View Full Submission View Parent Comment
0 users agree
4:50 PM, Sunday May 30th 2021

Starting with your arrows, very nice work - you're drawing them confidently, and capturing a strong sense of fluidity in how they move through space. Just one small thing - when adding hatching line, be sure to stretch it across from edge to edge. Generally having hatching lines end at an arbitrary distance tends to look a bit clumsier.

Moving onto your leaves, that same confidence is carry over quite nicely to capture not only how they sit statically in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. You're also doing an excellent job of building your more complex edge detail on top of the existing structure, rather than attempting to redraw the leaf in its entirety and replace the existing structure. This, along with your fastidious attention to how you apply the same kinds of steps to capture more complex leaf structures, shows a good deal of respect and understanding of the constructional method's core principles.

Continuing onto your branches, there's not much to be said here - it looks like you've followed the instructions to the letter, extending each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, maintaining healthy overlaps and achieving smooth, and relatively seamless transitions from one segment to the next. Very nicely done, and the tendency to keep the branches consistent in their widths really helps maintain the illusion of solidity for each branch structure.

As I scroll through your plant constructions, there are very few things that actually stand out as issues. I can see a couple things, which I will call out, but at its core your submission is very well done. You're achieving solid, believably three dimensional constructions, and are demonstrating an excellent understanding of how these forms exist and relate to one another in three dimensions of space. You're capturing a strong illusion that we're not just looking at a series of flat drawings on a page, but rather that the page itself is a window looking out onto a three dimensional world.

Here are the couple of things I did want to call out:

  • One thing that I try to keep an eye on is whether or not students are giving their drawings enough room on the page. Drawing small is a common issue that comes from students who aren't confident in what they're doing - they'll cramp up and squeeze their drawings in a small space. In other circumstances, students may allot a certain amount of space per drawing on a page ahead of time. Whatever the cause, drawing small can impede one's ability to think through spatial problems, and can also make it much harder to engage one's whole arm while drawing. Fortunately this isn't a side-effect I noticed in your work - but I did notice that there were a number of pages - like this one - where there was indeed a lot of room left over on the page. Your drawing was fluid and three dimensional, so you obviously gave the flower as much room as it required - but since there was plenty of space left over, you should have followed up by using up that space with more constructions. I understand that one might feel a little nervous about adding another drawing to the same page - one might be worried that they'll "ruin" the page. That is, however, a mindset one must move beyond, accepting each drawing as an exercise and nothing more.

  • The other point I wanted to raise isn't really of much significance - but I did notice that in this flower's petals, you did jump into capturing more complex waviness to their silhouettes too early, effectively jumping from step 1 (flow line) to step 3 (edge detail) and neglecting to first establish a simple silhouette. Be sure to go through all the steps - constructional drawing (as I'm confident you do already understand), is about breaking complex problems into a series of smaller, simpler problems that can build upon one another. We want to avoid, as much as possible, having to solve a ton of things all at once - in this case, you were solving both how the petal mirrors the trajectory through space defined by the flow line, and how the edges of the petals vary in that wavy manner.

Anyway, all in all you're doing very, very well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the great work!

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:51 PM, Sunday May 30th 2021

Thank you very much for your critique Uncomfortable, I'll try my best to follow your advices! Have a great day

The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.

Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.

These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.

We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.

Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.