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4:58 PM, Friday April 24th 2020

This is a big improvement. Just a few things to keep in mind as you continue forward:

  • Along the top of this page, you've drawn those complex wavy edges without any structure supporting their complexity. You should be building them in stages - first laying down simpler edges to capture how those sections are oriented in space, then breaking them down into more complex information, somewhat as shown here. Note how the waves are built off the simpler edge, as though the edge is simply being pushed around, rather than having a new edge built independently of the one that was there previously.

  • Along the base of your cactus, you'll have a better time capturing those pebbles if you treat them as texture - which means implying their presence purely through drawing the shadows they cast rather than the outlines of each individual stone.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
7:55 PM, Friday April 24th 2020

Hooray! Thanks so much.

Question about the mushroom (I attached my reference). I had a really hard time trying to wrap my head around where I should break down the structure at the top left, which in turn made it a little free spirit. Is there a different way I should have approached it (adding more structure at the top, different angle of my original circle)?

https://blog.ecogreenlawncare.com/category/gardening/104434/chanterelle-mushrooms

5:10 PM, Saturday April 25th 2020

Here's a quick breakdown of how I might approach something like that: https://i.imgur.com/KeQEXtM.png

As you can see, it's not entirely in line with the specific techniques demonstrated in the lesson. This is because Drawabox isn't about showing you how to tackle specific situations, but rather to build up an overall understanding of how to construct basic forms in 3D space and how to combine them in order to develop your spatial reasoning skills. Ultimately you'll be able to work far more flexibly than the rigid processes outlined in these lessons, to create more arbitrary forms whilst reinforcing their relationships with one another in 3D space by establishing their major "planes".

The particular mushroom you chose there was definitely vastly more complex, so I'm not at all surprised that it didn't work out. The main thing to look at in my quick demo is that I established a simple structure (a box-like form for the cap), and then I built the variation directly off those edges, always being sure to have those details return to the simpler structure in order to keep them all grounded in this solid base.

6:10 PM, Saturday April 25th 2020

Okay, that makes much more sense. Thank you so much!

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