Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

3:52 AM, Wednesday November 3rd 2021

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Hi, this is my submission for the Lesson 3 homework.

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8:44 PM, Friday November 5th 2021

Starting with your arrows, nice work! You're doing a great job of drawing these with confidence, which helps to capture the way in which they move through space with fluidity. This carries over very nicely into your leaves, where you're not only capturing how they sit statically in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. You've also done a pretty good job of adding edge detail to their silhouettes - although one thing I would recommend is to avoid drawing the later strokes with more pressure/weight than the earlier ones. Try to keep the line weight consistent throughout.

Moving onto your branches, you're doing a similarly good job here, in that you're maintaining fairly consistent widths for your branches, and I can see you gently shifting the degree of your ellipses to better capture how they turn in space relative to the viewer. There are is one thing for you to keep in mind however. Be sure to extend each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, as shown here. You often tend to cut that a bit short, resulting in less of an overlap between segments. That overlap is important, as it helps us to better achieve smoother, more seamless transitions from one segment to the next.

Continuing onto your plant constructions, as a whole you're doing very well, and as a result, your constructions are coming out quite solidly. I'm pleased to see that you're playing with plants that feature both simple leaf structures, as well as more complex ones, and that you're employing the core principles of construction to great effect - focusing especially on building up from simple pieces, gradually integrating more and more complexity as you move forwards.

There's really only one thing I wanted to point out before marking this lesson as complete. While for the most part you demonstrate a good grasp of this already - this being how construction is all about maintaining tight, specific relationships between different stages - I did notice that in drawing some of your leaves (specifically on the daisy demo as well as this one), you tend to leave a somewhat more arbitrary gap between the end of the flow line and the actual end of the given petal or leaf.

Remember that every stage of construction effectively answers a question, or makes an assertion. How long is this, how wide is that, how does this surface move through space, etc. Once given, we need to make sure that we adhere to those answers, lest we give a new answer that contradicts the previous one and risks undermining the viewer's suspension of disbelief. Here, the flow line establishes both how the leaf moves through space, and how long it will physically be. Be sure to have the leaf or petal itself end right at its tip, to the best of your current ability.

Side from that, you're doing very well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the great work.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:59 PM, Monday November 8th 2021

Thank you very much for your reply!

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