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Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

3:34 PM, Sunday November 28th 2021

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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?

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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.

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