Hello SparkleCloud, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.
Arrows
Starting with your arrows you're drawing your marks with a good deal of confidence which helps solidify the feeling of fluidity that arrows posses as they move through all the three dimensions of the world they exist in. However your arrows have little to no foreshortening, make sure to explore the size difference between arrow segments more in order to make better use of the depth of the page and push your understanding of tridimensional space further.
Your usage of hatching helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space and further your own understanding of the tridimensional space these objects occupy, but do remember that your hatching lines must still follow the principles of ghosting and mark-making, they must have clear end and start points, be carefully planned and executed and not end at arbitrary points.
In general you're doing well, so keep tackling this exercise during your warm ups in order to take your understanding of arrows and 3D space further, experiment with the different ways arrows can twist and bend and move across space, try different rates of foreshortening and experiment with the negative space between overlaps, all of these will help you challenge yourself and develop your skills further.
Leaves
The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, it's good that you're not only trying to capture how these structures sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.
However there are also some unnatural bends present in your leaf structures. Keep in mind that even though leaves are very flexible structures, that mostly applies to their length and not their width. They're like a piece of paper, not a piece of rubber, they can fold and bend in a lot of ways, but they can't stretch or compress, and if we try to force them to they'll simply rip apart.
Another issue present in your leaves is that when you put contour lines on your forms they don't really communicate any new information. Those kinds of contour lines, the ones that sit on the surface of a single form, only serve to take a form that can already be interpreted as 3 dimensional, and clarify it, while they're useful for introducing the concept of a contour line in practice it can be really hard to apply them incorrectly, if even 1 of your lines isn't in sync with the others the solidity of your structure will suffer. As such it's best to focus only on contours that communicate intersections.
You're not really making use of edge detail in your pages, edge detail would have greatly helped you further communicate the form of your structures and how they move through space, but by not adding it they're left very simple, so make sure to add edge detail whenever possible, and remember that only the last step of leaf construction - texture - is optional.
Branches
Moving on to your branches they are coming along really decently made as you're generally following the instructions for the exercise, but they can still be improved. While it's good to see that you're drawing your edges in segments you're not always extending said segment completely up to the halfway point between ellipses, and sometimes you extend them past the halfway point mark, these issues cause you to either partially remove the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve in these structures , or lose control over your marks because you've extended them too much.
So remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully up to the halfway point to the third ellipse, afterwards you'll start a new segment, making sure to place your pen at the second ellipse and repeat this pattern until your entire branch is complete.
There are a lot of visible tails present in these branch structures, while this is a very common mistake we can attempt to mitigate it by limiting the amount of ellipses in our branches, by spacing them further apart we'll allow for a bigger length of runway between ellipses, and ensure a smoother, more seamless transition between marks.
For ellipses it's good to see that you're making an attempt to always draw through them twice, as that allows for a smoother mark overall. When it comes to your application of the ellipse degree shift to your branches it can be improved, as it stands your degrees are too consistent and hardly change which is a mistake that flattens your structures. Remember that as a form shifts in relation to the viewer, so will the degree of the ellipses within that structure also shift.
Plant Construction Section
And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are generally coming along well made, as you're following the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson which allows you to construct really solid looking and believably tridimensional structures. I can see a good developing sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.
However there are some issues present in these pages which are holding you back from your full potential. So here are the points you should keep in mind whenever you tackle these exercises again so that you can continue to develop your skills.
First things first, it's difficult to truly gauge your pages, because you've mostly only drawn plants from the demos.
Demos are like training wheels, they help you learn and understand how these construction methods can be used together in a variety of ways in order to construct certain tridimensional structures, but just like with learning how to ride a bike, you won't know how much you know until you take the training wheels out - and then fall on your face. But it's okay, because the next time you try it it'll be easier because you already have an idea of what you should do.
However if you never take the training wheels out, you won't develop yourself to your full potential.
On top of this it's also strongly recommended that you do not draw earlier phases of construction with fainter lines and later ones with thicker strokes, as this is going to encourage you to approach construction as though you're redrawing everything at every step.
When drawing something with construction what we're doing is adding building blocks at each different step, using our first forms as a foundation in order to simplify our structures. In this way there's no need to alter that foundation, it should be able to stand for itself when you're done, without being redrawn, traced over, or having it's silhouette modified with 2d shapes on to of it.
Always keep in mind that the construction methods and techniques introduced in this course must always be applied to your work, as they're tools which will help you construct much tighter and solid looking structures, there are times where you deviate from the construction methods by not drawing your leaf structures with thw correct leaf construction method. Remember that they're not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.
Final Thoughts
You're starting to move in the right direction but since you've only tackled the demos, it's difficult to gauge whether you truly understand how to apply these construction methods and techniques to your own construction.
