Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

1:21 AM, Saturday September 11th 2021

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This exercise was a lot of fun! I snapped a bunch of pictures of plants while on a walk and used them of references here :) Sometimes the drawing got noisy with the amount overlapping leaves which made it a little difficult to work with and imagine the plant in 3d space. Cast shadows and line weight did helped a lot with organising the shapes and establishing whats in front/behind for the end drawing. I found that while I tried focusing on the flow of the shapes, I'd somtimes get the proportions/angle considerably off which resulted in some leaves that look a bit out of place, I'll try ghosting more rigorously next time.

I'm definitely seeing the power of construction though! It's a noticable improvement to how I previously drew plants. Establishing the direction, shape and size of each part of the plant early on better captures the general form and overall characteristics of the plant. Looking forward to some feedback :)

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10:53 PM, Saturday September 11th 2021

Starting with your arrows, you're off to a good start. You've drawn them with a good deal of confidence, which helps to convey the fluidity with which they move through space. I can also see that when it comes to the use of line weight, you're focusing it on the area where forms overlap one another (like where the ribbon folds back over itself). That's certainly a good thing - just take a little more time for the planning and preparation of that stroke, as I can see you ending up going back over the mark again to correct an unintentional mistake. Remember that you should not be going back over things to fix errors - it only draws more attention to them. Instead, invest the time in the use of the ghosting method for each mark (even the addition of line weight), and if it comes out wrong, no big deal. Keep moving forward.

Continuing onto your leaves, I feel you've done a good job of carrying that fluidity forward from the arrows, and you've been able to not only capture how the leaves sit statically in the world, but also how they move through the space they occupy. You've also built up the additional edge detail quite well, doing so with separate, individual marks, one at a time, rather than trying to outright replace the entire edge. This helps you to carry forward the solidity of those earlier phases of construction, even as the complexity of the overall structure increases.

Moving onto your branches, there's just one issue here - it looks like you are not extending each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, and instead are cutting them off a little past the previous one. As explained here, each segment should end halfway to the next ellipse, allowing for a healthier overlap which in turn can help to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from edge to edge.

Onto your plant constructions, as a whole you've done a great job, and I'm very pleased to see that you were very attentive to the need to draw each and every form in its entirety, rather than cutting them off where they get overlapped (despite the noisiness). This is important as what we're doing here are exercises, rather than performances - and drawing each form in its entirety helps us to better understand how they sit in space, and how they relate to their neighbours.

While your work has generally been done very well, I had a couple suggestions to call out:

  • First and foremost, be sure to give each drawing as much room as it needs on the page. I can see that you were enthusiastic about including lots of drawings, with at least a couple to each page. This is great, but it can cause us to draw a little too small, as we artificially limit the space a drawing may be given. When we constrict the space for a drawing, we also can limit our brain's capacity to think through spatial problems. The biggest example of this I could see was the little daisy on the top right of this page, where the linework ended up getting quite clumsy due to the impeded spatial reasoning, as well as the greater difficulty you'd have faced in trying to use your whole arm while drawing. In general, start off the initial drawing on a page by giving it as much room as it requires of you. Once it's down, you can ask yourself whether another drawing will fit in the space that remains. If it will, go ahead and add it. If it won't, it's okay to have just one drawing to a page so long as that space is used well.

  • For the flower pot on the right side of this page, avoid leaving any forms open-ended, as this causes them to flatten out into 2D shapes. Instead, cap them off - in this case with another ellipse to create a somewhat premature base. It's okay that the flower pot may have been longer in your reference - our focus here isn't in replicating them perfectly, but rather in using them as a source of information as we build up something solid and tangible on the page.

Aside from that, your work is coming along quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:40 AM, Sunday September 12th 2021

Thanks Uncomfortable, these are some good pick ups! Feedback to these exercises has been really helpful in highlighting bad habits I have like drawing too small and trying to overcorrect mistakes. Also I don't know what I was thinking with leaving the flower pot open ended, it totally passed my mind. I'll pay extra attention to all these points in future!

And thanks for making these lessons! I've been enjoying them a lot and can really see the improvement from lots of structured practice

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Sketching: The Basics

Sketching: The Basics

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Sketching: The Basics is a far better choice for beginners. It's more digestible, and while it introduces a lot of similar concepts, it does so in a manner more suited to those earlier in their studies.

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