Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

5:24 PM, Saturday May 8th 2021

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Hope this is sufficient, the most difficult thing for me to do were the petals, i don't think they came out really good.

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8:23 PM, Monday May 10th 2021

Starting with your arrows, these are looking good - they're focusing heavily on confidence and fluidity. That carries over nicely into your leaves, where you've got that strong sense of motion. You're also building up your edge detail properly here, although keep working on ensuring that when you add an extra little bump along the edge of a leaf, that the mark you're adding runs seamlessly from the existing edge, and then back into it. For example, this one is separate from that outline on both ends, which breaks the silhouette of your leaf and undermines its solidity. Conversely, this one is definitely better.

Continuing onto your branches, you definitely aren't a man of moderation - you went from drawing them really small to drawing them huge. Try to find a happy middleground.

I did notice that it looks like some of your marks started to get really faint and dried out - either your pen was on its last legs, or you were drawing with the pen at an angle to artificially impede its ink flow. Either way, avoid doing this. We specifically use fineliners because they produce rich, dark marks, so that every single stroke we put down on the page is fully committed. When we make fainter strokes, we can easily get tempted to sketch lightly as though those marks aren't really there, to explore what we're drawing ahead of time without consequences. This isn't helpful as far as this course goes. So if your pen starts dying on you, grab another.

If it just happens and a line comes out faintly, leave it as it is - don't trace back over it to make it darker.

Now, looking at the actual mechanics behind the branches here, it looks to me like you're still making one of the mistakes I called out previously. As explained here, you need to extend each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, so you get a nice, healthy overlap between those strokes. You're still not doing that - you seem to be stopping the lines at the ellipses themselves, then starting a new stroke around the same point. There's not a lot more I can point out about that - it's just a matter of following the instructions as they're written.

Moving onto your plant constructions, there are some issues, but overall you're doing decently. The whole dying-pen thing is a major factor, but all things considered despite it you did draw most of your marks quite confidently, as though they were fully dark, rather than getting caught up in tracing back over those faint marks to darken them up. That's certainly a good thing, but again - if your pen starts dying, don't keep using it, or find out why that's happening.

You're drawing your leaves with quite a bit of fluidity, and you're approaching your constructions pretty well. There are still a few places where you're zigzagging your edge detail on your leaves, like the top left corner drawing on this page. Remember that adding edge detail does not mean you're redrawing/replacing the entire silhouette of the leaf. You did this more correctly in the leaves exercise, where you just added individual bumps to it.

On the same page, you've got a number of cast shadows, though some of them are kind of sloppily drawn. I'm guessing you jumped in with a brush pen to draw them. Instead, use the brush pen just to fill them in, after you've actually drawn the outline of those cast shadow shapes with a regular fineliner. This will help you control where those cast shadows actually fall, instead of being subject to the whims of your brushpen.

And of course, cast shadows don't really work right if all the linework is really faint, like on this page.

Lastly, a minor thing - when you draw cylindrical flower pots, construct them around a central minor axis line, to help you align your ellipses more reliably. It's not that you drew the ellipses poorly, it's just a matter of setting yourself up for the best chances at success each time, rather than skipping steps.

All in all, I really wish you hadn't drawn with that dying pen, but you are applying most of the principles well. There are some areas where you forgot key instructions, but ultimately that is only going to be remedied by your own attentiveness and focus. As far as this lesson goes, I'm going to mark it as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:33 AM, Tuesday May 11th 2021

Thank you for the reply. You are right, the pen was dying out and I didnt think it was that big of a deal to immediatly replace it. Won't happen again.

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