Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

3:34 PM, Sunday November 28th 2021

Imgur: The magic of the Internet

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

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered enterta...

Hello, I'm looking for critiques! I accidentally misread the plant construction exercise (thought it said we need 8 plants, not 8 pages) so I jumped into texturing them a bit too early. I struggled with shading the agave cactus - on my study the cast shadows look like they're sticking to forms, but the reference shows that as well to some degree. Is it better to make up cast shadows that suit the drawing better, or just copy the reference directly?

2 users agree
5:55 PM, Sunday November 28th 2021

HI, I'll critique your homework.

Starting with your arrows your doing a great job here drawing them with confidence, and capturing the fluidity with which they move through space, also the adding of lineweight is pretty good and you don't hesitate when applying it.

Your initial confidence doesn't carry over very well to the next exercise, here the results vary form case to case, there are many good things here, for expample you're applying the core principles of the leaf construction process to more complex structures with many sub-leaves. But the most important observation here is that you are zigzaging edge detail in some cases, avoid this as it really undermines the fluidity of your leaves.

Continuing on to the branches exercise, you are doing pretty well, drawing through your ellipses and changing the degree of these, but there are some things to call out.

Remember that you have to extend each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, helping to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next. Looking at your homework I can see some cases where you didn't go through this process, remember to keep practicing.

Moving on to your plant constructions you are doing a pretty good job here, avoiding great levels of compexity, at least when it comes to the construction, I want to address the use of texture separately.

With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information,and the marks we draw to convey it are all cast shadows. Here take a look at this demo, that may help you.

The other two however, end up ignoring certain points - like the fact that back in Lesson 2, we mentioned that we would not incorporate form shading into our drawings for this course - and instead went well beyond just capturing cast shadows. That's really the deciding factor - those that turned out well, basically just focused on cast shadows, whereas those that didn't blended the use of form shading and cast shadows together. As a result, they also ended up being much more visually confusing.

Next Steps:

I think that you can move on, as long as you keep practicing, good luck and sorry for any misspellings.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
8:20 PM, Sunday November 28th 2021

Hello! Thank you very much for the critique, it is immensely helpful! I struggle a lot with texture, you managed to eloquently explain what I need to focus on. I'll try my best to correct my mistakes in future warmups.

Below this point is mostly ads. Indie projects, and tool/course recommendations from us.
This section is reserved for low-cost advertising space for art related indie projects.
With how saturated the market is, it is tough for such projects to get eyes on their work.
By providing this section, we hope to help with that.
If you'd like to advertise here, you can do so through comicad.net
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 we've used ourselves, or know to be of impeccable quality. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Ellipse Master Template

Ellipse Master Template

This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.

I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.

No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.

We use cookies in conjunction with Google Analytics to anonymously track how our website is used.

This data is not shared with any other parties or sold to anyone. They are also disabled until consent is provided by clicking the button below, and this consent can be revoked at any time by clicking the "Revoke Analytics Cookie Consent" link in our website footer.

You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.