Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants
11:12 PM, Sunday February 5th 2023
Thank you in advance to anyone who has some time to spare for a critique.
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9:48 PM, Sunday February 26th 2023
Hi, Dr Scrapjack, and congratulations on finishing lesson 3! You have an excellent showing!
Organic Arrows
Great job with the organic arrows – you showed tapering, the lines are confident, and shading appropriate. You occasionally overdid your line weight at the bends, keep it more subtle.
Leaves
Your leaves look flowing and natural. I can see that you carefully added the detail, applying the tip about cutting into forms. The only thing that might have been better was doing the right edge of the top left leaf additively as well (so we get its silhouette), the official description had a 3D example, so that was probably slightly confusing. Nice work with the textures! You really tried to focus on the shadows.
Branches
You aligned all of your ellipses to the minor axis, went through each one 2 times and even changed the degrees a bit. Excellent! You should work on ghosting more as I can see a lot of the compound stroke tails, but this mistake is expected, and will disappear with practice.
Plants
Mushroom – nice job with changing the ellipse degrees and applying what you’ve learned in the branches exercise (compounding your strokes).
Daisy – looks pretty good!
Lily flower – I like that you used an ellipse to place your petals correctly. The stem has some floating ellipses in it, try to keep the line touching them – these are its contour ellipses, they can’t be on the inside.
Oleander flower – this one is really good! You even applied the branches and contour ellipses exercise on the buds. Well done!
Horn of plenty – beautiful! Really nice texture, and three-dimensionality. You used the contour curves and ellipses really well!
Soy bean – again, I can see floating ellipses in the stems. Great job breaking the silhouette and applying the texture!
Poppy – this one has better stems, the edges are more aligned to the ellipses.
Venus fly trap – beautiful! Great use of the direction arrows and leaves exercise!
Just from this, I see you did your best on all the lessons so far! Brilliant work!
Next Steps:
You can move on to lesson 4!
10:11 PM, Sunday February 26th 2023
Thank you for your time and patience! You are right about the ellipses, I still struggle a bit with them, especially the smaller ones when trying to draw them from the shoulder, I will definitely try to pay more attention to them. Thank you again!
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