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11:35 PM, Sunday February 19th 2023

Hello Vesy, I'll try my best to answer your questions.

What we're going to be focusing on when drawing texture is indeed cast shadows, and as we can see by revisiting this section of the lesson material in lesson 2 why that matters.

Uncomfy's analogy is as follows:

An example I like to use is fish. If you've got a fish swimming in the ocean, then we draw it similarly to how we draw the boxes and sausage forms we've tackled thus far. We apply constructional means - drawing through our forms, defining their silhouettes with outlines, describing how their surfaces move through space with contour lines, etc.

If, however, you take a bunch of fish and use it to wallpaper your bedroom, it becomes a texture - and the way we draw it changes. The fish is now a part of the wall itself. If the wall turns, the fish will follow. If you were to strip down this fishy wallpaper and wrap it around a box instead, the fish would come along with it. They cease to be an independent object, but rather become a part of this texture that can be applied to any other surface.

What this means in more direct terms is that texture is about the scale of our drawings. There will be many cast shadows in a given reference picture but not all of those will communicate texture once applied. Texture is the difference between the bumps in a chicken wing casting small shadows onto the surface of the wing itself and those shadows then being deformed to conform to the uneven surface they fall onto, versus the shadow that is cast onto a plain smooth surface on the ground as a chicken wing is held up against a light.

If our focus is to communicate the texture of the chicken wing itself we should focus on the first approach as this is the method that actually conveys to the viewer how uneven the surface itself is and the shape of those shadows communicates to your viewer what the forms that block the light and create those shadows look like, a soft curvy shadow will be caused by a soft, rounded form, a sharp, hard edge shadow will be created by a sharp form.

The second only communicates that someone is holding a chicken wing against a light, it doesn't tell you anything about the texture of the chicken wing, nor the texture of the surface it's being cast on. When we construct plants and we decide to add shading to them our first concern should be to convey the texture of the plant itself. We can see this difference in action in your Mushroom construction versus this Edelweiss construction, on your mushroom construction, even though you're still leaning towards the explicit side by completely drawing the gills underneath the mushroom cap you're much more focused on drawing the shadow shapes that exist in between the gills. But your edelweiss construction has no such shadows, some of them are form shadows which are caused by the form itself blocking the light from reaching it's other side, and some are caused by the form of other parts of the flower structure blocking the light from reaching that part of the flower, but this doesn't convey any textural detail, as per chicken wing analogy.

Considering the size of the edelweiss drawing this may be a case of drawing too much, since you focus on capturing the large structure of the plant you don't leave yourself as much room to capture the small textural details that will be present in your reference picture. There is a lot of form that we could imply with texture in this kind of plant, since by looking at a closer reference picture we can see that the surface of the "petals" of the edelweiss are actually kind of fluffy looking, they're not completely smooth and the way we would translate that to our drawing would be by capturing the small cast shadows that each small clump of hairs would cast onto itself.

However, your drawing is too small for that, these hairs are incredibly tiny in order to be fully depicted with a 0.5 pen, it's not completely impossible, but it might have been more trouble than it was worth it. In this case, you should have either gone for drawing a close up of the flower, or have undergone texture and that would have been alright.

I hope this answers your questions.

9:17 PM, Monday February 20th 2023
edited at 11:25 PM, Feb 20th 2023

Hi, thanks again for the clarification. So the "secret" why this seemed like it changed based on context is actually the scope at which we draw? In other words, we should only try to add texture, when the textural details are large enough to be perceived at the distance we are drawing the object from. If we are too far away, the details become so small that they will not matter for describing the shape anymore since we would not perceive them anyway, even if we looked at the actual object from the same distance?

So in short, if the details the texture would provide become too small from the perspective we are drawing from, we might as well not draw them at all, not even as texture, to avoid cluttering the image with visual detail?

(And yes, drawing only large cast shadows you would see from far away does not count as that does not give us relevant information about the structure of the things we draw.)

edited at 11:25 PM, Feb 20th 2023
11:48 PM, Monday February 20th 2023

Yes, the scale of our drawings is very important for defining how much texture we should focus on, a fish swinming on an ocean is an object, a wall made out of fish is a texture, in that same manner we want to focus on the imperfections on top of the surface we're drawing which allows for cast shadows to exist and thus for us to conmunicate that texture in our work.

In other words, we should only try to add texture, when the textural details are large enough to be perceived at the distance we are drawing the object from. If we are too far away, the details become so small that they will not matter for describing the shape anymore since we would not perceive them anyway, even if we looked at the actual object from the same distance?

This is not necessarily true, because since Drawabox is interested in helping you build your sense of spatial reasoning this means that for your work you'll need clear reference pictures which depict the forms in the structure you wish to draw clearly. This means that often your reference will be at a close enough range that texture can still be perceived - and it's still possible to capture texture in objects that are slightly further away and it can still be useful for the viewer, but we run into a certain problem when doing this for our work and that's the limitation of our medium coupled with the limitation of our reference picture. We are using for the most part an A4 page coupled with a 0.4-0.6 fineliner, this means that any detail that is smaller than this will be difficult to capture, which if your reference is zoomed out means most detail. The other problem we face is the limits of our reference picture, looking at an edelweiss from far away, similar to the one in your work will make it difficult to analyze the small cast shadows shapes because the picture itself might not give you enough information, be it because of the distance, or the quality of the picture.

So for the purposes of Drawabox, which is to develop your sense of spatial reasoning in cases such as this you have two options, the first consists of either choosing better reference pictures which are at a good enough range and a higher resolution which will allow you to see the cast shadow shapes more clearly, even from further away, or finding a different reference picture alongside your initial reference, one which more clearly depicts the texture and cast shadows present in the kind of structure that you want to draw - similarly to how you'd find a different reference in order to add edge detail and texture to your leaf structures back in the leaves exercise - or undergo texture, which is completely fine as texture is completely optional for this lesson.

9:14 AM, Tuesday February 21st 2023

Alright, I think I got it. Thank you again for taking your time to explain this in such detail.

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