Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

6:14 PM, Friday August 12th 2022

DrawABox Lesson 3 Submission - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/Y5MAI6V.jpg

Post with 17 views. DrawABox Lesson 3 Submission

Hello! Thanks for reading my submission! Took me a long while to get it finished, as usual cx

I added the reference pictures alongside the drawings, except for the last one, which was an incompatible format

Hope you have a wonderful day! You're the best :3

0 users agree
6:24 PM, Monday August 15th 2022

Jumping in with the arrows, you've done a great job of drawing these with a great deal of confidence - and I'm pleased to see that this carries over to your addition of line weight at the zigzagging areas as well, as some students do get very stiff and focus more on tracing back over the lines. Keeping things confident helps to push the sense of fluidity with which the structures are moving through all three dimensions of space. The only thing I'd change when adding line weight is that if you put the mark down and it doesn't end up where you want it, try not to get into the habit of trying again. You get a shot, sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn't, but you don't want to get in the habit of reflexively going back over it until one falls where you need it to.

Anyway - focusing on that confidence, it carries over really nicely into 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. In regards to how you're building up edge detail, it looks like you're adding large numbers of bumps together, at least in some cases, and it results in areas where you zigzag back and forth the existing edge, which as explained here needs to be avoided. Be sure to draw each individual bump with a separate stroke, so as to maintain a tight, specific relationships with the existing edge, so that each step of construction involves actually modifying the singular cohesive silhouette of the structure you're building upon - rather than trying to redraw or replace the existing structure.

Lastly, I did notice that you appeared to be filling in areas with black in a somewhat more arbitrary fashion - it's unclear what exactly you're using to decide where the filled black goes, but you'll want to review these notes about what we're doing as we build up textural detail.

Continuing onto your branches, your work here is coming along quite well! You're allowing for a healthy overlap between the segments (although I would advise you to try to use the last chunk of the previous segment as a runway, overlapping it more directly before continuing onto the next target as shown here).

Moving onto your actual plant constructions, you have by and large applied the techniques from the lesson quite well. I have a few points I want to call out to help keep you continue to get the most out of the exercises in this course, however:

  • In this drawing, I feel that your construction starts to devolve a bit into more of a "collection of lines on a page" simply because of the number of stray marks that appear to be floating around. When doing the kinds of constructions we do in this course, try and always focus on everything you introduce being its own complete, self-enclosed silhouette - avoid marks that linger on their own. I can also definitely see the zigzagging I addressed earlier - I know it can be tedious to draw a ton of individual little spiky protrusions, but ultimately this course requires one thing of you - that every form you construct, every shape you draw, and every mark you execute is given as much time as you require to do it to the best of your current ability. Often this means investing more time than you may want to.

  • Keep the relationships between your phases of construction tight and specific, and avoid arbitrary gaps between them. So for example, on this daisy drawing, the petals should end right at the tip of their corresponding flow line. You've left quite a few gaps of variable sizes between the end of the flow lines and the tip of the petals.

  • A minor point, but remember that when we're getting into detail, our focus is on defining (by implying) the textural forms that are present on the surface of the object. It seems you might be more generally looking at decoration as your goal - which essentually comes to doing whatever you can to make the drawing more visually pleasing and interesting. this has led you, on this page at least, into form shading which as mentioned here should not play a role in our constructions. Be sure to go through the list of reminders from that page, which I'd linked earlier.

Anyway, all in all, your work is coming along well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
2:37 PM, Tuesday August 16th 2022

Thank you Uncomfy for your feedback! I'll work on being more intentional with my lines, specially in the texturing phases, and focus on cast shadows and separste strokes on the sillhoette.

In the fern drawing I tried representing the water droplets on the surface of the plant with shadows, but the refractive nature of water made it a bit hard to understand the diffuse shadows around it. But I remember I studied a similar wet surface back in lesson 2, in which the shadows cast around the droplets. The little protrusions on the plant really did feel form shaded, I'll look into that. Maybe starting the 25 textures challeneg would benefit me on the cast shadow problem!

Anyway, thank you so much for your insights

The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Cottonwood Arts Sketchbooks

Cottonwood Arts Sketchbooks

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.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.