Hi,
Hope you've been well so far during this pandemic. Aside from the plant drew in assignment, can you advise how to draw flower which has many layer of leaves such as roses. The picture of it is attched on the link as well. Thanks in advance.
Starting with your arrows, you've drawn these with a good deal of confidence and fluidity. Just one thing - be sure to compress the gaps between the zigzagging sections as we look farther back in space, so as to better represent the depth of the scene, as shown here.
That confidence and fluidity carries over quite nicely into your arrows, where you've not only captured how they sit believably in space, but also how they flow through the space they occupy. When it comes to building up more complex edge detail on those leaves however, I did notice that you have a tendency to zigzag a single continuous stroke back and forth along that edge, effectively redrawing the simpler edge from the previous phase of construction. This is incorrect. As explained here, you should be building directly upon that simpler edge, using smaller individual strokes to come off that previous edge and return to it, adding only the parts that change. You can also see this demonstrated here on another student's work.
I am pleased to see that you're approaching more complex leaf structures correctly, by taking the concepts of construction and applying their principles, rather than trying to apply the same exact steps to, say, a maple leaf. I can see that you've built up several separate leaf shapes and combined them, which is spot on.
Continuing onto your branches exercise, this appears to by and large be applying the instructions correctly. The only adjustment I'd make in the future is to work with larger branches, simply because it'll help you engage your arm a little more easily, and will help give your brain more room to think through the spatial problems. As you get more comfortable working through these kinds of structures at a larger scale, you'll then have an easier time of making them smaller. Jumping right into a smaller scale can pose its own challenges (although honestly, you're doing pretty well regardless).
Moving onto your plant constructions, for the most part you've done quite well. I have just a few issues to call out.
As mentioned previously, be sure not to zigzag that edge detail on your leaves and petals. Everything builds upon the structures laid out previously.
On these two flowers you've got the flow lines for your petals stopping short of where the petals themselves actually extend. Be sure to have that flow line stop right at the tip of where you want your petal to go. Once in place, your petal should stop at the flow line's end, regardless of whether you want it to go further. Construction is all about making decisions one at a time, and sticking to them. The flow line determines how that leaf flows through space, and how long it will be. As long as we hold to these decisions, we can avoid the kinds of contradictions in our constructions that undermine the illusion of solidity.
On this plant you've gotten a bit too caught up in drawing the veins on those leaves as individual lines, in a manner that breaks away from the core principles of texture as introduced back in lesson 2. The veins themselves are forms - little tubes on the surface of the plant - and what we see are the shadows they cast on their surroundings. You can see an example of using shadow shapes to imply details like this here in the leaf exercise instructions. All textural marks should be drawn as shadow shapes, and we can stick to that by making a point of applying this two-step process, first outlining our intended shadows and then filling them in. This will also help us to focus more on the relationship between those shadows and the forms that cast them.
The last point I wanted to make was that on this last page, you definitely went way overboard and broke away from some of the principles introduced in lesson 2 - specifically, the fact that in this course we're generally staying away from any kind of form shading. The key thing here is that you got too caught up in the idea of detail/texture as being an opportunity to decorate your drawing. What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. 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. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.
As to your question about how to approach a rose, the key is to build up those petals around a cylinder. Other than that, you use the same kinds of steps. Here's a quick demo of how I would approach constructing a rose.
And with that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. All in all you've done a solid job, and should be ready to move on.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.
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