Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

3:05 AM, Thursday July 9th 2020

DAB-Lesson 3_Stepp - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/uAJy81K.jpg

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Thanks again for the critique!

QQ: I had some issues with the large "holes" in this image (https://imgur.com/Vb5WJXN), can you please advise on how you would tackle this or point me to a lesson/other area I can research. I drew this picture twice and each time I feel like the holes got worse.

Thanks!

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7:06 PM, Thursday July 9th 2020
edited at 9:37 PM, Jul 9th 2020

Starting with your arrows, you're drawing them to flow decently through space, though you need to be exaggerating the foreshortening that is applied to them quite a bit. There are cases where you play with making the closer end of the arrow larger and the far end smaller, but often times the changes aren't that significant. Furthermore, you don't really apply this same foreshortening to the gaps between your zigzagging sections as shown in this diagram.

Moving onto your leaves, these are for the most part, decently done. I do think that you can stand to push the sense of flow and fluidity in them a little more - being sure to draw the initial flow line with as much confidence as you can, thinking about how you're depicting the path the leaf follows as it moves through space. Drawing the leaves larger on the page to give your brain more room to think through spatial problems and to engage your whole arm when drawing can help. Additionally, remember that when adding detail - like implying the veins along the surface of the leaf - you are dealing with texture, and therefore must be applying the techniques covered back in lesson 2's texture section. That specifically means implying the presence of those textural forms by drawing the shadow shapes they cast on their surroundings. Shapes, not lines.

Also, for the ficus benjamina leaf in the top left, I'm not sure why you ended up covering the middle of it in ink, but as a rule, reserve the filled areas of black for cast shadows only. Don't use it to capture form shading (where the surface gets lighter/darker based on it turning towards/away from the light source), or to capture local colour (where the actual colour of an object gets darker in a particular area relative to others).

Other than that, I am pleased with how you're approaching construction. You're building those edge details directly on top of the previous phase of construction, ensuring those adjustments come right off the previous structure of the leaf, and return right to it. This builds a more solid, believable illusion that we're looking at something real.

Moving onto your branches, there are a couple main issues that stand out:

  • When drawing your ellipses, you're doing so quite stiffly and hesitantly, rather than drawing them confidently so as to maintain a smooth, even shape. This is likely in part due to drawing them from your wrist. One thing that can help, again, is to draw them bigger on the page - this, as I mentioned before, engages your brain's spatial reasoning skills and pushes you to use your whole arm when drawing.

  • You don't seem to be following the instructions in regards to how the line segments should be drawn. You're starting the next line where the previous one ends - you're meant to start that next stroke at the previous ellipse, giving a healthy overlap between the two segments, as this is critical to help them flow smoothly from one to the other, as shown here.

Moving onto your plant constructions, you are applying the techniques correctly (aside from the lack of overlap when you use the branch construction stuff), but the biggest issue really comes down to the fact that your linework is all really hesitant and stiff. You need to be drawing bigger, taking advantage of all the space available to you on the page, you need to use your whole arm to ensure the marks come out smoothly, and most of all you need to be employing the ghosting method. The ghosting method is all about breaking the process into a series of steps, each with their own responsibilities so you can ultimately execute the marks without hesitation or fear of making a mistake. You can read more about this in this response I gave to another student.

I noticed in a couple places that you were attempting to get into form shading when adding detail to some of your later drawings. Form shading, as discussed back in lesson 2, should be left out of the drawings you do for these lessons. Texture and detail is itself really just about communicating more information. Where the construction tells the viewer about what it would be like to manipulate this object in their hands, texture is about telling the viewer what it'd be like to run their fingers across its surface. You're not adding decoration, you're not just trying to make it look impressive everything we do, you're just trying to communicate a little extra information.

I think the best next step is to have you take some time to absorb what I've laid out here, and to complete some additional pages which I will list for you below.

Next Steps:

I'd like you to do the following:

  • 1 page of branches. Try to make them a little bigger (wider, mainly, so the ellipses themselves are larger on the page), and don't forget about the overlapping line segments.

  • 4 pages of plant constructions. Again, draw bigger, take full advantage of all the room available to you on the page, apply the ghosting method to every single mark you draw, and draw from your shoulder. Don't get into any detail/texture, but push construction as far as it will go. That means that everything you add to your drawing must itself be a solid, 3D form, but it doesn't just have to be the big stuff.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
edited at 9:37 PM, Jul 9th 2020
7:01 PM, Monday April 5th 2021

Lesson 3

Instructions from Uncomfortable

As you go through them, start integrating the exercises back into your warmup routine, and when you feel you're ready I'd say the best bet here would be to start Lesson 3 over. So your next homework submission should consist of all the assignments from Lesson 3.

Please see link above - thanks for your time.

10:26 PM, Monday April 5th 2021

Since this is a full homework submission, and will require a full critique, it will have to be posted as a fresh official homework submission, rather than as revisions for this older submission.

2:18 AM, Tuesday April 6th 2021

submitted - thanks

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