Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants
9:22 AM, Thursday May 28th 2020
Ok, I finished it. >_>
Starting with your arrows, these definitely flow fluidly and confidently across the page, though to be honest, your page is pretty bare. 3 arrows is really showing that you were more focused on getting the exercise out of the way, rather than actually gaining something from the exercise. In general, you really need to think about why you're doing the work. Is it to get a meaningless badge at the end saying you were finished, or to really think about and apply what the exercise and lesson is attempting to convey to you. Think about that whenever you consider what "1 page" means to you.
Same thing goes for your leaves. Here you've done the basic premise of the exercise fairly well - drawing these leaves such that they flow confidently through space, but you've really only done the bare minimum with no actual exploration of any kind of edge detail or complexity whatsoever. In the video for this exercise, I first construct a simple leaf form and nail down how it flows confidently through space, as you've been doing here, but I then add additional detail along the edges, building upon this structure, and drawing information from reference images to make something a little more real.
Moving onto your branches, aside from the page being pretty sparse again, you're mostly doing the exercise correctly, save for one thing. You don't seem to be extending your segments fully halfway to the next ellipse - you seem to purposely only extend it a little ways past the previous ellipse. This whole exercise is very much about constructing a long, more complex edge from a series of individual segments that flow seamlessly from one to the other. Part of what we use to achieve that seamless transition is having a direct overlap between the segments. You end up with a very limited overlap, so your transitions tend to be much more sudden and noticeable. Here's what you should be doing.
For your plant constructions, you've got a good start, but as with everything else you're not really pushing yourself as hard as you can. I mean, here's one thing that stands out: look at all the dates on your pages. You did the vast majority of these in one day. That's not how any of these lessons work. If you find yourself completing an entire lesson in basically one sitting, you need to ask yourself just how much time and effort you're putting into observing and studying your reference, into executing each and every mark you put down using the ghosting method, and into following the instructions laid out in the lesson.
As far as your linework goes, it's good. Your lines, your ellipses, they're all smooth and confidently drawn. So that's a good start. There are however a number of shortcomings, and some issues in your choices:
What stands out to me most of all is the fact that you tend to put down your construction, and then you go back over it with a thicker pen, in what appears to be an attempt at drawing a "clean-up" pass. I actually discussed this back in Lesson 2's form intersections video - you should not be using a sort of underdrawing/clean-up pass mentality anywhere in these lessons. Every single mark you put down establishes a form as though it truly exists in a 3D world. At no point should we ever behave like those underlying forms don't exist - they're there, they're solid and they're real. Once a form has been placed in the world, it can't be ignored.
Line weight itself should be used minimally, in key places to help clarify how one form overlaps another. Line weight is not added by grabbing a thicker pen. All of our drawings use the same thickness of pen, and line weight is achieved by going back over the limited local section of line (not along the whole line) the same way you'd have drawn the original stroke. You apply the ghosting method to plan and prepare, and you execute the mark with confidence. I noticed that in a number of places what you were doing was more like "tracing", which is where we draw slowly and carefully along a line. This causes us to focus way too much on how that line exists on the flat page, rather than how it represents an edge that moves through 3D space. Line weight should always be subtle - it's not about making something drastically thicker, it's about making it slightly thicker than another line. It's all relative. The viewer's subconscious will pick up on those slight changes, where their conscious brain does not. You're whispering to that subconscious, not shouting in their faces.
One last thing about line weight - super thick outlines will make a form feel very flat, like a graphic shape rather than a three dimensional entity.
Remember that construction is all about building things up from simple parts. If you look at the base of this mushroom and this one, you've basically jumped in with a form that was way too complicated with all kinds of bumps and complexity. We build everything out of simple forms because we can make simple forms feel solid and three dimensional really easily.
When it comes to texture and detail, you really need to review the texture section from Lesson 2. It stresses the importance of not outlining the textural forms (the little bumps and growths and things on the surface of your form), and instead implying their presence by drawing the shadows they cast. More recently I redid the videos and notes for that section.
All in all, this is not even close to the best you can do. I know for a fact you can do better, and I expect to see it - otherwise my critique ends up being less useful than it could be. I'm going to ask you to do this lesson over, and submit it again as a new submission. Take your time, don't hammer everything out in a day. Hell - try and do no more than one or two plant drawings in a given sitting, and really put time and thought into planning every single like, observing your reference carefully and consistently.
Next Steps:
Do this lesson again, and submit it separately as a new submission. You really need to take your time with every drawing and get used to observing your references much more closely.
When it comes to technical drawing, there's no one better than Scott Robertson. I regularly use this book as a reference when eyeballing my perspective just won't cut it anymore. Need to figure out exactly how to rotate an object in 3D space? How to project a shape in perspective? Look no further.
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