Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your lesson 3 homework

Organic Arrows

-Starting with the organic arrows these ared rawn with a good deal of confidence which really helped you to capture the fluidity with which they move through space, you are also making some good attempts at the perspective of the ribbons, as you have made them wider as they move closer to us. I can also see that you have kept in mind the negative space between the zigzagging sections of the ribbon, as it decreases as it moves further away from the viewer. Your applications of lineweight are correct too as you have kept it restrained only to the parts where an overlap happens.

Leaves

-This fluidity and confidence carries over to your leaves and I like to see that you have drawn the little bumps and cuts to the edges, I do have some things to call out when it comes to this. Remember to take your time to design each individual cut in order to avoid any repetitiveness, this comes back to one of the principles of markmaking that we went over during lesson 1, take some time to read this notes, this also causes you to start zigzagging the edge detail, which as explained here, results in a weaker relationship between each step of the construction.

I also want you to try some more complex leaf structures like the maple leaf shown in this informal demo.

Branches

-Moving on to the branches I can see that in most cases you have extended your segments fully halfway to the next ellipse, we still have some visible tails, but this tends to disappear with more mileage, just make sure that both segments overlap a good bit in order to achieve a smoother transition.

Make sure you are cognizant of the degree shifts of each ellipse as the branch moves through space, if you are unsure of what I mean you can check the ellipses section of lesson 1 again.

Plants

-You are moving in the right direction when it comes to the plants, and you are using the construction method in order to break each one of your subjects into its more primitive elements, however I do have some things to call out.

-First of all, make sure that you respect each step of the construction, for example take a look at the flower on the left side of this page, you have drawn an ellipse that serves as a footprint for the space that the flower is going to occupy, then each flow line tip should end right at the edge of that ellipse, and consequently each petal should end right at the tip of each flow line. This all comes down to not leaving any gaps between each phase of the construction, these gaps remind the viewer that we are just looking at a set of lines.

We can also see this issue on your daisy demo attempt, where the initial flow line runs short of the length of the petal, making sure that they connect without leaving empty spaces.

-I can also see that you are prone to end up redrawing your leaves, disregarding the initial stages of construction, this can be easily seen on the plant on the left side of this page, where your edge details end up zigzagging and doesn’t seem to have a specific relationship with the initial footprint. This really comes down to making a lot of smaller moves rather than trying to capture a lot of things with a single stroke, whenever you want to build this complex leaf structures make sure to follow the steps highlighted here, this is very important stuff so make sure to study it with care and patience.

-I also want to draw your attention to the mushroom on the right side of this page, where I can see that you have tried to add some details to the top of the mushroom as you did to the leaves, just remember that the mushroom is not a flat shape like the leaves, so instead of adding bumps and cuts we add full forms, this process is shown in this informal demo.

-I like to see that you have aligned all of your ellipses to a minor axis just to make sure that you are drawing them with an awareness of how they change degree as they move through space. Again, if you need a reminder take a look at the ellipses section of lesson 1.

Oh I almost forgot, make sure that you are giving each individual drawing as much room on the page as you can, by limiting the space available you are also limiting the ability of your brain to engage in spatial reasoning, and it also makes it harder to draw your lines with confidence while engaging your whole arm. If you can draw a plant per page, as long as it is making full use of it, then I encourage you to do it.

You are moving in the right direction but we still have some loose ends to tie up, I’ll leave you some additional homework so that you can address these issues. Best of luck!!