11:31 PM, Monday February 20th 2023
Hello Purplerains, thank you for getting back to me with your revisions.
It's important to note that the feedback we provide is based on what we see in the work - it is necessary for us to set aside what the student themselves reports about their experience and focus entirely on what the work itself tells us, as it is very common for a student to think they're doing something one way, or to think that a certain thing is the ultimate goal or focus, when it is in fact not.
One such example of this is that your comments suggest you're not just focusing on applying the instructions provided, but rather that you're also trying to solve the problems yourself. While this is certainly laudable, it is as explained in this video from Lesson 0 not what this course requires of its students, as it can cause students to commit their efforts in directions other than what we intend. I strongly recommend that you review that video, in order to refamiliarize yourself with how this course works.
We can also see this in how your comments seem to prioritize actions that will make the activity you're doing right now easier rather than harder - where you express that because something might be more difficult to achieve (like drawing through smaller ellipses two full times, drawing smaller branches, etc.) that it might be wrong, or wrong for you.
I want to stress very strongly that the goal here is not to find the method that is easy for you, but rather to ensure that you understand how to approach the exercises we are doing here, so that you can continue improving your skills. The techniques are difficult, and they're going to continue to be difficult and taxing for a good long while. That doesn't mean they're not extremely useful exercises however.
Lastly, in attempting to direct how you're tackling the work here other than simply doing your best to follow the provided instructions, you end up committing less of your mental resources to following those instructions (which means that because you're changing things up to suit your own judgement, you may end up neglecting specific things that were pointed out). One example of this is the branches exercise, where by your own description you are trying to go "from middle to middle" - but that's not what the instructions ask. They ask you to go from one ellipse, past the second, and stop halfway to the third.
I believe that it's also important to mention that the problems you're facing here are exactly why you need to be drawing bigger, when we attempt to use a complex structure as a reference for our construction but try to fit it into a tiny space what happens is that we're forced to omit details and the scale of the drawing makes it difficult, or straight up impossible to make full use of the methods that were previously introduced in the lesson material. Remember that in this course we're going through what are essentially 3D puzzles in order to develop our sense of spatial reasoning, if we're not able to make use of the pieces of the puzzle - in this case, the techniques shown - we won't be able to "solve" the puzzle , our sense of spatial reasoning won't develop and we'll be left with a flatter drawing.
Onto the rest of your work, your page of leaves is coming along much more nicely as you start taking more time with your edge detail, although due to gaps or running strokes this still suggests that in some level you're still zigzagging your edge detail.
Your plant constructions are looking solid as they already did in your original construction for the most part, revisiting these exercises especially at a bigger size has definitely helped the quality of your work as your leaves are more solid and well defined along with your branches being able to have a stringer sense of form. But the issues present in your leaves and branches can also be seen here, another problem present in these constructions is that for your branches you're adding too many ellipses along it's length, this means that your ability to fully engage your shoulder when drawing and extending a segment is limited, make sure to draw less ellipses for your branches, for the most part ellipses should be used to indicate a slight shift in the form's angle or to help you simplify more complex curves, in general, if the form is very straight you can afford less ellipses for your branch structure, and adjust from there since you can always add more ellipses, but you cannot take away.
Since your work here doesn't follow the steps for drawing branches introduced in the lesson material I'll be asking for a final page of branches before giving you the go ahead on to the next level, please revisit the instructions for this exercise and then please reply once you're finished.
Next Steps:
1 page of branches.