Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

1:30 PM, Wednesday September 23rd 2020

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By using the "volume" arrows with the combination of simple forms, drawing plants and other things I draw outside of Drawabox as part of the 50% rule has been much easier with the help of visualizing simple forms in real three-dimensional space. I still need a hell of a lot of practice with grasping real forms that interact with each other, but I'll look into that as part as my warmup later on. There's still some things, like the rose in particular, that confuses me with it's sheer amount of individual small forms that blends with each other. During the optional part of applying the textures to the last 4 plants, I also realized that I have trouble seeing actual details, and even more so of knowing how to interpretate that onto the drawing itself. All in all a good lesson, I can definitely see myself using these later in my warmups.

On another note, the idea of using arrows as the "spine" of forms with volume has helped me out greatly in my private projects, specifically when I was working with animating and drawing fire particles which seem to be volumes of forms blending into, and dissipating, from each other.

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2:17 AM, Friday September 25th 2020

Starting with your arrows, these are definitely flowing with an excellent sense of motion and fluidity. One thing that I do need you to keep in mind however is that right now the negative space between the zigzagging sections does not appear to contract/compress as we look farther back, suggesting that it is not being subjected to foreshortening. As shown here, applying foreshortening to the gaps in between is an important part of showing depth in the scene.

That sense of fluidity and motion in your arrows carries over quite nicely into your leaves. You do however have something of a mixed bag when it comes to adding that more complex edge detail to your leaves. In some cases you're doing a pretty good job, but there are a couple there in the center like this one where you break away from the principles of construction quite a bit. As shown here, those little spikes all come off an edge that you have not drawn. Construction is all about breaking problems down into a series of stages. First we establish the major edge, then we add the little bits of variation to it. In your case you ignored the initial leaf you'd constructed, and then attempted to handle the major edge and the variation all at once.

We see this same issue in the petals for this flower, where you've outright skipped solving the simple problems first, and jumped into a greater level of complexity without the appropriate scaffolding in structure in place.

You appear not to have included your branches exercise. In the future please double check that all of the exercises are included in your submission and that nothing is missing.

Continuing onto your plant constructions, along with the matter I pointed out above, there are a few other issues I'd like to point out. Overall you're not doing particularly badly, but the skipping of key constructional phases in regards to your leaves does show that you don't quite understand how construction is meant to work as a whole. It's not always that way - for example, if we look at this lily you handle construction just fine on some of the petals to the left, but not to the one on the right.

Another concern I have is that you tend to only take up a small section of a given page. This limits our brain's ability to think through spatial problems, and we benefit immensely from being given more room. This also helps us engage the use of our whole arm when drawing, and discourages the use of our wrists and elbows.

When it comes to petals and leaves - or really any forms - it's very important that you draw each one in its entirety so we can fully grasp how it exists in space. This is necessary to understand in turn how those forms relate to those around them, which is at the core of each of these constructional drawings. After all, none of the drawings you do in this course are about simply capturing our references and creating pretty drawings to show off. Each drawing is an exercise in spatial reasoning, to better understand the forms themselves and how they behave in a three dimensional world. We have to draw each one in its entirety, even when it is overlapped by another, because these forms do not cease to exist when our view of them is blocked.

The last thing I wanted to mention comes down to how you use filled areas of solid black in a few drawings. These filled black shapes should be reserved only for cast shadows. There will inevitably be situations where you may see something that is actually black in your reference, or areas that are darker. It's important that you ignore any such kind of "local" colour information (local colour being the colour of the surface regardless of lighting), and treat your objects like they're all flat white or grey. By focusing these filled shapes only on cast shadows, we're able to leverage them more effectively to convey more three dimensional information, as explored back in lesson 2's section on texture and implicit drawing techniques.

This also means that you should not attempt to capture form shading either - just cast shadows.

All in all your work is coming along well - when you don't get into more complex structures, you handle the leaves and petals quite well with an excellent sense of fluidity. I do however want to make sure that you understand how to approach the more complex leaves and petals, and I still need to see your branches exercise. As such, I'll be assigning additional pages below.

Next Steps:

Please submit:

  • The missing page of branches

  • 3 pages of plant constructions - focus on things with petals and leaves.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
9:51 AM, Tuesday September 29th 2020

Here's the 3 additional plant constructions, as well as the missing Branches page!

I tried to simplify the image into the most simple shapes as I could, I hope I got it right this time!

7:58 PM, Thursday October 1st 2020

These are definitely overall looking quite well done now. I do however want to draw your attention to cases like this leaf where there is very clearly greater complexity that could be simplified further with an earlier phase of construction.

As shown here this kind of complexity should be captured using successive phases of construction, not trying to capture it all at once.

Aside from that you're doing a great job so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Go ahead and move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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