Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

9:32 AM, Saturday May 8th 2021

CloudyShortbread DAB Lesson 3 - Album on Imgur

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

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my first few plants are from the demos, and i've included my plant referances :)

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7:36 PM, Monday May 10th 2021

Overall you're doing a good job, but there are a few key issues I want to draw to your attention.

Starting with your arrows, you've got them flowing with a great deal of confidence and fluidity, but when you add your line weight, you end up doing so in a very scratchy fashion. Remember that you should be doing that using the ghosting method, planning and preparing before the execution of each mark rather than just going back over it repeatedly and quickly. You're ending up with a hairy result that is best avoided, and can be avoided by just putting a little more time into those marks.

Moving onto your leaves, you're carrying forward with the same sense of confidence, although also with a touch of sloppiness to some of the additional contour lines you're adding along the surface of those leaves. Again - it doesn't hurt you to take a few more moments to plan through the execution of each mark you draw, and it'll ensure that you're able to stretch your marks from edge to edge, rather than having them overshoot/undershoot your intent.

Also, when it comes to adding your edge detail to the leaves, you run into the issue of zigzagging your more complex edges back and forth across the simpler edge, which undermines the core principle of perspective. That edge detail should be built directly onto the existing structure, and should not be seen as an opportunity to replace it. Construction is about taking complex problems and breaking them into individual stages - by establishing our flow line, we figure out how the leaf moves through space. Once determined we don't have to think about that again, we merely carry it through, extending it into a simple footprint of a leaf in space. With that down, we now have a structure that establishes how the entire form moves, and we can add little deviations to the edges without having to consider how the whole thing flows all together.

Moving onto your branches, these are coming along well, but be sure to extend each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse. You seem to be kind of arbitrary in how far you extend them - sometimes extending them even farther (which is fine), sometimes extending them the correct amount, and on occasion, extending only slightly past that previous ellipse. This falls back into the whole investment of time thing - while your linework is indeed really confident and that allows for a nice smooth stroke each time, the ghosting method doesn't contradict that. It merely supports it with planning and preparation beforehand.

Moving onto your plant constructions, you're managing excellent fluidity to your leaves and petals as they move through space, and your plant constructions are generally coming along well - aside from the general looseness that, again, would be reduced with a greater investment of time. In cases like these leaves, you really should take more care that the flow lines actually extend all the way to the perimeter of the outer boundary, and then that the leaves themselves end where their corresponding flow line ends. The more you leave gaps, the less you're adhering to your constructional steps, and the more you undermine your overall solidity. We are, after all, not sketching or exploring on the page. We are constructing things with the intent to make them feel solid and real.

I felt the construction on the left side of this page came out especially well - when adding the little spikes along one of those leaves, you did so adhering more closely than usual to the existing structure/edge, and that definitely helped. The layering of the individual leaves also works very nicely to establish how they all sit in space, and how they relate to one another.

When it comes to your cylindrical flower pots, be sure to both construct them around a central minor axis line, and not to simply stop at drawing them as a simple cylinder. There's generally going to be more going on - for example, at the very least the opening of the pot will have a rim with thickness to it which can be captured by adding an ellipse inset within it. Without that, the flower pot appears paper-thin. Include as many ellipses as are needed - to define the rim, to define the level of the soil, to define any additional features required - and of course, align them to that minor axis line.

The last thing I wanted to call out is that when you get into detail - like in the sunflower - it seems your focus is heavily on the idea of decoration, on the idea that you want to make your drawing stand out and look nice. This is especially clear on your leaf, and less so on the middle of the sunflower's head. Reason being, this kind of focus isn't really clear or substantial. Decoration doesn't have an achievable goal, it's a moving target.

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Overall, you are doing a pretty good job, but you need to slow down and put more time into each individual mark. I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, but I hope to see that increased patience and greater overall use of the ghosting method in your work for the next one.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
4:36 PM, Wednesday May 12th 2021

That's really helpful & insightful.

Thank you very much! :D

I'll try from now on to focus & take my time more with planning & prep.

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