Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants
6:11 PM, Tuesday February 4th 2025
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1:38 PM, Monday February 10th 2025
Hello kippeeyy, I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and I'll be the TA handling your critique today.
Arrows
Starting with your arrows you're drawing your marks with a good deal of confidence which helps solidify the feeling of fluidity that arrows posses as they move through all the three dimensions of the world they exist in. However your arrows have little to no foreshortening, make sure to explore the size difference between arrow segments more in order to make better use of the depth of the page and push your understanding of tridimensional space further.
Your usage of hatching helps you establish how your arrows twist and turn in space and further your own understanding of the tridimensional space these objects occupy, but do remember that your hatching lines must still follow the principles of ghosting and mark-making, they must have clear end and start points, be carefully planned and executed and not end at arbitrary points.
Generally you're doing a good job with this exercise, but try to step out of your comfort zone more often the next time you tackle this exercise in order to keep pushing yourself further. Try arrows with different kinds of twists and turns and different rates of foreshortening, keep in mind that arrows are very flexible objects and can move freely across the world in all sorts of manners, so you should push yourself and explore the different possibilities.
Leaves
The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, it's good that you're not only trying to capture how these structures sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment.
However there are also some unnatural bends present in your leaf structures. Keep in mind that even though leaves are very flexible structures, that mostly applies to their length and not their width. They're like a piece of paper, not a piece of rubber, they can fold and bend in a lot of ways, but they can't stretch or compress, and if we try to force them to they'll simply rip apart.
Your addition of edge detail is generally looking good, as you don't usually attempt to capture more than one piece of edge detail at a time, and you generally construct your edge detail additively. You're also keeping the line thickness between your phases of construction roughly consistent, all of which is very good and helps you create a tighter, more solid construction that still feels fluid and energetic.
Branches
Moving on to your branches you're not sticking to the instructions for this exercise as closely as you should. While it's good to see that you're drawing your edges in segments you're not starting your new segment back at the previous ellipse point and superimposing it on top of the preexisting mark, you're starting your new segments close to where your previous mark ended, which partially removes the healthy overlaps we seek to achieve in these structures.
You're also leaving gaps too big in betwen the branch's outer edges and the ellipses, make sure to keep all stages of your construction tight and specific, don't leave gaps in between stages of construction, they must connect.
So remember how branches should be approached, by having your segment start at the first ellipse point, extending it past the second ellipse and fully up to the halfway point to the third ellipse, afterwards you'll start a new segment, making sure to place your pen at the second ellipse and repeat this pattern until your entire branch is complete.
Don't forget to always draw through your ellipses twice as this will create a smoother and more confident look in your marks. When it comes to your application of the ellipse degree shift to your branches it can be improved, as it stands your degrees are too consistent and hardly change which is a mistake that flattens your structures. Remember that as a form shifts in relation to the viewer, so will the degree of the ellipses within that structure also shift.
Plant Construction Section
And now let's take a look at your plant constructions, which can still be improved as you're not always following the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson, which hurts the quality of your work and how much you're getting out of it. So here are some of the points you need to keep in mind whenever you tackle these exercises again.
Always keep in mind that the construction methods and techniques introduced in this course must always be applied to your work, as they're tools which will help you construct much tighter and solid looking structures, there are times where you deviate from the construction methods, largely because you're not drawing your leaf structures with the correct method, you draw leaves without the flow line, and when you do make ise of the flow line, ypu often leave big gaps in between the flow line and the outer edges. They're not guidelines or suggestions - they are rules.
Make sure that you're always drawing through your forms and constructing them fully, I've noticed that in some of your constructions you don't draw through some of your forms, such as leaves or branch like structures, this limits your ability to work through these tridimensional puzzles and limits how much you're getting out of the exercise. Not drawing through your forms means relying on your observation skills, instead of engaging your sense of spatial reasoning and truly trying to understand how the object you're drawing works, where it comes from, what it attaches to.
It's really good to see that you're making use of elliptical boundaries in order to construct some of your flowers, this allows you to keep the distance and size of the petals consistent with onr another and helps reinforce the illusion of tridimensionality in your work.
When approaching cylindrical structures such as plant pots make sure to start with a minor axis in order to keep your several ellipses aligned to each other more easily. Going further don't forget to construct the outer rim that's present in most types of plant pots, and make sure to add a ground plane to your structures, this line is necessary when constructing plant pots because otherwise your structure will look like it's floating in mind air, which breaks the illusion of the construction.
You're not usually making use of edge detail in your pages, edge detail would have greatly helped you further communicate the form of your structures and how they move through space, but by not adding it they're left very simple, so make sure to add edge detail whenever possible, and remember that only the last step of leaf construction - texture - is optional.
Final Thoughts
In general you're starting to move in the right direction but you're still struggling on a couple of points. As such I believe you will benefit from tackling these exercises again before moving on to the next lesson, please revisit the lesson material mentioned and then reply with:
1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.
2 plant construction pages.
Next Steps:
1 page, half of leaves, half of branches.
2 plant construction pages.
2:28 PM, Tuesday February 25th 2025
Hello! thank you very much for the critique her is my re-try
3:46 PM, Wednesday February 26th 2025
Hello Kippeey, thank you for getting back to me with your revisions.
Starting with your leaves, make sure not to cross out your structures.
Your leaves are looking better and the structures you've crossed out are actually bending and folding quite nicely. Although there are still unnatural bends present in your leaf structures, but this is quite normal, keep practicing during your warm ups and you'll naturally improve.
Moving on to your branches they are improving, but there are still some moments where you're not following the instructions for how to draw the edges to the letter. While it's good to see that you're drawing your your edges in segments, you're not always extending said segments completely up to the halfway point between ellipses, and there are some times where you draw the entire segment with one line.
And lastly let's take a look at your plant constructions, which are generally coming along well made, as you're usualy following the construction methods and techniques introduced in the lesson which allows you to construct really solid looking and believably tridimensional structures. I can see a good developing sense of spatial reasoning in these pages.
You're still pre-planning the amount of constructions you want to fit on a given page before you've even committed to any of them, which should be avoided. Drawing bigger would allow you not only more room to work through the spatial reasoning challenges that arise when tackling these exercises, but also give you enough space to fully engage your whole arm.
You're taking a great first step towards starting to think of how to break down different structures in this structure but it does end up accidentally stiffening the inner structure a bit if you don't approach it with the leaf construction method which naturally adds a sense of flow and energy to your work.
One way in which we can approach this structure that ensures the petal structures are still flowing nicely and that all of the relationships between the different forms are tight and specific is by using a slightly tapered cylinder in order to construct the main body of the leaf shape, then afterwards make use of the leaf construction method, build it on top of the cylinder in order to capture the flow of the different sections of the leaf structure, and lastly connect them together, making use of edge detail in order to finish the complex structure. I actually put together a quick demonstration of how this would look like in the context of a Daffodil for a different student once, and I believe you will find it helpful.
In general your work is looking really good, you're starting to understand the purpose of these techniques and exercises and making use of them in your work effectively, as such you demonstrate that your sense of spatial reasoning is developing really nicely.
I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.
Next Steps:
Don't forget to add these exercises to your list of warm ups.
Move on to Lesson 4.
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