Thank you so much far taking the time and reviewing my work. I struggled a bit with drawing thin branches and leaves with more than one flow line in perspective. Do you maybe have any tips for that?
Don't be surprised, I did it in pink, because my black pen died and I didn't want to buy a new one when I had a perfectly fine one at home.
Hello CyTori,
Starting with your Arrows these are looking great. I can see you applied the feedback Chiran gave you for lesson 2 to good effect. The width of your arrows increases more consistently as they get closer to he viewer with far less unexpected bulging or tapering, which is a great improvement, well done. it looks like you've applied the hatching to the correct side of every fold and overall your lines are looking smoother too. Sometimes your lines get a little hesitant and wobbly when adding line weight around the folds. Try to do your superimposed lines with the same confidence as your initial mark.
Moving on to your Leaves these look smooth and confident and I think you're doing a good job at capturing how the leaves flow through space, nicely done. I can see you've built them patiently, step by step, following the process described in the lesson instructions. Just a note for how you apply line weight. For this course it is primarily used to clarify overlaps, and you should not be tracing back over the entirety of an exisitng line, as you appear to have done for the compound leaf at the top of your page.
Your Branches are well done too. I'm pleased you remembered to draw through your ellipses, as well as experimented with varying their degrees, whilst still keeping the branch at a fairly consistent width. You've also done a pretty good job of building the sides of the branches in segments, and extending each segment part way to the next ellipse to form a "runway" to build your next segment on. Some of your branches have a good smooth transition between segments, others have some visible tails but I'm confident you're heading in the right direction and will get smoother transitions more often with a little bit of practice. You mentioned in your comments that you struggle with thin branches in your plant constructions. Things to practice to help with this are including small, skinny ellipses in your tables of ellipses, and practicing thinner branches in your warmups without the pressure of needing them to conform with a specific plant construction.
Onto your plant demos these are really well done and I don't have an awful lot to criticise here. You're following all the steps shown in the demos pretty faithfully, great job. I think the only nitpick is on the hibiscus demo, the stamens (I think that's the name, I don't know plants so well) are all stuck out from the sides of your branch structure. In reality they are spaced all the way around and some of them will point towards (and away from) the viewer and should be drawn attached to the front surface of the branch, not just the sides. If you study the reference image and the video from about the 10:20 mark, hopefully you'll see what I mean.
For your plant constructions you've done a good job of applying what you've learnt about construction to your own drawings. Building things up step by step, building leaves, branches, and solid forms, and exploring how thee things exist in 3d space. For page 5, the hanging plant, I would have liked to see you draw through your forms more. I can (just about) see where the flow lines for your branches pass behind leaves or other overlapping forms, but the branches them selves (with the ellipses and the sides drawn in) get cut off. Just like with previous Drawabox exercises you're supposed to draw the entire form, even the parts you can't see. This will help expand your understanding of how these things exist in 3d space. You've done much better with the leaves, drawing all of them in their entirety and clarifying the overlaps usig lineweght, great job.
Your Aloe plant, page 6, is looking much better in that regard. You've drawn through all your forms, and clearly established where the leaves join the soil inside the pot, it reads much better as a solid construction. Just a minor pointer, for your plant pots (or any cylindrical form in DAB) you should be constructing them around a central minor axis line. And it would have helped if you had placed an additional ellipse to establish the thickness of the rim of the pot.
Page 7 has a loooot of empty space. I'd advise you to draw bigger, which will make figuring out spacial reasoning problems easier, as well as encouraging you to use your shoulder and allow you to explore more details in your constructions. Alternatively, if you've drawn one plant and find half the page is still empty like this, go ahead and draw another one. Fill that page!
Page 8 looks a little stiff and flat, but it may just be that the reference you chose to draw from is like that. You appear to be following the construction steps correctly for it.
In Conclusion you have plenty to think about and improve upon but I'm happy that you're heading in the right direction, feel free to move on to lesson 4.
Edits made for typos
Next Steps:
Feel free to move on to lesson 4
Thank you so much for the extremely in depth and long critique, Andpie. I really appreciate all the time and effort you clearly put into this, so thank you.
I guess I kinda fell into the trap of wanting to draw nice drawings instead of drawing to learn, so thank you for reminding me. I didn't draw the branches behind the leaves because it looked so confusing when I did it at the top, but I will include it from now on.
I also struggle with drawing really big. Ever since I started drawing I naturally drew small, even if I wanted to draw bigger. I guess I'll just have to put conscious effort into planning my drawings before I actually start drawing and maybe mark the rough corners with small points?
I'll remember how to use line weight and do so confidently and construct my ellipses around a minor axis as well as thinking about how thick a form is (e.g. the pot).
What would you recommend as warmup? Should I just do the exercises from lesson 1&2 I struggled with along with some boxes or should I construct a plant every once in a while as well?
Hi, thank you for your kind response.
You're clearly thinking a lot about these exercises and I'm sure you'll do great in the next lesson.
Yes, putting down dots to plan the size of your forms and get them to fill the page is a good idea.
You can add plants t your warmups if you like. I usually stick to the techhnical exercises (so add leaves and branches to your warmup pool) as I draw so slowly it tempts me to warm up longer than necessary if I attempt a full construction.
Good luck, have fun!
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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.
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