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4:08 PM, Wednesday July 12th 2023
Hello,
Good job on completing this lesson. I have a few comments to make about your work:
Your arrows can be a bit flat sometimes. A good example of an arrow you did is the arrow on the bottom right. Something like this is ideal. Some of the turns on the other arrows can be flat (like the one under the top leftmost arrow, 3rd curve from the arrowhead). For this exercise, this should be avoided, as it's good to maintain a feeling of 3-D volume with the arrow while making it move through space (the latter of which you have a good understanding of). It's good to visualize how these forms appear to flow on top of each other.
Your leaves demonstrate good understanding of how flat forms flow through space. One thing to keep in mind (of which isn't the focus, but it's something I feel I should mention) is that textures, while they run across a form's surface, also bend and flow with a form.
(I don't know what your reference looks like, so take this with a grain of salt)
Take the leaf with the "ignore" comment as an example. I'm assuming that the area surrounded by the black hatching is supposed to be the middle area of the leaf. Comparing how it's drawn with how the leaf as a whole looks, the middle area looks as if it's ending at the edge of the leaf, rather than the stem area. Keep in mind how, since the leaf is flowing in on itself, the texture would follow suite and appear to be bending alongside the leaf.
Overall, your branches are good. Next time, try to vary the degrees of your ellipses more, making branches turn more in space.
For the plants you did outside of the demos, I'd keep in mind how each leaf and/or petal flows in space, as some of them could appear to be a little flat (see your pomegranate plant). Again, I don't know what material you referenced, but even if what you drew looked like the leaves and petals in the reference material, still think about how they can flow and overlap in space. Don't be afraid to draw through your forms!
Also, remember that, when connecting tube-like forms (like branches), you want to connect segments by using spheres. It's to give us a better understanding on how these things can connect to eachother while also being able to have that natural-feeling "flow" to them (how branches in real life aren't just cylinders). We want everything in a construction to feel cohesive and solid, and these spheres work to maintain that solidity.
Congrats for sticking through until the end of the lesson!
Next Steps:
- Move on to lesson 4
6:03 PM, Friday July 14th 2023
Thank you for leaving me advice! I also noticed that all the leaves on my pomegranate plant were extremely flat. I tried making up for for those flat leaves with the final drawing which had a more 3d feel for the petals of the flower.
As for the shading that I did for the leaf where I marked ignore, I tend to get carried away sometimes with shading. I know uncomfortable always says to not worry about detail too much, but I didn't listen and here I am. I'll make sure to focus more on forms first since the shading was supposed to be following a stem that was wrongly placed which cause the weird feel.
Lastly, the reference I used for the branches in the pomegranate plant were relatively thin, so I didn't bother using the sphere to connect the cylinders. This was a mistake as it left the branches feeling flat and lifeless. I incorporated the sphere in lesson 4 with insects like the stick grasshopper which have bodies that mimic branches.
Again, thank you for the critique.
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Sakura Pigma Microns
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.