Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

2:29 PM, Wednesday September 23rd 2020

Lesson 3 Homework - Album on Imgur

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

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered enterta...

Hello!

This is my attempt at doing Lesson 3 homeworks. I had more fun with drawing plants than Lesson 2 here.

Anyway, please critique my works.

Thanks!

0 users agree
2:48 AM, Friday September 25th 2020

Starting with your arrows, these generally flow fairly well and convey a good sense of confidence as they move through space. One thing they are missing however is the use of foreshortening on the gaps between the zigzagging sections as shown here. Compressing that spacing is an important part of conveying depth in the scene.

That sense of movement carries over nicely into your leaves, where you've done a pretty good job of capturing not only how they sit in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. You've generally done fairly well with building up more complex edge detail as well, although I do want to push you to explore more complex leaf structures, like those introduced here.

Looking again at the edge detail though, there is one thing I want to call out. The process you've applied here is to draw your simple edge, and then to replace that edge with a more complex one. While this introduces certain changes - little cuts and spikes and whatnot along the edges - it also means that there are plenty of places where you're simply redrawing exactly where the last, simpler edge was in the previous phase of construction. As shown here, you should only be adding the parts that change, leaving the previous phase's edge to stand on its own for the rest.

Moving onto the branches, it seems that you may not have entirely understood how this exercise was meant to be done. As explained here, you are to extend the first segment fully halfway to the next ellipse (which you're doing, and then start the next segment back at the previous ellipse, resulting in an overlap between them that helps ensure that the transition from one to the next is smooth and seamless. I see many instances where you only attempted to start the next segment where the previous one ended. Please take greater care in reading through the instructions, as this has definitely interfered with some elements of your plant constructions.

Looking through your plant constructions, you've got a decent start, though along with the issue with the branches, I am seeing various areas where the leaf construction technique hasn't been followed entirely, or where the point I raised about not redrawing whole edges definitely come into play. In these for example, the leaves that you've drawn there have edges that are not too complex, but they are definitely more complicated than the basic leaf shape. As shown here, you've immediately started out by jumping ahead to a more complex phase of construction without the appropriate structure in place to support it.

As a side note, this wasn't addressed in the lesson or anything but it is something I want you to keep in mind moving forward. With pages like this one, where you've basically got the same thing being repeated, resulting in each individual leaf being really quite small on the page, it is best to pick a particular area or branch of the plant and focus on that, allowing you to blow it up bigger on the page. Drawing things larger helps us push our brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, and also helps us engage our whole arm when drawing, whereas drawing smaller tends to cause us to draw in a clumsier fashion.

Continuing on, while the main structure of this hibiscus is fine, I did notice that the relationship between the more complex ripples along the edge of the petals are only very loosely bound to the underlying structure. Construction, again, is all about very tight, specific relationships, where the earlier phases of construction directly support the more complex details we add later on.

One last, minor point. In the taller, skinnier mushroom on this page, in any situation where you end up cutting off a form, make sure you cut it off - in this case by placing an ellipse at the bottom there where you've got the edges just stopping arbitrarily. Open ends like this remind us that we're looking at a flat drawing, not a 3D form, so we want to avoid them.

Overall while you're moving in the right direction, I do want to see you apply those principles of construction more stringently, so I'm going to assign a couple additional pages along with a redo of the branches exercise.

Next Steps:

Please submit the following:

  • 1 page of branches

  • 2 pages of plant constructions

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
3:51 PM, Sunday September 27th 2020

Hello,

Thanks for pointing out what I was missing, because I watched your videos then did the exercise without reading much of the instructions, lol. I will pay attention on the instruction more in the future.

Alright, here's my revision:

https://imgur.com/a/t25MSXp

Thanks!

6:17 PM, Monday September 28th 2020

This is moving in the right direction, but there are a few things I'd like to draw your attention to.

  • For the branches, you're more on track now, but one thing to help fix those "flyaway" edges that separate out from the intended path is to actually draw your next stroke so it overlaps the previous one directly, rather than where the previous one ought to have been. This will force you to actually learn from those mistakes, instead of having the freedom to ignore them.

  • You are pretty clearly using pens of different thicknesses here - probably a regular 0.5mm and a brush pen. Brush pens should only be used to fill in specific outlined shadow shapes (drawn with this two-step process). The majority of the drawing should be done with your 0.5mm fineliner, and nothing else should be used to establish line weight. This is probably the most significant issue in your revisions - just putting marks down with your brush pen without outlining the intended shapes first results in a lot of general sloppiness.

  • Don't forget that in lesson 2 I mention that you will not be using any form shading in this course. What you did on the mushroom to the left was clearly an attempt at form shading that should have been left out.

All in all you have made progress, but I really, really cannot stress enough how important it is that you read the instructions thoroughly. The videos are only supplementary material, and because they are harder to update they aren't going to necessarily have the most recent information. They are not intended to be a replacement for the written content, and while I have plans for the near future to update them all, you will always be expected to go through all of the material thoroughly before doing work that is to be submitted for official critique.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Color and Light by James Gurney

Color and Light by James Gurney

Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.