Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

12:47 AM, Sunday January 3rd 2021

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Hi everyone! I finished my plants. Any comments are appreciated:)

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3:08 AM, Tuesday January 5th 2021

Starting with your arrows, these are really well done. You've drawn them with a lot of confidence and captured an excellent sense of flow and fluidity, really nailing how they move through all three dimensions of space.

Moving onto your leaves, for the most part this sense of fluidity has definitely carried over quite well, helping you capture not only how the leaves sit in the world, but also how they move through the space they occupy. That said, it's very clear that you're prioritizing the idea of detail and texture very highly, and in a way that does not necessarily work out as well as it could. While you are still adhering to the principles of the lesson so far, building up your leaves in a structured manner, you do seem to have a lot of sketchier, fainter lines, rather than having each and every mark you draw come through confidently and clearly.

Moving onto your branches, it's much the same. You're following the exercise instructions pretty well, but I'm noticing that there are these extra faint marks around the actual darker ones, which suggest that you're not just drawing one mark per line. It is incredibly important that you apply the ghosting method to each and every mark you make, committing to making each one dark and confident on the page. No sketching lightly or trying to make marks without committing yourself.

Moving onto your plant constructions, we definitely seem much more of this in play in some of your drawings. For example, on the left side of this page, you've very clearly broken your drawing into two distinct parts. There's the underdrawing, where you've allowed yourself to be more loose and explorative, since those marks are so faint you're not actually committed to any of them. Then you draw back over them with a 'clean up pass', using darker lines and tracing back over those you'd already drawn.

This is not an approach you should be using in this course, as discussed back in these notes from Lesson 2's form intersections. While you're definitely drawing more confidently, and not encountering the same kind of wobbling, it is an approach that fundamentally contradicts the principles of what this course is after. I know drawing your marks dark and confidently from the start can be quite intimidating, but you will get used to it if you allow yourself to.

For the most part, the rest of your lesson is looking fine - although there are certain things I can't judge clearly due to the fact that many of your construction lines are too faint to see clearly. As such, there are cases where I don't think you're skipping steps, but it's still a possibility.

So, I'm going to assign some additional pages below, so you can demonstrate that you can indeed draw just as well without employing an underdrawing, or fainter lines.

Next Steps:

Please submit two more pages of plant constructions.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
2:58 AM, Wednesday January 6th 2021

Hi Uncomfortable! Thank your for your critique. i have made two additional pages. This time i tried not to use fainter lines. My old pen was dieing so i think it was also the reason. With a new one it feels much better. Two pages of plant construction: https://imgur.com/a/K5BgNcF

3:22 AM, Friday January 8th 2021

This is much better! There's still room for improvement in terms of overall control, and simply putting more time into planning and preparing each mark (using the ghosting method) will likely help with this. Students sometimes think they're expected to complete their drawings at some arbitrary speed or in some time limit, but that is not the case. Investing as much time as every individual mark requires to be done to the best of your current ability is your only responsibility.

Anyway, your overall constructions are definitely coming along well, so you can work on tightening up your linework in the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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