Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

8:14 PM, Tuesday August 9th 2022

Lesson 3 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/5NTZSBx.jpg

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Ended up with a a few months gap between the lessons due to some unforeseen circumstances that caused me to lose some focus so the lesson which then got spread out very thinly over time. I hope that's alright, I did try to keep up with exercises from the previous lessons when I had the time to stay in touch with what I had already learned.

I feel like for this lesson I went a bit too freely at the leaf edges and probably should have stuck to the leaf outlines a bit more. I also struggled to find references that werent too packed full of leaves and stems which seemed quite overwhelming and instead ended up with some bare stems and disjointed plants, woops. Looking forward to hear what feedback you have for me.

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10:43 PM, Wednesday August 10th 2022

Starting with your arrows, you're doing a good job in executing these with a fair bit of confidence, which helps to push the sense of fluidity with which they move through space. This continues to improve on this front into your leaves, where you're capturing not only how they individually sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy.

That said, I do have some concerns with your use of edge detail, mainly in that - as you stated - you were definitely too "free" with them, as this leads to direct cases of zigzagging edge detail like this, which as noted here should be avoided. One point to keep in mind on this front is that as in successive phases of construction we are altering the existing 3D structure and not simply redrawing it or replacing its lines, we do want to avoid making our later phases of construction darker or thicker than the earlier ones. While you do not attempt to redraw the entirety of your leaves, you do have a significantly darker stroke when adding edge detail, which is going to encourage you to redraw more than you need.

Another point I noticed was that in this more complex leaf structure, you started with the larger simple leaf shape, then added a flow line for every sub-leaf, but you did not draw the simple structure for each of those leaves (as shown on the bottom left of this diagram). Additionally, remember that every phase of construction is a decision being made, and we want to maintain tight, specific relationships between those stages to ensure that we do not contradict those decisions later on. So for example, the earlier, larger simple leaf shape defines the extent to which the smaller "arms" will reach - so every subsequent flow line should be drawn right to the edge fo that footprint shape. You did this for most of them, but there was one on the left side that fell short, leaving an arbitrary gap between it and the footprint shape.

Continuing onwards, you are generally handling the branches fairly well, although I have one main recommendation. Instead of drawing your next segment where the previous one ought to have been, try using the previous one as a runway, overlapping its last length directly before shooting off to the next target. This will make it a bit more challenging, but it'll also help you make better use of the exercise long-term, as you'll be dealing with any such mistakes. The instructions here demonstrate that kind of direct overlapping.

Moving onto your plant constructions, I can certainly see a clear demonstration of your overall capacity and skillset, but I can also see where neglecting to adhere to some of the instructions I've already linked above definitely held you back. There are two categories of issues we can encounter - those in which we need to change the way in which we allocate our resources and spend our times now, actively, meaning making conscious decisions to control the way we handle those things - and things that are simply a matter of our skill level, that will improve with practice. Your skill level is fine - but your allocation of resources can definitely be improved, especially when it comes to consciously and actively applying the instructions.

That's not to say your constructions are badly done - in fact, a lot of these are solid. But there are cases where you skip constructional steps, and where you zigzag edge detail, and certainly need to be more mindful of the specific instructions you're meant to follow, as you draw. This means revisiting those steps frequently, rather than relying too much on memory.

There's only one other point of advice I want to offer, and it has to do with how you're using the space available to you on some of these pages. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

There are definitely some pages where you're making excellent use of the space available to you, but there are also others like this and this where you were somewhat stingy on how much space the individual structures were given. If you're confident that you're giving a given construction as much space as it requires, and you've got a ton left over - don't be afraid to put it to use.

Now, I am going to assign some minimal revisions - you'll find them below.

Next Steps:

Please submit:

  • 1 page of leaves

  • 2 pages of plant constructions

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
12:13 PM, Sunday August 28th 2022

Thank you for the detailed feedback! I have tried to take it into account for the revision work. I still struggled making the finer details have a finer and less dark line in the revisions, I naturally ended up slowing down while drawing the very small wavy details which made them darker. I'll try to continue keeping an eye on that for the future. I realized I also still ended up focusing a bit too much on smaller edge details that were one offs or bends, which was not needed at the moment.

https://imgur.com/a/kwBXYtx

4:11 PM, Monday August 29th 2022

Looking good overall. Just one quick correction - there are a couple places, like this, where you try to jump over a step of construction by adding more complexity than the existing structure can support. In these cases, add additional constructional steps as shown here on another student's work.

As to this point:

I realized I also still ended up focusing a bit too much on smaller edge details that were one offs or bends, which was not needed at the moment.

There's nothing wrong with adding small structural details, as long as you do so at the correct phase of construction - meaning, not to do it early on, but rather towards the end. They are as much a part of construction as anything else, so don't take the impression that construction is all about keeping things simple the whole way through. We start simple, but build up complexity in successive stages. So if you happened to leave out subtler edge details here for example, I wouldn't say it's inherently incorrect - but thinking that those edge details shouldn't be added there would be wrong.

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

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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