Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants
3:03 AM, Sunday October 23rd 2022
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9:57 PM, Monday October 24th 2022
Starting with your arrows, you're doing a good job of prioritizing the confidence of your linework, which helps to push the sense of fluidity with which they move through the world. This carries over into your leaves, generally helping you to capture how they move through the space they occupy, instead of merely sitting statically in space. That said, I noticed that despite submitting multiple pages for this exercise (where only one was assigned), you didn't delve into any of the edge detail aspects of the exercise. A great deal of the notes on this page focus on how one approaches adding edge detail onto these structures, so skipping it means that we don't really have any way of assessing whether or not you understood those concepts.
Before I continue on, I want to stress what I already did mention in this video from Lesson 0. When assigned a certain number of pages of work, you should only be doing what's asked. It's not uncommon that when I have students feeling the need to complete more pages, that they tend to focus less on executing each individual instance of the exercise to the best of their current ability - taking the time to execute each mark, draw each shape, and construct each form as well as they reasonably can (regardless of how much time that takes them), and more on simply getting the exercise done in quantity - but not necessarily to the best of their ability.
Drawing more itself isn't a bad thing on its face, but it's about how it impacts the manner in which we engage with the work. You will always have more opportunities to practice these exercises in your warmups - the quantity we assign is not with the expectation of seeing growth and improvement over the set, but just to judge whether your understanding of what you're meant to be doing with the exercise is correct, or whether it requires clarification. Can't really judge that too well if you're spreading the time, energy, and effort you could have dedicated to a single page of a given exercise over multiple pages.
With that out of the way, continuing onto your branches, your work here is coming along well. The main thing you'll want to do to continue improving here is to, when drawing another edge segment, overlap the last chunk of the previous one more directly, using it as a runway before shooting off to the next target, instead of drawing that next segment where the previous one ought to have been. This will make the exercise more difficult, but it also makes it more beneficial as it requires us to take more time and put more thought into how we execute each mark.
Finally, moving onto your plant constructions, you are by and large doing pretty well, with one main issue - your drawings tend to be rather loose. This results in more gaps in the silhouettes of your structures (like here in your pitcher plant, where the edges do not flow seamlessly into one another), which undermine the solidity of the resulting structure. This simply requires you to invest more time into the execution of each mark, and the use of the ghosting method - specifically investing that time into the planning and preparation phases for each mark. This of course can be really time consuming, but that's pretty much the name of the game. The work we do here simply cannot be rushed.
Now, while your work in your plant constructions is (aside from the looseness) pretty solid, I am unfortunately still going to have to see that you understand how to build up edge detail for your leaves/flower petals in successive stages - so we will need to see one more page of that exercise before you can continue on.
Next Steps:
Please submit one more page of leaves.
5:29 PM, Tuesday October 25th 2022
Here is the additional page of leaves: https://imgur.com/a/ZjXPVwO
3:35 PM, Wednesday October 26th 2022
This is definitely a step in the right direction, although you are running into the problem where you're effectively treating each subsequent phase of construction as though it is meant to replace the previous one, effectively causing you to redraw a ton more of the previous phase of construction than you should be. This leads you to zigzag your edge detail back and forth, which as discussed here is a mistake and breaks the third principle of markmaking from Lesson 1.
Remember - what we're doing here is not putting down a rough sketch to use as a guide. We are effectively introducing a structure to the world, as though it were a simple leaf shape cut out of a piece of paper, and as we add edge detail to it or build up its structure, we are actively making physical changes to that existing form. If we want to add spikes to its edge, we're physically adding more pieces of paper to it. If we want to create a wobbly edge, we are physically drooping and lifting sections of its perimeter in 3D space. And if we want to cut into its silhouette, then the lines we're drawing represent the paths a pair of scissors would follow to cut it out, as shown here.
Now, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, as I feel this is something you can address on your own.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 4.
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Sakura Pigma Microns
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.