Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants
11:06 PM, Saturday August 1st 2020
Hello. Here's my submission for lesson 3.
Your work here is largely well done, with a few things to watch out for.
Starting with your arrows, they're flowing confidently and smoothly through space, and that carries over nicely to your leaves, helping you capture not only how they sit statically within the world, but also how they move through the space they occupy. You're also doing a good job of adding more complex edge detail in a manner that adheres to the constructional method - you're building right on top of the simpler leaf shape, maintaining that tight relationship with the simpler edge as you adjust it, adding those little waves, bumps and tears.
For the most part your branches are coming along well, although you do need to make sure that you extend your segments fully halfway to the next ellipse. Currently you appear to only extend it slightly beyond the previous one, leaving you with very little overlap between segments. As shown here, that overlap is a critical part of allowing you to get those segments to flow smoothly and seamlessly from one to the next.
Continuing onto your plant constructions, you're largely doing a good job of approaching your drawings systematically, breaking them down into their individual components, and building them out in a structured fashion. There are some issues I'd like to point out however:
For your corn drawing, you actually approached this just fine, there was just one thing that felt off. It has to do with the way in which you added the little bumps of the individual corn kernels to the silhouette of the cob, but you did so only thinking of it as a repeating pattern along the outside of the form, not by thinking about the actual kernels that are present, in terms of being an actual texture. This is not the correct approach, because it reinforces the idea that you're just drawing something in two dimensions, creating an arbitrary repeating pattern rather than ensuring that every mark you draw is influenced by the understanding of forms that are actually present. To put it simply - if you wanted to actually convey the impression that there were kernels present, you should have dug in and actually drawn it as a texture, not as an afterthought. An entirely acceptable alternative would have been not to draw the little bumps at all.
In some drawings, you do a better job of capturing the flow of your leaves than others. For example, the leaves are definitely stronger than the leaves in your apple tree branch and your potato plant. The key is that initial flow line - you absolutely need to push yourself to draw it with confidence, thinking about how it moves through 3D space in a single fluid motion. It's very easy to feel like that initial line is just an afterthought, but it is a critical part of the leaf's foundation, and if you draw it hesitantly, or without thought, your leaves will come out feeling flat.
Additionally, for the apple tree branch - specifically the leaf furthest to the right - make sure that you always lay down the simple leaf shape first, before adding any additional wavy edges. Don't skip constructional steps.
As a whole, I do feel like you improve a fair bit over the course of the lesson, and your last few pages continue to show growth, both in establishing the forms such that they feel solid and believable, and in capturing the flow of your leaves. I think you should be good to consider this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 4.
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