Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants
4:54 AM, Friday July 2nd 2021
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10:38 PM, Saturday July 3rd 2021
Starting with your arrows, these are looking really good - they're confidently drawn with a great sense of fluidity to them. That carries over fairly well to your leaves, where you've definitely captured how they not only sit statically in space, but also how they flow through that space.
I can see that you are making an effort to build up your edge detail through the addition of separate, individual marks, but I am a little concern with the accuracy of those marks. You end up with a lot of cases where you overshoot past the simpler edge from the previous phase of construction pretty regularly, creating a fairly loose relationship between the different phases of construction. This really is just a matter of taking more time in the execution of each individual mark to avoid overshooting and gaps which will compromise the solidity of the structure.
Maintaining tight, specific relationships between phases of construction is critically important - that's how we're able to carry forward the solidity from the simpler phases, as we build up more and more complexity.
Lastly, right now you are not employing any of the principles from Lesson 2's texture section when adding texture to your constructions. As discussed back there, textural marks are to be captured using implicit techniques - focusing on defining cast shadow shapes, not lines, each one helping to imply the presence of a specific textural form on the surface of the object. You can see an example of this in the instructions where the veins along the surface of the form are implied by creating little shadows where they branch of from one another. You're pretty exclusively working in line to convey those veins, which is incorrect. I strongly recommend you reread the texture section of lesson 2.
Continuing onto your branches, there are a couple of things I want to call out, but once you resolve those, this will be coming along fairly well. They are as follows:
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You appear not to be following the instructions as explained here, when it comes to the way your edge segments are drawn. Each segment starts at the previous ellipse, allowing for a healthy overlap and a smoother, more seamless transition from edge to edge.
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For the most part, the degree of your ellipses seems to be pretty consistent. Remember that as explained in the lesson 1 ellipses video the degree of those circular cross-sections should be getting wider as we slide away from the viewer.
Continuing onto your plant constructions, there are a bunch of these that are coming along well - specifically the pages labelled "plants 6", "plants 7", and "plants 8". That's not to say there aren't issues, but they're fundamentally stronger in their overall understanding of how to think through these spatial problems than the earlier constructions where I feel like you were just trying to bite off way more than you could chew, and in all of their complexity, you were kind of losing track of the core focus of the lesson.
You really don't need to jump on complicated things to satisfy the lesson. In fact, focusing on simpler structures and employing the concepts from the lesson's demos and technical exercises is perfectly fine. When you were tackling these mushrooms, you were approaching the steps okay, but I feel like the complexity of what you were tackling got a little too overwhelming, causing you to throw out what you knew about proper, mindful markmaking, resulting in a lot of chaos.
Compare that to the plant on the left side of this page where every mark was more purposely drawn. You did a great job of maintaining tight relationships between the phases of construction - for example, by having the flow lines of each leaf end specifically at the perimeter of that larger ellipse.
One thing I do want to warn you against is this tendency to draw your earlier phases of construction as being lighter/fainter, and then trying to entirely replace it by the later phase of construction. For example, if you look at this corpse flower, you ended up drawing an entirely new set of petals that completely replaced the ellipse you started with. Instead, you should have allowed the ellipse to define its outermost perimeter, then cut into it, drawing lines that define the path a pair of scissors would take as it snipped pieces away. You can see a sort of example of what I mean here - note how we only draw the parts that change. Replacing the entire thing will just result in a weaker relationship between phases of construction.