I'm not going to be passing you onto the next lesson yet, these concepts will be highly important in the following lessons, make sure to revisit any relevant material mentioned here, once you're finished please reply with:
1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.
2 plant construction pages.
Next Steps:
1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.
2 plant construction pages.
hi,
thanks for the critique. I tried to apply them but I know there is still room for improvement.
Thanks
Hello SparkleCloud, thank you for getting back to me with your revisions.
There are still some unnatural bends in your leaves, but this is something that can be worked on by practicing it during your warm ups and making use of reference
One last thing about your leaves— it's not uncommon for students to confuse what they're trying to achieve when adding marks to the surface of their leaves, as you've done here. It's important that you consider whether you're trying to add artificial contour lines to just help convey how that surface flows through space, or whether you're trying to capture the actual vein texture present along that surface. If you're drawing artificial contour lines, you shouldn't be trying to mimic a branching vein pattern. If you're drawing the veins proper, then you shouldn't be doing so with lines, and should instead be using cast shadows to imply the presence of those textural forms as discussed back in lesson 2.
Moving on to your branches you are deviating from the instructions for this exercise because you're not following the instructions for how to draw the edges as shown in the exercise instructions. While it's good to see that you're drawing your your edges in segments, you're not extending said segments completely up to the halfway point between ellipses, which removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve in these structures, and prevents you from utizing compound strokes— one of the main points for this exercise.
Something that causes this to happen is that your ellipses are too far apart, take the time to ghost your marks on a plain piece of paper and see when your ghosted lines start to waver and become uncomfortable to draw, then stick to drawing ellipses at the distance that's comfortable for you to ghost, and slowly increase that distance over time.
And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which still need some work.
Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that in some of your constructions you don't draw through some of your forms, such as leaves or branch like structures, this limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise. Not drawing through your forms means relying on your observation skills, instead of engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and truly trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, where it comes from, what it attaches to.
Your mushrooms could also use a clearer and more defined construction for the cap of the structure. Currently you use only a single ellipse shape to define the structure, but ellipses are two dimensional shapes, by themselves they will flatten a structure.
Keep in mind that mushrooms are cylindrical structures, this doesn't apply only to the body of the plant but also the "cap", some have a flatter cap, while others have a sort of dome shape. Regardless, you should construct it fully as shown in the kind oyster demo, using at least two ellipses to define the tridimensionality of the structure - the base that will attach to the body of the mushroom, and the top part which defines the edge of the structure.
And lastly, let's take a look at your textures, where your textures are looking very explicit with big areas of black and shadows that could have been designed in a more dynamic way and implicit way.
So remember that in Drawabox, texture isn’t about making your work look pretty or aesthetic. Instead, it’s about accurately representing what’s physically present in your reference. The goal is to understand how each form exists in 3D space and how it casts shadows on surfaces. By analyzing the reference closely, you'll be able to translate it into your construction.
The shape of the shadow is important because it shows the relationship between the form and the surface it’s on. We need to think carefully about how to design a shadow shape that feels dynamic and communicates 3D space effectively. It’s harder than just focusing on making your work look nice, but this method will help you strengthen your spatial reasoning skills. This also means that by considering the tridimensionality of the form we must consider the transitions from light to dark that your texture would have as the form shifts away in space and if affected differently by the light.
As shown in this diagram, depending on how far the form is from the light source, the angle of the light rays will hit the object at shallower angles the farther away they are, resulting in the shadow itself being projected farther. This gives us the logical grounds to say that despite two forms being identical, they don't have to cast identical shadows - and therefore we can control where we want shadows to be longer or shorter, without changing the nature of the texture being conveyed.
By following this approach, you’ll focus on conveying texture more efficiently, using fewer lines and less ink, while sticking to the mark-making techniques from Lesson 2. Take some time to review the reminders to solidify your understanding of texture.
In general your work is moving in the right direction, but you need to spend some more time on applying the construction methods and techniques to your work.
I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.
Next Steps:
Don't forget to add these exercises to your list of warm ups.
Move on to Lesson 4.
Thanks for your reply. I will try to get better before jumping into lesson 4.
Michael Hampton is one of my favourite figure drawing teachers, specifically because of how he approaches things from a basis of structure, which as you have probably noted from Drawabox, is a big priority for me. Gesture however is the opposite of structure however - they both exist at opposite ends of a spectrum, where structure promotes solidity and structure (and can on its own result in stiffness and rigidity), gesture focuses on motion and fluidity, which can result in things that are ephemeral, not quite feeling solid and stable.
With structure and spatial reasoning in his very bones, he still provides an excellent exploration of gesture, but in a visual language in something that we here appreciate greatly, and that's not something you can find everywhere.
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