Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

7:06 PM, Friday December 24th 2021

Imgur: The magic of the Internet

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

Post with 21 views.

Hi this is my submission for the Lesson 3, now it´s kinda easy for me to think and construct 3D forms. I focused on the construction and not in the details.

Thank you for the course and the critique.

Happy holidays.

0 users agree
5:26 PM, Monday December 27th 2021

Starting with your arrows, these are drawn with a great deal of confidence, which is really helping you to capture the fluidity with which they move through the world. This carries over really nicely into your leaves, where you're not only capturing how they sit statically in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy.

While you're generally handling the addition of edge detail fairly well, there are some areas where you deviate from the previous stage of construction more than that existing structure will support. For example, here the edge detail you've added includes a fair bit of complexity to it. Instead, this should be tackled in stages, as shown here on another studen'ts work.

Continuing onto your branches, here you appear to be following the instructions incorrectly - at least in regards to the specific manner in which each edge segment is to be laid out. As explained here, each segment starts at one ellipse, goes past the second, and stops halfway to the third. The next segment then starts back at the second ellipse, goes past the third, and stops halfway to the fourth, repeating the same pattern. This is important, as it allows us to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from segment to segment.

Furthermore, I'm noticing a lot of cases where you're having individual segments extend way beyond this - for example, this one which does not actually break the edges into separate parts. In doing so, you end up overlooking the purpose of this exercise, which is largely to learn to build up complex lines in parts, as explained here. This is also leading to more cases where your edges cut into the ellipses, rather than touching their tips (in order to keep those cross-sections contained within the ellipses). It seems you probably ended up only focusing on completing the exercise on a more superficial level. Every drawing throughout this course - even where we're actually drawing objects from reference - serve a purpose as a specific exercise, and so simply aiming for the end result and getting there in whatever way you can, is not what we're after. It's the process itself that matters.

Continuing onto your plant constructions, by and large you've done a good job, although there are a small handful of things I'd like to call out in order to keep you on the right track.

  • For the flower on the left side of this page, you're ending up with somewhat arbitrary gaps between the phases of construction. Your flow lines are close, in that many of them end right at the perimeter of that intiial ellipse, respecting its purpose as defining the extent to which each flow line would extend. There are definitely some that extend slightly beyond it, but I think those are just slip-ups rather than an incorrect intent. When drawing the petals however, you're leaving an arbitrary gap between the end of the flow line and the end of the petal. Construction is all about each step asserting something specific, and every step thereafter respecting and abiding by what was asserted. In this case, the flow lines assert how each petal moves through space, and the length of those petals, and so the petals themselves must respect and follow this by ending right at the tip of their respective flow line.

  • When constructing your flower pots, be sure to construct them around a central minor axis line to help you align your ellipses to one another. Also, don't skimp on those ellipses - on the drawing on the right side of this page, you've left the rim paper-thin. Instead, including another ellipse inset within the opening can allow you to define the thickness of that rim, as you did on the left side of the page, in drawing number 5.

  • While I'm continuing to see you employ the addition of edge detail to your leaves pretty well here, I do want to warn you against the tendency to increase the line thickness as you move from one constructional step to the next. Try to stick to roughly the same line thickness. Thickening them can cause us to needlessly redraw more of the given leaf than is strictly necessary, rather than focusing only on drawing the parts that change from one stage to the next. Construction is not about having each step replace the one before it, but rather for each step to contribute to what is an otherwise solid construction. Of course, you can always add a later line weight pass at the end, focusing on clarifying how different forms overlap one another by restricting its use only to the localized areas where those overlaps occur, as shown here with these two overlapping leaves.

Aside from those points, you've done well. While your branches exercises were done incorrectly, I'm going to leave you to read through those instructions again. From everything I've seen here, you should be well capable of correcting those mistakes on your own, so I don't see any benefit from holding you back over it. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:32 PM, Thursday December 30th 2021

Thank you very much for the feedback, this is really useful for me. I´m going to check the Lesson 3 notes and use the branches, leafs and plant construction to practice.

Thank you for the course, i´m really improving.

Below this point is mostly ads. Indie projects, and tool/course recommendations from us.
This section is reserved for low-cost advertising space for art related indie projects.
With how saturated the market is, it is tough for such projects to get eyes on their work.
By providing this section, we hope to help with that.
If you'd like to advertise here, you can do so through comicad.net
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 we've used ourselves, or know to be of impeccable quality. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Wescott Grid Ruler

Wescott Grid Ruler

Every now and then I'll get someone asking me about which ruler I use in my videos. It's this Wescott grid ruler that I picked up ages ago. While having a transparent grid is useful for figuring out spacing and perpendicularity, it ultimately not something that you can't achieve with any old ruler (or a piece of paper you've folded into a hard edge). Might require a little more attention, a little more focus, but you don't need a fancy tool for this.

But hey, if you want one, who am I to stop you?

We use cookies in conjunction with Google Analytics to anonymously track how our website is used.

This data is not shared with any other parties or sold to anyone. They are also disabled until consent is provided by clicking the button below, and this consent can be revoked at any time by clicking the "Revoke Analytics Cookie Consent" link in our website footer.

You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.