Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

6:00 PM, Wednesday June 10th 2020

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thank you (in advance) for your review

here are the refrences for the plant construction https://imgur.com/a/Zsc0YlX

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9:28 PM, Wednesday June 10th 2020

Starting with your arrows, these are well drawn - they flow nicely through space and capture a sense of fluidity to them as they do so. This carries over very well into the leaves, where you've clearly established not only how these leaves sit in 3D space, but also how they move through it. Many students are more inclined to focus too much on how the leaves are solid, but overly static, resulting in a lot of stiffness and rigidity.

I'm also pleased to see how you're appyling construction - you're building directly on top of the previous phase of construction, not treating it like a loose sketch or something to be followed only vaguely. You adhere to it like scaffolding as you build up levels of complexity, and as a result, your leaves feel convincing and believable.

Your branches are coming along okay, but you're hitting one major issue - you're not extending your line segments as instructed. As shown here, you should be extending each segment fully halfway towards the next ellipse, providing a good chunk of overlap between that segment and the one that follows. This overlap is critical to achieving the impression that they flow seamlessly together, forming a single continuous edge.

As a side note, you've generally done a good job of maintaining even, consistent widths throughout your branches here, except for number 6. Keep in mind that a consistent width helps the form feel solid, so definitely pursue that every time.

Moving onto your plant constructions, these are largely extremely well done, with just a few minor points I'd like to mention. You're drawing through all of your forms, and achieving solid, believable results. There are a couple places where you get into forms that are more complicated too early, like the petals on these flowers - a lot of the waviness can first be ignored, instead setting down the main scaffolding that would ultimately support them, but these are still well executed. Just something to keep in mind in the future.

When drawing flower pots, or anything cylindrical that involves a lot of ellipses being aligned together, be sure to do so around a central minor axis line. I see you doing this some of the time, but not always. Additionally, make sure you draw each ellipse confidently and completely - don't fall into the trap of purposely trying to draw them faintly where you know they'll be covered up by some other form. These drawings are not done with the goal of having a pretty thing to show off at the end. Each of these are exercises focusing on developing your understanding of 3D space and of the relationships between your forms. Drawing those lines confidently is key to understanding how the forms sit in space, and ultimately how they relate to one another.

The last point I wanted to raise has to do with your use of cast shadows, form shading, and line weight. In general, you have a pretty heavy use of cast shadows. This is entirely fine, as they can be a useful tool in separating forms from one another (especially when we're drawing through each and every form in its entirety with the kind of confidence I mentioned in the previous paragraph). That said, when doing so, it makes sense to employ line weight as well - specifically in small sections, blending into the existing line weight, to help clarify how different forms overlap. Having largely uniform lines throughout your drawing, then suddenly jumping to big cast shadows can be a little jarring. A subtle touch of line weight can help bridge that gap.

More importantly however, you need to make sure that you distinguish cast shadows and form shading. Form shading, as explained here, is not something we are incorporating into our exercises in this course, and so should be left out. Cast shadows are where one form blocks the light from being cast upon another, and instead projects a shadow shape onto that surface. The rule is simple - cast shadows never fall on the form in question, they always fall on the surfaces around it. Form shading instead falls on the form in question, where the surface gets lighter as it turns towards the light source and darker as it turns away. It is often what people will use to further sell the illusion that what they're drawing is three dimensional - but because we're employing constructional techniques, which are far more effective at achieving this goal, it becomes unnecessary and decorative at best. As such, we leave it out so we can focus on construction more specifically, without distraction.

So, to keep it simple - if you're drawing a shadow shape, ask yourself whether it is being projected onto a surface by another form, or if it is the form's own relationship with the light source that is causing you to draw it. If it's the latter, don't.

Aside from that, your work is coming along well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:46 PM, Wednesday June 10th 2020

thanks bo(x)ss

I totally agree and accept your tips and suggestions (the one of the shadows vs shades i forgot, sorry)

thank you so much

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