Starting with your arrows, these are coming along quite well. You're doing a great job of executing their linework with a fair bit of confidence, which in turn helps you to achieve a stronger sense of fluidity in how they move through the 3D world. This carries over really nicely into your leaves, where you're capturing not only how they sit statically as 3D objects in the world, but also how they actually move organically through the space they occupy.
Your addition of edge detail is coming along decently, though I've noticed you employing pretty much the same singular kind of "bump" many, many times over. When doing this exercise, definitely reach for more varied reference when looking for edge detail to add, rather than simply playing with the exact same kind each time. The bumps you've got here are definitely good, but they're a very specific kind of sudden protrusion - like a thorn. There are definitely many other kinds that you might want to play with.
Continuing onto your branches, you're certainly making progress here, but there are a couple things I want to draw to your attention:
You appear not to be following the instructions in regards to how the segments should be layered on top of one another, at least not as closely as you could. As shown here, each segment should start at one ellipse, continue past the second, and stop halfway to the third, with the next segment starting at the second ellipse and repeating the pattern. This allows for a healthy overlap (of about half the distance between ellipses) which will in turn help achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from segment to segment.
The degree of your ellipses there seems largely to be very consistent, or a little arbitrary. Remember that as discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, as we slide along the length of a cylindrical structure away from the viewer, the ellipses that make up its cross-sections will gradually get wider.
Moving onto your plant constructions, I'm definitely seeing that your sense of 3D space is developing well, and that you're leveraging a lot of the techniques from the lesson effectively. I am however seeing a couple of issues and other things that I do want to draw your attention to:
For this hibiscus drawing, if we compare the leaves in your reference to the leaves in your drawing, we can pretty quickly see a stark difference. It's fairly clear that you rushed through that at the very least - not in terms of making your marks carefully and with precision, but in terms of actually looking at your reference. Observation is by far the most important step involved in drawing - we do it not only towards the beginning to figure out our game plan, but in between every step, and every mark made, to ensure that we're always drawing directly from the reference and not from our memories. You can read more about the importance of observing frequently back in Lesson 2.
In relation to the previous point, I wanted to call attention to your potato plant drawing. At first glance, it looks like it was rushed as well, like you jumped right into drawing each and every leaf. Upon closer inspection however, that's not the case at all. In fact, I can see a lot of very particular choices you made to actively try to match the reference. Sure, a lot of mistakes were made in terms of accuracy, and in terms of judging the space as a whole - honestly, this is a very challenging arrangement of leaves, with their density and quantity, so I certainly don't be grudge you that. Mistakes happen, but what's important here is that you approached it with far more care and attention than the edge detail on the hibiscus' leaves. That's what ultimately matters insofar as the work you do for this course.
This one's no more a criticism than the last point, just another observation. With your first drawing you definitely had a tough time figuring out how to exactly decide on which parts of your reference image to draw. As a result, it was pretty chaotic and malformed, and you even tried to draw some of the grass (which if done in its entirety would have taken you a damn lot of time). Very quickly after that however, you seemed to get much better at looking at the reference and picking out with a greater sense of intent, what was important to you. That's definitely a good thing.
In this drawing the larger, more complex leaves over the fruit breaks away from the technique from the lesson, jumping into a greater level of complexity far too soon. You can see some examples of how to take the same process and extend it with additional steps to approach more complex leaf structures here and here.
Overall, I think you're doing pretty well. Just make sure that you're investing ample time into observing your reference, especially in between the marks you put down. Make sure that everything you draw is specifically informed by what is present in your reference, and avoid making guesses or working from memory.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 4.
Hello,
Thank you for critiquing my work. Yes, I actually misunderstood the branch construction regarding overlapping lines. Thank you so much for pointing it out, else I would have carried on as before.
So about carefully observing a reference. I remember in lesson 2 (and 3) you said when observing a reference, we're not trying to copy it 1:1, but rather draw a representation. But the representation still needs to be closely matching the reference, but how close? I bring this up because I don't quite understand the difference between trying to copy a reference exactly versus drawing a representation. If the representation is made by careful observation and adding strokes matching the reference, isn't that just copying it exactly? Can you elaborate on this a bit more? Thank you.
Think about it this way instead - every drawing here is an exercise, like a three dimensional puzzle. We know what we're aiming for (based on our reference image), but the real focus of the task is on how we're going to gradually build our construction up, step by step, from simple to complex, in the direction of that goal.
As you step through this process, with every choice you make altering the physical, solid structure that you're creating, you move either closer to that result, or you deviate from it. Regardless of which, you always have to hold to the idea that you're building something real and tangible - and therefore you can't arbitrarily jump back to interacting with your construction as though it's just a drawing to take some shortcuts to bring it back in line with your reference. You simply have to keep going, accepting that some aspects of your drawing won't match the reference - but that it's okay. The goal is ultimately just to have something that feels solid in the end.
The real reason we use reference at all is because students simply don't know what specific things look like. They don't know what plants look like, they don't know what insects look like, they don't know what animals look like. They can identify them by sight, but the information required to reproduce them in a way that is actually realistic or believable, simply isn't there yet. So, we need some source of information to help fuel the choices we make as we work through each of these puzzles.
That doesn't mean we can be lazy in terms of observation - because poor observation will result in an unbelievable, oversimplified construction, which will interfere with the benefits of the puzzle itself (and it's by solving those puzzles over and over that we rewire the way in which our brain perceives the 3D world in which our drawn objects exist). But it does mean that deviation from your reference isn't a huge deal, as long as the effort is being made to observe your reference closely and carefully, and to keep coming back to it to inform every subsequent decision.
Thank you for the clarification.
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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