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12:02 AM, Sunday February 12th 2023

Thank you so much for the thorough, constructive and helpful response. Before I start work on my plant constructions (after I finished going over the leaves and branches), there are some questions I'd like to ask, and I would love it if you can give me your perspective.

  • For my cactus, may I ask what do you mean by leaving my form open-ended? I observed the cactus to be constructed from roughly diamond shapes pieced together - should I have drawn the center out instead? I was a bit iffy about that since I'm not sure where exactly I should have placed the shape outlines, ending up only placing a small light bit at the start.

  • For the palm tree, I'll admit I skipped a lot of steps there since palm trees are both big as is, and the leaves are also tiny as well, so constructing everything feels like such an undertaking. May I ask for the future, what technique should I look into for drawing trees, as well as plants with a lot of tiny details, like palm trees, pines and the like?

  • And finally regarding texture, my mindset to it while working on this exercise has been to capture anything I can see, but instead of framing it like that, should I instead as you mentioned try to frame it as a question of "If I move my hand over it, what it would feel like" ? And from there, deciding whether a detail actually would be noticable enough to be included in the implicit depiction?

Again, thank you so much for your insightful critique, and I hope to hear from you soon.

1:27 AM, Sunday February 12th 2023

Hello Hxhexa, I'll try my best to address your questions and concerns.

For your cactus, you can see at the base of the plant, in the area I've outlined in red you can see that the lines that indicate other forms in the construction simply continue and then end, leaving gaps between them, this area of the cactus is left open, as such there's no indication of an edge in tridimensional space which flattens the form. Make sure all of your forms are enclosed, in cases like this you should cap off the construction with an ellipse or any other way appropriate for the form you wish to establish.

For the purposes of Drawabox such plants should not be chosen as reference pictures, for your own personal interests you can look around and find the method that works best for you, there are many methods for drawing trees, such as block ins, capturing the major forms and implying detail similarly to the way texture works in drawabox, or through other techniques found in painting. Look around for books, courses or other resources and experiment with drawing trees during that time.

And finally, yes, but also no. While you should be thinking of how it would feel to run your hands over the surface of the object you're constructing, remember that texture in Drawabox is based on cast shadows this means that your texture should be made up only of shadows that appear because a bump or part of a small form is blocking the lightsource and casting a shadow on it's own surface. This means that form shadows, aka shadows that happen when a part of the object is in shadow because the object's form itself blocks the light from reaching that side, as well as local color should be ignored.

If a shadow you can see in your reference is a cast shadow that is present in your structure's surface is caused by imperfections in that surface it's pretty safe to add it in, so in a way, yes, it's your own discretion to choose how much to draw in this case, since sometimes drawing every piece of detail you see can end up cluttering your construction, so remember the concepts introduced in Lesson 2 in the dissections exercise, and that leaving some areas of detail more dense and some more sparse can help direct your viewer's attention.

I hope my answers address your concerns adequately, best of luck.

3:01 AM, Friday February 17th 2023

Thank you for your reply! Here's my revision for the lesson. Please do let me know whether this would be sufficient, and what other areas I should focus on improving.

https://imgur.com/a/JszLuG4

On that note too, since for the purpose of Drawabox, textures are made from cast shadow, may I ask for flat textures like for example butterfly wing pattern, should I draw that just as a pattern as regular with black and white, or is there anything I should pay attention there too?

12:04 AM, Saturday February 18th 2023

Hello HxHexa, thank you for getting back to me with your revisions.

Your page of leaves and branches are looking good, you still have some visible tails in your branches and some size consistency problems, but these will most likely improve naturally as you continue to focus on them.

Your leaves are looking good, but some parts of your edge detail your marks don't rise up enough from the preexisting construction, this leaves them feeling a little bit awkward as the marks don't properly communicate the edge detail you wish to convey, so make sure that you're giving each mark as much time as it requires so you can properly execute your mark and make sure that it rises off from the previous line and then comes back down to it.

Your constructions are looking much more solid looking, although for the second plant construction you're falling into the trap of zigzagging your edge detail and trying to capture complexity in the petals way too soon, instead of using the leaf construction method to capture the overall structure of the leaf, no matter how complex it may seem, and only afterwards make use of edge detail to build the more complex details of the petal.

On that note too, since for the purpose of Drawabox, textures are made from cast shadow, may I ask for flat textures like for example butterfly wing pattern, should I draw that just as a pattern as regular with black and white, or is there anything I should pay attention there too?

Flat textures cannot be conveyed while using the principles of texture that Drawabox seeks to teach, in such cases where you have a fabric with different colors, a butterfly's wing pattern, or smooth metal it's better to forego adding this texture to your construction altogether while going through this course, since in these cases you'd be trying to capture locsk color or even reflections in the surface, not cast shadows. The only exception would be when you have a wing pattern that is created from veins that stick out from an insect's wing, in this case you can use the small cast shadows that these small protrusions cast onto the surrounding surface in order to convey a wing texture.

I hope this answers your questions, best of luck in Lesson 4.

Next Steps:

Don't forget to keep practicing these exercises during your warm ups.

Move on to Lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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