Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

7:36 PM, Wednesday March 4th 2020

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Plodding along, greatly enjoying the course and learning a new skill while feeding the failure monster (it loved my daffodil).

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

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9:16 PM, Wednesday March 4th 2020

You start strong with this one - your arrows flow very nicely through space, and I can clearly see an excellent application of perspective to both the positive and negative space in these arrows. This energetic enthusiasm and focus on motion and fluidity carries over really nicely into your leaves as well, both in how the leaves themselves capture how each one moves through the space it occupies (rather than just how it sits in that space), but also in the general quality of the linework. There's no stiffness here - everything is smooth like butter.

Moving onto your branches, there is a little bit of stiffness here, but no more than I'd honestly already expect given the nature of this exercise. It's quite minor, showing up more when the branches have drastic turns (like towards the bottom left of the page), and by and large you are still doing a great job of getting those segments to flow seamlessly into one another, giving the impression of a single continuous edge.

Throughout your plant constructions, it's clear that you've taken the instructions and demonstrations to heart - you're applying the principles of construction very nicely, being mindful in every individual form you draw, and being sure to construct each one in its entirety to better grasp how they all relate to one another in space. Your lines are still fluid and free from hesitation as well.

Since your leaf exercises included no detail (which is not an issue), I was concerned as to whether or not you'd apply it correctly in the constructions, but it's clear in drawings like your hibiscuses that you're mindful of how every phase of construction builds on top of its predecessor, adhering closely to it rather than using it as a loose suggestion.

Now there obviously are some duds - your daffodil definitely went south quickly, and it's clear that you weren't able to recover and the general uncertainty of how to progress resulted in stiffening of your linework. That said, I am still glad that you both completed the drawing and that you included it here. Even when our drawings go badly, it's important to see them through to the end.

Now, I'm not all praise - I do have a couple points to raise that should help you as you continue to move forwards.

First off, think about what your drawing is focusing on, and don't be afraid to cut off pieces of your plant so you can occupy more of the page with the parts that matter. For example, for your orchids - especially the one on the right side of the page - you ended up with the main focus of the flower being quite small on the page, which impeded your spatial reasoning skills and kept you from engaging the whole of your arm while drawing. You could have clipped the stem much earlier, capping it off and allowing the flower to take up most of its half of the page.

Another thing I noticed later on in your set was that you started to go back over your lines to add pretty strong line weight in ways that didn't really make sense. Now, I do frequently see this when students make a mistake, trying to hide it by drawing the "correct" line and filling the gaps in with ink. This kind of behaviour draws more attention to your mistake and causes the blunder to guide your decisions, taking control out of your hands. If you make a mistake, leave it be - by the end it will likely be a lot less significant than you think, and it may disappear on its own.

If however that line weight was intentional, then I do want to mention that allowing your lines to get so much thicker than their surroundings (rather than using line weight in a subtle fashion) does tend to make things flatten out somewhat. In this case, if you wanted to somehow clarify the fact that a given petal was in front of another, you could instead achieve this by blocking in a cast shadow on the latter. In fact, in drawings like these it looked like you wanted to create a cast shadow, but you were clinging to the form casting the shadow rather than actually drawing it on the surfaces upon which they'd be projected. Always remember this - shadows fall on other forms, even forms that are not immediately adjacent to the one casting.

So! All in all you're doing a great job, but you do have a few things to keep in mind. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the good work.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
2:41 PM, Thursday March 5th 2020

Great, this is motivating! You pinpointed a misunderstanding I've had regarding line weight - I have been thinking that if it's in front, it gets a second or third pass, and I can see I'm way too heavy handed with the extra weight. Cast shadows. Got it.

Now my reward: wasps and spiders.

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