a weaker relationship between the phases of construction, and thus the solidity of the earlier, simpler phases, does not carry over as you increase complexity.
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As an extension of the previous point, avoid redrawing the entirety of a given leaf when adding edge detail, as well as increasing the thickness of your lines from one step to the next. Each step of construction merely builds off the last - it is not intended to outright replace it. Increasing the thickness of your lines can put you in more of a mindset of redrawing the entire thing. Line weight itself is something we add in its own pass towards the end of the process, and even there, we're focusing specifically on the localized areas where overlaps occur between forms, as shown here with these overlapping leaves.
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When constructing a cylindrical structure like a flower pot or vase, like in this drawing, be sure to do so around a central minor axis line. This will help you in aligning all the various ellipses you might use to establish its structure.
Aside from that, you're making solid progress, and are applying the instructions for this lesson well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.