Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants
5:21 PM, Monday October 12th 2020
Hello
Please evaluate my Lesson 3 exercises ,it was not a easy one but were much more funny than the lasts ones .
Many thanks.
Starting with your arrows, you're doing a good job of drawing them such that they flow smoothly and confidently, although you are not applying foreshortening/perspective to the gaps between the zigzagging sections as shown here, and so they tend to look like they're moving across the surface of the page, not through the depth of the scene.
Your arrows carry the same strong sense of flow, and you're doing a good job of capturing not only how they sit in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. I'm also pleased to see that you're playing with more complex edge detail, although I am noticing that you have a tendency to redraw the entire leaf's edge in each phase of construction. As explained here, you should only be drawing the parts that change.
I also recommend that you try playing with some more complex leaf structures as well - there are cases where we would want to combine the same leaf construction steps as shown here to create more complicated kinds of leaves, especially those with many separate "arms".
Moving onto your branches, while these are mostly looking pretty good, there's one main shortcoming - you're not extending your segments fully halfway to the next ellipse, resulting in a limited overlap between those different strokes. The reason this is important is that the overlap allows for the marks to flow seamlessly and smoothly from one to the next, as shown here in the instructions.
Moving onto your plant constructions, you are by and large doing a pretty good job. I'm very pleased to see that you are holding true to the principles of construction (although the point I raised earlier about not redrawing the entirety of a form in each phase of construction, and only draw the parts that change definitely applies throughout all of your constructions here). You do a good job of adhering to those previous phases of construction, and ensuring that any detail you add is supported by the information that was already present in the previous phase.
There are just a few things I want to draw your attention to:
You should definitely be drawing through all of your ellipses. That instruction introduced back in lesson 1 applies to all of the ellipses we draw - meaning you should be drawing around the shape two full times before lifting your pen off the page to ensure a confident, even shape.
When constructing any cylindrical forms (like flower pots), be sure to do so around a central minor axis line, as introduced in lesson 2's form intersections exercise. This helps keep the various ellipses aligned to one another. On that point, I am pleased to see that you did attempt to capture multiple ellipses around the mouth of your pots, capturing the thickness of the rim and any additional structures.
Your comfort level with cylinders is a little off in some places. One thing to keep in mind is that when dealing with basic tube forms, the ellipses closer to the viewer are going to be narrower in degree, and those farther away will be wider. That's why the pot of the potted plant in the top left quadrant of this page ended up looking off - that relationship was reversed.
Aside from these points, your work is coming along quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.
Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.
Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.
Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.
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