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2:57 AM, Sunday July 19th 2020

Thank you very much for your thorough critique. I had put a smiley in the end of my message and it transformed into "????". I hope you didn't take it badly.

I have some questions to make sure I understood everything :

  1. You said my arrows have to compress after the last lesson, and I tried to apply that, but I got the same critique. Does that mean I have to do it more? Does it have to be kind of exponential?

  2. About the leaves, if the veins are useful for construction, is it okay to draw them? For example, some of these let me place the spikes of the maple leaves.

  3. I had used some lines to show the 3d form, a bit like contour lines. Should I replace them with lines similar to the ones used in the organic forms?

  4. I have lose myself in the flower when too much petals overlap and I don't know which line is which anymore. I think that's the reason I add so much weight to lines. Especially when in some flowers have just a little tip of petals showing and I have to draw them completely. Do you have an advice on how I can approach those harder tasks?

Also, I think the daisy demo inspired me to add the lines for the ridges and valleys of the petals. Did I misunderstand a part of it?

Thank you very much for making learning art really accessible and for organizing everything really neatly. You are one of those who really make a difference in this world.

8:34 PM, Sunday July 19th 2020

  1. For the arrows, take a look at this image. The little red angle is basically the exact same, just pasted in different places and rotated to fit. The angle itself is the same. It can sometimes be a bit misleading, since everything is getting smaller as we look farther back. By looking at the angle however, you can see that it actually does remain equal, and therefore the gap itself is not getting narrower as we look farther back. If it comes down to thinking of it as though things are getting narrower exponentially, that works - though it's technically not exactly the case.

  2. Don't draw them as veins - veins are specific, they branch in a particular way. But if you mean drawing lines coming off the flow line/spine of the leaf, like this, then that's fine.

  3. All lines that run along the surface of a form are contour lines - with the organic forms they're drawn in a specific way because that surface is fully rounded. Lines you draw on the surface of your leaves will, of course, follow that surface. Just keep in mind that you're not drawing veins here, you're drawing artificial contour lines.

  4. To be quite frank, it's something you'll get used to. What it really requires of you is to study your lines more closely to identify what is what. You will make mistakes - that's normal. But it is something you'll get better at.

I think a few people are getting a little confused by aspects of some of the demonstrations - I'll be making steps to replace and correct them in the near future, but for now, all I can do is correct things in my critiques.

3:36 AM, Monday July 20th 2020

Thank you very much! It's all crystal clear!

7:03 PM, Monday July 20th 2020

Hi,

I have an idea for the old demos. We could add in bold red in the beginning what is done in the demo that should not be reproduced (being very specific). I see you added a message saying that other lessons should be prioritized, but by the point we do the demos, sometimes we forget some of what shouldn't be done (adding form shadows, simple lines for ridges/valleys of flowers, etc.). It's like doing a critique of yourself that would save you time in the critiques of students (at least a couple I hope).

Thank you for reading my idea.

7:18 PM, Monday July 20th 2020

That would definitely be a good idea, although I'm planning on going through and totally redoing the demonstrations in the coming couple of months, so it'd make more sense for me to devote the time towards doing that instead.

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Framed Ink

Framed Ink

I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.

Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.

Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.

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