Check Out NMA    Learn More About our Partnership
Close and Enjoy Drawabox Ad-free
View Full Submission View Parent Comment
6:35 PM, Friday February 11th 2022

There are no deadlines, and thus no delays - it's fine for students to take as much time as they need, but it is very important that the time is invested in executing the work to the best of your current ability, in going back through the material from the lesson and from the feedback you've been given, and applying it as closely and attentively as you can.

Looking through your work here, I have a number of concerns:

  • Your linework is in some ways still a rather rushed, leaving little gaps between the edge detail you add and the silhouette to which it's being added. This is not a huge issue and one I expect will improve with practice, as long as you invest as much time as you need to execute each mark to the best of your current ability, rather than basing how much time you spend on each mark on how much time you actually have that moment. It's quite important that as we build up detail, that we do so by creating seamless extensions of, or cuts into, the existing silhouette.

  • You're skipping constructional steps as explained here in the lesson notes when tackling more complex leaf structures.

  • When building up edge detail, you sometimes try to add way more complexity than can strictly be added, adding many separate spikes before returning to the existing silhouette. This should be handled in successive stages of construction, only ever adding as simple a mark as you can. To that, you can of course add another, and another - construction is a cumulative process that achieves greater complexity one small step at a time, as shown here on another student's work.

  • I'm also a little puzzled at all the random little points that seem to surround your linework. Not sure what purpose they're meant to serve.

  • I've marked out the points above here on directly on your work.

  • In my original feedback I really stressed the importance of taking full advantage of the space available to you on the page, but for this foxglove which is loaded with all kinds of little elements, you definitely could have drawn it at least 50% bigger without capturing any less of the plant. Of course, you also have the option of focusing in on a specific area of a plant instead of necessarily capturing the whole thing - this can be useful when you have a lot of the same elements repeated, and thus would benefit more from studying a specific cluster at a much larger scale, rather than the whole thing. Remember that our reference images are just a source of information - there's no rule stating that we have to reproduce the entirety of the reference image we choose.

  • In the last drawing, I noticed that some of your edge detail zigzagged back and forth across the silhouette's edge, which is another point I did call out in my previous feedback.

None of these issues are huge concerns - I certainly want to see you demonstrate that you understand how you're skipping steps and such - but as a whole you are not far from having this one marked as complete. What I am most concerned about however is how you're executing your linework, as it does not demonstrate that you're investing nearly as much time as these drawings individually demand.

Some students get the impression that for some reason they're expected to finish a given drawing in one sitting, that the moment they get up their drawing cannot be touched again. But there's no basis for this - you are welcome to, encouraged to, and required to give each drawing as much time as it requires. When that means spreading a single drawing across different sittings and days, then that's simply what's required of you.

Given that there are quite a few points you missed from the lesson notes and my previous feedback, I'm going to ask that you complete the same revisions again.

Next Steps:

Please submit 1 page of leaves, and 2 pages of plant constructions. Remember that every structural mark should be executed using the ghosting method, and engage your whole arm from the shoulder.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
11:54 PM, Tuesday May 24th 2022

Hi, here's my 2nd remake: https://imgur.com/a/hVg5IYY

I'm writing some notes and doubts i had down here, i hope i'm not writing too much as i've been warned about writing long self-critiques on a previous homework submission.

Notes and doubts:

  1. The points that you saw in my previous remake were used to "plan" my lines. I would place them and imagine the line going through them and if the line didn't fit my plans, i would just place more points. In this remake i avoided them as much as possible

  2. In the leaves exercise there is one leaf (i indicated it) where i add edge detail by adding and subtracting and using the same line\mark; that is intentional since i felt that it was the only way to match the reference

  3. There are 2 butterfly bush because: 1) i felt i didn't draw the first big enough 2) wasn't sure how to approach it (i also wonder if it would have been more appropriate to approach it like a texture, with a part "shaded" where i draw all the little flowers and the rest in the light, left blank with just a broken silhouette)

  4. In the butterfly bush close up there are some flowers where i've drawn the flow lines for the petals. Ultimately i discarded this approach as i thought it added too many lines.

  5. As for the american bittersweet i had problems with the leaves in particular. How am i supposed to treat the leaf's stem when it is in the foreground? i ended treating it like a branch but i'm unsure about my choice here

4:07 PM, Wednesday May 25th 2022

Overall I feel you're moving in the right direction overall. Your leaves exercises are well done, and your american bittersweet is solidly done as well. For the butterfly bush however, you ended up taking a wrong turn. From what I can see, you identified the great increase in complexity to what you were trying to draw, and decided that this should be approached in a different manner to simplify the problem.

Unfortunately an increase in complexity does not inherently imply that a different approach should be used. Sometimes a drawing is just more demanding, and either you need to give it as much time as it individually requires (in this case to construct each petal on each flower using the methodology shown in the instructions), or you simply need to pick a different kind of plant.

At least, that's for the purposes of what we're doing in this course, where each drawing is an exercise in spatial reasoning. The goal is not to simply produce a replica of your reference image - it's about applying the assigned procedures in order to help further develop the way in which your brain thinks through 3d space.

That's not to say that there aren't situations where you could tackle this one with a greater focus on texture - that is, treating the structure itself as though it's a simpler cylindrical structure, then focusing only on drawing the shadows that the petals would cast upon one another. I should be clear though that this isn't just a matter of putting down random marks and hoping to capture the "impression" of those petals - rather, it'd require you to think about and understand the nature of each individual petal, and how they relate to the other surfaces around them, so that you can design each individual cast shadow based on that understanding. This would actually be harder than simply tackling each petal with construction.

What you did here was more a matter of approaching it with explicit marks (so not the implicit markmaking we use for texture) but without holding to the core principle of construction, being that we start as simple as possible and build up complexity in successive stages.

Anyway, I'm not going to assign additional revisions over that, as overall I can see that you're headed in the right direction. Just consider the references you choose to work with. There's no shortcuts in this course, and so if you pick something that has a thousand tiny flowers on it, that's inevitably going to mean a ton more work for you.

You may consider this lesson complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
7:05 PM, Wednesday May 25th 2022

Thank you for your review. So my mistake was not prioritizing enough the constructional method, and for future lessons i need to prioritize applying the teachings above all else, is that correct? Because when it comese to the close up, i ended up not doing the flow lines only because i was thinking about contrast, and how about there were so many lines that started to attract too much attention

P.S. out of curiosity, in my next homework assignments, should i include the photos i used as a reference for my drawings? i see other students doing it sometime, and i wonder if i should do the same

View more comments in this thread
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 I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Sakura Pigma Microns

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.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.