Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

7:07 PM, Wednesday May 19th 2021

Drawabox Lesson #3 Plants - Album on Imgur

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I've noticed that I focus a little too much on copying the reference instead of adjusting it to make it seem more natural. What I mean is that I get too focused on the amount of leaves there are that I forget that the leaves should be treated as organic forms. I will also continue to work on my branches, because sometimes they end up looking pretty stiff.

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8:09 PM, Thursday May 20th 2021

Starting with your arrows, these are drawn quite well. You're executing them with confidence, and being mindful of how the spacing between the zigzagging sections ought to compress as we look farther back.

That general sense of confidence comes through reasonably well in your leaves, where you're focusing on not only capturing how they sit statically in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. I do still feel that you could probably push that fluidity further, and one trick I use to remind myself of how the flow line is meant to represent a sense of motion is to add a little arrowhead at its tip. Still, you're very much working in the right direction here.

You're also doing a good job of adding more complex edge detail, doing so while adhering closely to the underlying structure, and you appear to be adding those edge details piece by piece rather than with a single continuous line. Just one small thing - when building more complex leaf structures (those where you construct smaller leaf structures inside of the larger one), treat the simple silhouette of the larger leaf shape as the perimeter to which all of the smaller leaves' flow lines will extend. Right now you appear to be leaving more arbitrary gaps between the end of the flow lines and the larger overall perimeter. In construction, these kinds of arbitrary gaps need to be avoided.

Continuing onwards, your work on the branches appears to be following the instructions well, with your segments being extended fully halfway to the next ellipse (or at least in most cases - there are a few where you don't quite make it all the way, so be mindful of that). When drawing those ellipses, remember to apply the ghosting method, whose primary focus is on achieving a confident execution. Your ellipses are pretty decent, but there is some hesitation and rigidity to them that suggests that you may not be applying the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder as consistently as you should. Also, remember that you need to be drawing through them two full times before lifting your pen.

Onto your plant constructions, overall these are done quite well, but there are some issues I'll address:

  • A minor point, but when constructing your cylindrical flower pots, construct them around a central minor axis line and draw each necessary ellipse in its entirety. In cases like this one, again those ellipses should be drawn more confidently (and you should be drawing through them two full times). Additionally, there should be a complete ellipse defining the level of the soil, as well as another ellipse inset within the "mouth" of the pot to help capture the thickness of that rim. All in all, it's a matter of there being much more to be done in building out these flower pot structures.

  • There are quite a few leaves on this page where you're skipping the "simple leaf silhouette" step (step 2 of the leaf construction process) and jumping straight into more complex edge detail. In doing this, you basically have to solve multiple problems at once, instead of addressing one problem at a time. Splitting your brainpower up across all these tasks at once will inevitably make it harder to execute those marks correctly. Remember that construction is all about breaking things down into simpler problems that can be solved one at a time.

  • With your sunflower, you generally did a good job, but your cast shadows seem to be kind of inconsistent. They don't always seem to relate specifically to a particular leaf casting them (although I think that just might be due to you getting confused while keeping things straight in your head - not really a big deal, that stuff improves with practice). The other issue however is that you seem to have shadows being cast according to inconsistent light sources. Always keep the specific light source consistent, so shadows are cast to the left or to the right, but not both.

  • On pages like this one and to a lesser extent, this one, you definitely would have benefitted from giving your drawings more room on the page. I definitely get the impression that you've been very enthusiastic about cramming lots of drawings into each page, and for the most part it's been okay, because you were able to give them as much room as they required. These, however, definitely would have benefitted from simply having more room to construct the various structures required. Drawing smaller tends to limit our brain's capacity to think through spatial problems, and also makes it harder to engage our whole arm while drawing - especially as a beginner. It also tends to make us more susceptible to rushing, as you noticed with the potato plant. For the most part the cherry blossom was mostly fine, but I think just zeroing in on a specific section of the plant, rather than letting the reference image decide how much you're going to draw, would be better. No one is forcing you to draw everything you see in your reference - focus on how much you can fit on the page comfortably, and stick to that. This is especially true when dealing with plants that have a lot of repeating elements, where it may be better to just focus in on the specific structure of a few of those repeating sections.

Aside from those points, you are doing a great job. 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.
6:46 PM, Friday May 28th 2021

Thank you very much!

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