This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
11:16 PM, Thursday August 6th 2020
Starting with your arrows, they're looking quite good. Some of your areas where you add line weight are pretty scratchy, so make sure you're not adding line weight in any way other than using the ghosting method with singular added strokes, not a bunch of small short ones. Other than that, they're flowing nicely through space, a quality that is largely shared by your leaves. There you've done a good job of establishing not only how the leaves exist in 3D space, but also how they move through that space.
I'm also pleased to see that you've explored adding more complex edge detail, and even more complex structures, applying the constructional drawing principles quite effectively to achieve that greater complexity without sacrificing the believability of the object you're drawing.
For the most part you're doing a good job with the branches as well, although there are a few cases where you only extend segments a little ways past your previous ellipse, rather than fully halfway towards the next ellipse. Extending them all the way (which you usually do correctly) is important because it allows for a healthy overlap between the segments, and in turn allows them to flow more seamlessly from one to the next. You can see this demonstrated here.
Now, moving onto your plant constructions you're largely doing a good job. You're continuing to capture a strong sense of flow and fluidity to your leaves and petals, and you're approaching your constructions quite well, building them all up from a variety of solid, simple forms. There are however a few things I want to draw attention to:
-
When constructing cylindrical flower pots, make sure you do so around a central minor axis line that penetrates through all of the required ellipses.
-
Similarly, don't forget that the "mouth" or opening of such a flower pot or vase is not just constructed with a single ellipse. It takes two ellipses to give the impression of a rim - an outer one and an inner one, and that is important as such objects are not paper-thin.
-
Also be sure to draw through all of your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen.
-
I noticed that when you added the little rocks at the base of your plant, in the opening of the case/pots, you drew each of these stones as little boxes. It would be better in these cases to draw them using textural, implicit methods, as covered back in lesson 2. That is, drawing the shadows they cast on their surroundings, rather than drawing each form directly.
-
In this plant, for the wavy-edged leaves/petals/things towards the front, you jumped into greater complexity (the wavy edges) too soon. I would have probably put down some kind of an ellipse, or at least a highly simplified scaffolding for that shape, before getting into the waves.
-
For the same plant, the flowers in the back, you only drew the portions of each petal that were visible, and stopped them where they were overlapped by another form. It's important that you draw through each and ever object in its entirety, so you can fully understand how it exists in space relative to its neighbours. The drawings we do in these lessons are all about developing our spatial reasoning skills, so drawing through our objects helps towards those goals.
-
Try not to get scratchy and haphazard when it comes to texture/detail, as you've done on the various leaves of this plant. If you're going to add texture, it'll be in the form of specific cast shadow shapes. Texture is added to a drawing with the purpose of communicating to a viewer what it'd be like to run their hands over a form, just as construction is added to convey to the viewer what it'd be like to manipulate that object in their hands. Random lines don't convey much. Instead, they suggest that you're focused on decoration rather than visual communication, which is not something of consideration in these drawings. Remember to think about the purpose of each mark you put down, and whether the mark you're drawing is actually achieving that purpose with any effectiveness.
Aside from that, your work is coming along quite well, and I'm pleased with your constructions as a whole. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
Ellipse Master Template
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.