Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants
8:31 AM, Sunday August 29th 2021
I added additional pages of arrows and branches practice as I wasn't feeling confident enough in them after the first page.
Starting with your arrows, you've got a bit of a mixed bag, but generally you're doing well. It looks like your underlying linework is good, and confidently executed, but when you get into adding line weight, you tend to apply it with more hesitation and uncertainty. Remember first and foremost that even line weight should be executed using the ghosting method, focusing on a confident stroke. Furthermore, you don't have to try and cover a significant area with line weight - reserve it for where forms overlap one another, like right at the area where the ribbon folds over itself.
I totally get that adding line weight can be tricky - but don't focus on changing your approach to markmaking to improve the chances of "success". Everything here is an exercise - so focus on executing the marks using the ghosting method, with a confident stroke, even if you risk missing in doing so. It's about the practice you get in the process.
Moving onto your leaves, these are for the most part well done. You've captured how the leaves flow through space, not only how they sit statically in the world. When building up your edge detail, you've generally done this well, except in this one you appeared to draw singular continuous strokes that zigzagged back and forth. As explained here, be sure to draw each individual spike as its own separate mark. You did this correctly in the others.
Continuing onto your branches, these are mostly well done save for one main issue - you need to be extending your segments fully halfway to the next ellipse, as shown here. You're really limiting the overlap between the segments, which is important to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next.
Onto your plant constructions, you've continued the trend of largely doing a good job with these, and respecting the core principle of construction throughout these pages, although there are a few minor points I want to raise:
When drawing anything, always focus first and foremost on giving the first drawing on a page as much room as it requires. I can see here that you were pretty enthusiastic about squeezing in a lot of different drawings on each page. That's certainly laudable, but when we artificially limit how much room a drawing will have on a page, we can actually interfere with our brain's capacity to think through spatial problems, while also making it harder to execute marks confidently from our shoulder. This results in more clumisiness to our linework - for example, if you look at the additional edge detail on these petals, your additional strokes weren't quite flowing seamlessly into the existing edge, but rather missed it slightly. You'd have definitely had a better time of it had the flower been drawn larger. So, give the first drawing as much room as it needs - then when it's done, assess whether another drawing will fit in the room that remains. If another will fit, go for it - otherwise, it's okay to just leave it to a single drawing as long as you're making good use of the page.
I am seeing a bit of a tendency to start out your constructions with fainter, lighter lines, and then to gradually get darker as you push forwards. As a rule, keep your line weight consistent throughout all the stages of construction. Once your construction is established, you can go back in to add an additional pass to add line weight in specific areas, where overlaps occur between your forms. You can see this in action in this example of two overlapping leaves. Avoid tracing back over whole lengths of existing lines to make them thicker.
So, keep those points in mind - but you may consider this lesson complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
Thank you for the feedback!
Stan Prokopenko's had been teaching figure drawing as far back as I can remember, even when I was just a regular student myself. It's safe to say that when it comes to figure drawing, his tutelage is among the best.
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