Kites

Hello again! I am finally back with the 150 cylinders as you instructed. Hopefully it hasn't been too long.

"as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course - always changing in response to clear, defined structure. You can see this demonstrated in this diagram."

Pretty much what I'm getting here (and in your other corrections) is that your modified forms are more curvy and simpler than mine. You've also made them "pinch" behind the forms upon which they lie, which is something I was hesitating to do because I didn't want them to look too "2D", with the way their silhouettes appear to "pinch back" in space but ultimately merging in with other marks. With how much you are drawing focus to these clear, specific corners, I still don't understand how it would make it any more obviously 3D...without risking having you interpreting them as if I had carved into silhouettes or merely extended them—this is why I made my forms more blobby where they would have receded at their corners, so as to say "Hey, this corner over here is not part of these other marks".

• Perhaps I should have clarified some of the forms by adding more line weight to avoid confusion?

Thank you for the heads up about inward & outward curves. Some of these additional forms were indeed too complex for the purposes of the exercise.

Ah, I see. I thought that you were telling me that I misunderstood the forms in the examples. So this is why you don't ask students to include their references along with the exercises...because the end result does not matter as you say, but rather the approach—and so, one that initially focuses on additive construction has proven to be more efficient at developping spatial reasoning in your experience, at least for people who struggle with it at first.

I personally can't say for sure how much I understand 3D space, which is why I am here to begin with, and the farther I go, the more I begin to see where you're coming from.

I still think that sometimes, I do need to be presented with something more specific in order to grasp the general ideas and concepts of the lessons.

Thanks again for your time, Irshad.

After digesting this information, I have a couple of questions referring to your examples.

I just can't see how I made them 2D, and the more I think about it, the more it confuses me.

• Would it have made it any easier to read the ant's thorax if I added another mark in there? The thorax had two forms on its back. If I made any other mark, it would have looked like there was a third form on there... It would easily get confusing with how cluttered some of these drawings become.

• The upper blue portion of the ant's head is supposed to be kind of behind its [original flat shape]'s silhouette, so maybe a mark connecting the eye with the other one in the back would have helped make it feel more three-dimensional? If I had made an ellipse on the [original flat shape]'s silhouette to connect it with the farthest bump, it would have broken the illusion of there being a second one in front of it, based on our point of view.

  I either purposefully extended the [original flat shape]'s silhouette with the lower blue part (which is unnecessary for this much length) or it's just part of the same mark used to draw the silhouette in the first place.

  As for the red portion of the treehopper next to the ant, I can see that a better way to handle this region would have been with adding the head's plane instead of subtracting it.

  I simply made the head's edge thicker than the silhouette to distinguish it because the plane that I had cut is facing away from us at this angle, but this doesn't seem to work as well as I thought it would. It's VERY difficult for me to see how this is a problem or how it could be solved. In your demonstration of Correct vs Incorrect Subtractive Construction, you have highlighted the opposite plane of the lower form in hatching, which you forbid to use in any circumstance. So...

• What is the correct way of doing here? If I absolutely had to subtractively construct this part, should I make the contour lines curve around the back plane of the head?

---(I'm starting to think most of this is actually just more of my confused thoughts that I should have kept to myself.)---

Your linked section does not explicitly mention to never use form shading—it merely says that it's not the main focus of the course and that it's not used for the purpose of making forms feel 3D. This is followed by "everything we add to our drawings serves a specific purpose. Therefore if the shading does not serve any such purpose (since it's already being handled by the techniques listed above), then we do not bother to include it."... But then, to end this explanation with "Shading where those transitions are achieved with textures specific to the surface of that object, however, are perfectly acceptable." can make the instructions rather confusing with the way you put it.

I had three purposes in using form shading: adding clarity and contrast, helping to maintain a hierarchy and sneaking in some textural information. To my understanding, there was no reason for me to not use it when adding texture because I was not using it to make my drawings "pretty" with hatching lines or as a means of construction. Not to mention that I've seen you use something similar to it in demonstrations like this or as I think I misunderstood here, at step (4). Only after the fact do you tell me straight up to not ever use it in Drawabox, and so I won't.

In fact...

• Are these really cast shadows?... I'm not sure anymore, given that some of them seem to occur on the sloping planes of the leaf itself without being cast by another object...

Sorry if I seem a little impatient and also for continuously coming back to you with something else, especially if you're dealing with over a thousand people. It really is a difficult course.

I know that it can be subjective, but now I feel like I tried to convey too much textural information...without using very efficient/economic marks, apparently.

• Again, in the leaves/petals examples, I thought that "adding more ink", or rather blocking up some texture, provided enough contrast to notice the veins and depressions while still treating those areas as form shading...but perhaps I should have just tried to capture very little to no texture in them?... Perhaps not treating them as form shading at all would have been a better choice?

Thanks again for the feedback. I'm still puzzled by what would be the right balance here, so I will now move on to the next lesson.

Once you hit the 'detail phase' of a drawing, I get the impression that your focus shifted to the general, vague idea of 'decorating' your drawing. [...] With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice. So focus instead on conveying what can be felt and touched, rather than simply what can be seen.

When it comes to texture, I still tried to understand how the smaller forms would sit on the plants.

For example, on the 5th page, the texture on the petals of the top-left plant is supposed to represent tiny depressions on its surface. With page #6 (top-right plant), I added cast shadow forms created by the bumps in its center, as with the soil on page #8, in which I also tried to define the small veins on some leaves by blocking them in with "shadow" forms.

For these examples, I didn't just draw what I saw. I tried to visualize what was really there and added just enough information to suggest how it would feel with shadow shapes. Nevertheless, I may have gotten careless when transitioning to less and less detail with some of my texturing.

• Can you tell me more about these specific examples?

• Aside from the veins, should I have just completely darkened the bottom parts of the leaves in page #8 and leave out the little possible highlights on their edges that suggest some unevenness of their surface? I'm not sure if they're adding too much noise despite how I interpreted them.

• Do you want me to use the ghosting method to plan even the tiniest marks that went into shadow shapes in said examples? (This would seem rather unnecessary.)

Oh! Yes, I see.

"When you want to add more structure to a form, altering its silhouette by cutting/adding 2D shapes, it flattens it out."

I fail to see where I went wrong here, in the example you pointed out. Given the reference I was using, I don't think I was adding flat shapes to add structure. I even drew lines on top of the small shapes to give them volume instead of just adding to the silhouette of the plant. They are small, but i also added ellipses to indicate the poles on three of those additional forms.

I am unsure to have understood everything in the critique, but I am taking note of it.

Thanks again!

Thanks, Irshad!