Overall you are moving in the right direction, but there are enough issues across the set that I do want you to do some revisions to ensure that you understand how to move forwards. You'll find them assigned below.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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1 page, half of leaves, half of branches
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2 pages of plant constructions
4:58 AM, Tuesday July 13th 2021
The make-up submissions are here: https://imgur.com/a/fSoLDHi
Here's my issue with textures. I'm often put into situations where what I see is just a line. There's nothing more to it. It's just a line that's part of the texture. There's nothing for me to imply, there's nothing to shade in, it's just a line on the texture. I have no other way of representing this than by drawing a line. What's more is that, in the instructions for the dissections exercise, a lot of the examples are drawn in a pretty standard way, where it's not shading that implies the presence of something. This is especially prevalent in the hair, grass, and pangolin scale textures you provided. I'm working with a fineliner so I have limited means of conveying line weight, and since I can't perfectly trace over curves, my lines wind up looking like I tried correcting them. This creates an extremely frustrating scenario for me where I'm implementing what the lessons teach but then I'm told that I'm not doing that. Take this texture. https://polarbearsinternational.org/media/3353/2_simon-gee-0430.jpg?width=0&height=0
How in the hell am I supposed to convey this with shading alone? I HAVE to draw some of the shapes of the tufts of fur because I can't do it any other way. Unrelated, I find it difficult to care about drawing plants because I don't find them interesting. I'm following this course so that I can eventually do anatomy. I want to draw figures, not still life.
6:27 PM, Tuesday July 13th 2021
Your constructions are definitely coming along quite well, and your work on the branches exercise is more in line with those instructions.
When it comes to texture, I think the piece that you're missing is that observation is the first step. We don't draw what we see, directly. We observe in order to identify the forms that are present along the surfaces of the objects we're studying (that is, the smaller textural forms). The shadows and lines we see imply the presence of those forms, so by looking for them, we can start to find the signs of those forms.
Then, it's using our understanding of where those forms sit and how they occupy space, that we specifically design the cast shadow shapes themselves. It actually helps a lot to outline those shapes first, then fill them in, rather than trying to paint them on straight away with a brush pen as you did for the mushrooms. Here's an example of what I mean, by working in two steps, outlining first, then filling them in. You can use the brush pen to fill things in, just not to define that shape in the first place.
I will say that I do have plans to improve the texture section of Lesson 2. While I embarked on an overhaul of the whole course several months ago (starting from Lesson 1), that was primarily just to make the videos and notes more succinct and somewhat clearer, but not really modifying how things are explained. Texture, however, having been added as a more recent component of the course (I develop the course based on what I see from the students whose work I critique, to improve where those explanations aren't clear enough), is something I have bigger plans to update.
Unfortunately that overhaul got paused due to my apartment flooding, forcing me to put my equipment in storage and moving into a temporary location. I'm expecting to start the overhaul up again in September, and I should have the texture section of Lesson 2 updated by October, barring any other unforeseen catastrophes.
For now, try to apply what I've explained as you move forwards, but keep in mind that texture is really just an extension of understanding how the forms we're working with exist in 3D space, and how they relate to one another within it. It's actually the same thing we focus on with construction, just at a smaller scale, and continuing to develop your work with the larger forms will further improve your abilities here.
Then once the material is updated, you'll be able to review it and hopefully it'll help further clarify any remaining uncertainty.
There is one last thing I wanted to call out though - remember that as discussed here in Lesson 2, our drawings here aren't going to incorporate any form shading, so you won't be needing to fill anything with hatching as you did with one of your leaves. Every filled shape of solid black you draw should represent a cast shadow, and you should be aware of the nature of the specific 3D form that casts it. In any circumstances where you don't - like the top-middle leaf, where you drew big black shapes around its silhouette - should not have any such shapes drawn.
As for not caring about plants, that's... really not important. This course isn't about learning how to draw plants, or insects, or animals, or vehicles. Each lesson is tackling the same problem, but from a different angle. It's looking at how we can manipulate solid, three dimensional forms in space, and how we can combine them to create more complex structures that still maintain the illusion of being three dimensional and real - not just drawings on a flat page. We tackle these through a series of different angles, with each topic giving us a new way to look at the same issues, because that is what spurs the brain to avoid plateauing. So whether you care about the topic or not isn't of consequence here.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, as your work with the core construction is coming along nicely.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 4.
6:35 PM, Tuesday July 13th 2021
Alright, I'll proceed later today. There is one last thing I needed to ask about. I've read over the instructions for the 25 textures thing and it's something I intend to get started on in the near future (I created and scanned a template to avoid having to set up the paper every time) but I don't know if this challenge is a prerequisite for any of the other lessons. I know the cylinders thing is required for one of them (lesson 5?) and I already did the box challenge.
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The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw
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