7:39 AM, Thursday January 6th 2022
To answer your question, what's stated here in Lesson 2 on the topic of shading does indeed apply to the entire course. That is, that we are not to incorporate shading into our drawings here. What we're doing in the texture phase of drawings (should we choose to add it) serves a specific purpose - it's not actually just to put arbitrary decoration on our drawings, but rather to use the specific shadow shapes we lay down to imply the presence of specific textural forms.
Ultimately, that you feel unable to shade, is by design. 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.
Circling back to this concept of texture being made up of shadow shapes cast by specific forms onto the surfaces around them essentially does mean that what we consider texture here is very time consuming, and goes beyond simply looking at your reference and attempting to draw what you see. As with the greater overall construction, it all comes back to understanding how things sit in 3D space, and how they relate to one another within it.
Anyway, jumping right in with your arrows, you're handling these fairly well, in that you're drawing most of them with a good bit of confidence, which helps to capture the fluidity with which they move through the world. I would however avoid the kind of staggered chicken scratching you employed in this one. That sense of confidence from your other arrows does carry over fairly well into your leaves, helping to capture not only how they sit statically in the world, but also how they move through the space they occupy.
That said, there are a few issues of concern:
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First and foremost, there's a lot of empty space on this page. Either opt to draw your leaves larger (which can help give our brains more space to think through spatial problems, while also making it easier to engage our whole arm when drawing), or make use of that space by drawing more leaves.
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Secondly, you end up running into the issue explained here of zigzagging your edge detail a fair bit. This results in a much weaker relationship between the different phases of construction. Construction is all about building upon what was there previously, right off that existing structure. What we don't want to necessarily do is outright redraw the leaf by stamping a new one right on top of it. There needs to be tight, specific relationships between each phase of construction.
Continuing onto your branches, your work here is fairly well done, though there are two recommendations that I have to offer:
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Firstly, be sure to extend each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse as explained here. This helps us to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one segment to the next.
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Secondly, right now your approach is resulting in little tails. While that's not a huge problem, it does help a fair bit if we actually use that last chunk of the previous segment as a sort of "runway", overlapping it directly for our next stroke before shooting off to the next target, rather than drawing where the previous stroke ought to have been. This helps us take account for our mistakes, and address them directly, whereas if we simply ignore them, those mistakes will linger for longer. Of course, this will also make things more difficult in the short term, but it will result in more rapid development of those skills.
Finally, moving onto your plant constructions, overall you've done a pretty decent job, though there are some things I'd still like to call out:
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For the white eridens, you jumped a little too quickly to drawing all of the little complex edges as shown here. Instead, you should starting with a much simpler form - like a sausage - and then adding those little bits to its silhouette in a later step.
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For the pine tree, drawing each branch as a separate "leaf structure", and then drawing each individual needle inside of it (as shown here for the more complex leaf structures) would allow you to break down the construction further, in line with the principle of starting as simple as possible and gradually getting more complex.
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The tendency to zizgag your edge detail does tend to persist throughout your leaves and petals here.
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Similarly, as mentioned with your leaves, try not to leave too much empty space. Most of your plants were fine, but there are some pages like this one and this one (as well as some others) where there was a ton of blank space left over. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. In artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.
All in all I do think you're headed in the right direction, but remember above all else that the drawings we're doing for this course are exercises. Our focus is not on creating a nice drawing, but rather to go through a specific approach that takes each drawing and turns it into a 3D puzzle for our brains to solve. In solving each of these puzzles, we gradually flesh out our brain's internal model of 3D space.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'm going to assign a few additional pages for you to apply what I've called out here.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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1 page of the leaves exercise
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2 pages of plant constructions