Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

1:01 PM, Thursday June 3rd 2021

DrawABox Lesson 3 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/Ozp65bY.jpg

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered enterta...

Hey guys,

I've finally finished lesson 3 of DrawABox after 1 month and a half. I think I was never that exhausted after a lesson, not even that much after the 250 bix challenge lol.

Anyway ,so I firstly pretty much struggled with this whole lesson. I had some problems drawing normal arrows like the exercise from lesson 2, made really horrible branches which were chicken scratchy, uneven and too thick and was kinda insecure with my plant drawings ,whether it were flowers or yeah plants...

I was so underwhelmed with every new drawing I made as I always felt that I didn't quite get the point. I mean I still need to learn a lot and practice drawing branches, plants etc. so much more but...At the end of the lesson, about two and a half week ago, I kinda finally got the hang a bit more of it.

I finally wasn't so anxious anymore of trying a new page with a flower/plant even tho I knew that it might look not good or even horrible lol. I overcame my fears and also tried to add some texture, line weight to my drawings. I also finally didn't use my white out marker ,that I first used because yeah as I said anxiety if failure, but as Uncomfortable said: "These drawings are nit there to look pretty and be hung up on a wall but rather to evolve your skills and improve your way of seeing things around you in a constructional and 3D'mensional way!"

So enough with my rant about this lesson haha, and if ya got through everything ,thank you so much for reading it! I really appreciate it.

P.S: Any criticsm, advice etc. is truly appreciated ,thanks in advance and have a nice day! :)

0 users agree
11:20 AM, Friday June 18th 2021

Hello!

I want to start of by saying that your drawings are beautiful! The lines are super good and clean, you have a great handle on rendering texture and shadows and I never felt the drawings were cluttered or hard to look at.

In fact it's so good that at my current skill level I can't really find anything about your drawings to critique.

So instead I just really want to tell you that making mistakes is totally fine. From one super anxious person to another I know that is a lot easier said than believed. But mistakes need to be imbraced. They're part of everyones journey. We ALL do them. And we all NEED them to learn and grow not only as artists but as humans. Uncomfortable even made a comic about it. https://drawabox.com/comic/4

But again your drawings are really good and to add to all of my previous complements I loved all your breakdowns of individual parts and I'm happy you overcame part's of your anxiety

Hope this helps and be sure to read some of the next steps I'll be recommending :)

Next Steps:

Something that really helped me with perfectionism and anxiety was timed drawing. So I would pick a subject and set up a timer between 30seconds to 5minutes. And then I would draw that subject for that time and no matter what I would not touch it after. It not really helps you develop your process and become faster but it also helps you accept mistakes by having you draw lots and lots of drawings that are not "finished" and a most might even be failures. There's a super popular exercise around this very concept called figure drawing that I would really recommend if you do not already know what it is.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete. In order for the student to receive their completion badge, this critique will need 2 agreements from other members of the community.
12:00 PM, Saturday July 24th 2021

First of all I´m so sorry for literally just answering over month later :/ I didn´t really log into my DrawABox account for some weeks because of private events occuring but neither the less ,as I logged in today I was really happy to see a notification! Thank you so much for your encouraging words and compliments like I could not be more motivated to draw right now ,as I´ve been in an art block and motivational lack towards art for about 3 weeks ,which made seriously mad. So, thank you so much again for your kind feedback, really appreciating it. Btw it´s a funny coincidence that after finishing lesson 3 ,I started to make figure drawing for about a month to learn timed drawing and work against my perfectionism, so I guess I already took your next step haha :)

11:19 AM, Sunday July 25th 2021

I'm glad to hear that my message helped and that you already had taken action before even reading it. That's great! If you want you could mix timed drawing with the exercises here. Drawing in the constructional way instructed in drawabox is hard to do fast but maybe try to keep it to about 25minutes. Again, if you'd like to do that. Other than that I wish you the best. :D

The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Ellipse Master Template

Ellipse Master Template

This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.

I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.

No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.