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10:29 PM, Tuesday September 27th 2022
Starting with your arrows, you've drawn them with a great deal of confidence, which helps a lot in establishing how the structure moves with a sense of fluidity. This carries over quite well to your leaves, where you're capturing not only how they sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy.
That said, while you're generally doing a good job of building up your edge detail in individual marks, added one at a time to represent each individual bump (and generally avoiding zigzagging edge detail back and forth or trying to capture more than one bit of detail with a single stroke), I am noticing that you could probably stand to invest a little more time into each individual stroke. It's not uncommon for students to feel that since they're tasked with drawing a lot of little marks, that those marks can perhaps be drawn a little more quickly, but that is not the case. Every mark we draw must be given as much time as it requires, so as to avoid little inconsistencies and issues like these which fail to create a cohesive extension of the existing silhouette, and instead read more as individual lines on a flat page.
You're headed in the right direction, just need to give each of those marks more attention.
Continuing onto your branches, I do have a few things to call out:
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You need to be drawing through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, as discussed back in Lesson 1. This goes for all the ellipses we freehand throughout this course.
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You're generally pretty close to having each edge extend fully halfway to the next ellipse, which is good. One thing that'll help you make better use of this exercise going forward however (though it will make the exercise a bit more difficult) is to use the last chunk of the previous segment as a runway, overlapping it directly before shooting off towards the next target, rather than drawing it where the previous segment ought to have been. You can see this approach applied here. In effect, it forces us to deal with our mistakes, so we can avoid them going forward.
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Lastly, don't forget that as discussed back in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, the degree of your ellipses here should be shifting wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of the form. The turning of the form would also impact the degree of these cross-sectional slices, although farther = wider is a good starting point. It looks like you're generally trying to maintain a consistent degree throughout most of these, although there are a couple - like the far left of the page - that show a proper degree shift.
Moving onto your plant constructions, there are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.
As far as the actual constructions themselves go, you are by and large doing pretty well. There are however a few quick points I want to call to your attention:
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For the cylindrical flower pot on this page, you've got the degrees reversed - the end closer to the viewer should be narrower, with the base (which is farther away) being wider. Also, be sure to construct any and all cylindrical structures around a central minor axis line - especially when you've got a lot of ellipses to lay out, as this helps us align them to one another. I am pleased to see that you included another ellipse inset within the opening to establish the thickness of the rim there (though you don't always do it with your other flower pots), although another to represent the level of the soil would help as well, giving the trunk of the plant something to intersect with.
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When you've got a lot of forms overlapping one another - like the petals on this flower - you will feel tempted to cut them off where they're overlapped to avoid clutter. In this course however, it is important that you draw each and every form in its entirety, so as to help you understand how they sit in 3D space, and how they relate to the other forms around them within that space. Cutting them off causes us to focus more on how the given object looks from one specific angle, and thus neglects the focus of this course (being all about 3D spatial reasoning).
The last thing I wanted to discuss is how you're approaching the more "detailed" drawings. Right now it seems that you're viewing it more as an opportunity to decorate your drawings - that is, to do what you can to make them more visually pleasing. This results in you transferring information more directly, by observation alone, from your reference image, and also often results in you adding form shading (which as noted here should not be playing a role in our drawings throughout this course). You can further review why pure observation is not what we're after in these notes as well.
What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.
Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.
As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that.
Now, there are definitely a number of things to be addressed, but I feel you should be equipped to do so on your own. As such, I'll be marking this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 4.
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These are my favourite sketchbooks, hands down. Move aside Moleskine, you overpriced gimmick. These sketchbooks are made by entertainment industry professionals down in Los Angeles, with concept artists in mind. They have a wide variety of sketchbooks, such as toned sketchbooks that let you work both towards light and towards dark values, as well as books where every second sheet is a semitransparent vellum.