Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants
4:38 PM, Wednesday June 10th 2020
This was definitely a challenge. Looking forward to your feedback! Thanks, Ben
Nice work! Starting with your arrows, you're doing a pretty good job of capturing both how they flow fluidly through 3D space, and with capturing the application of perspective on both the arrows' positive and negative space (the width of the ribbon itself and the compression of the spacing between the zigzagging sections).
You carry this sense of fluidity over into your arrows pretty nicely, doing well to capture how those arrows not only sit statically within 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. I'm also very pleased with the fact that you've pushed beyond the standard leaf shapes and explored a number of more complex structures, while also employing the constructional principles to build edge detail directly on top of the previous phase of construction, rather than seeking to replace it and treat it as more of a suggestion or a rough sketch. This adherence to the underlying structure helps capture a more convincing three dimensional object as a result.
Moving onto your branches, you're mostly doing a good job with these, but there are a couple places where you're not applying the overlaps between the segments correctly. Remember that as shown here, one segment should go from the first ellipse, past the second and fully halfway towards the third. Then your next segment should run from the second ellipse, past the third and fully halfway towards the fourth. There should be a healthy overlap between the two that allows them to flow more seamlessly together, giving the appearance of a single continuous edge.
Moving onto your plant constructions, you're doing quite well! While I'm seeing that same branches issue in a few places (loike your sunflower), you're overall doing a good job of building up your constructions from simple forms, and breaking them down into greater levels of complexity. I do have a few points to raise, however, that should help you stay on target as you continue to move forwards:
When drawing cylindrical forms (like flower pots), it's best to draw them around a central minor axis as shown in this step of the form intersections exercise to keep your ellipses aligned to one another.
Remember that flower pots are not just simple cylinders - they've got thickness to them, which you've drawn correctly in some cases, but where you've left paper-thin in others. Creating inset ellipses - that is, ellipses that differ only in overall scale, drawn around the same geometric center - can help you create the impression of a "lip" at the opening of a flower pot.
Remember that as explained here, form shading should not be a part of your drawings for these lessons. Hatching lines in particular are just a generic pattern used when someone wants to capture form shading for decorative purposes. Many students mistakenly think of the "detail" phase of a drawing as being an opportunity to decorate their drawing and make it look nice, but that is not the case. Instead, everything we do in our drawings focuses on the concept of visual communication. With construction we communicate to the viewer how this object sits in space, and how they might manipulate it with their hands. With detail/texture, we communicate what the surfaces of the object would feel like if one were to run their fingers across it.
The same thing applies when dealing with large black shadow shapes. In most cases you've used them properly as cast shadows, but there are some cases where you've confused them somewhat with form shading. On the right side of this page for example, there are places where it is used in both ways.
You resolved this in your later drawings, but as a general point, always make sure you're giving yourself plenty of room to think through your spatial problems. This means drawing things bigger, and avoiding cramming lots of different drawings into a page for the sake of "full-ness". Drawing larger helps engage our brain's spatial reasoning skills, as well as pushes us to draw from our shoulder. Drawing smaller does the opposite, making it more difficult to sort through spatial problems as a beginner, and also causing some of our linework to, at times, come out a little stiff.
All in all, your work is still very well done, and you do a good job of building up your constructions from simple to complex. As such, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
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