Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

4:02 PM, Wednesday December 30th 2020

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hello, i have drawn a plant per page instead of filled page of plants i hope thats ok.

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12:30 AM, Friday January 1st 2021

Starting with your arrows, these are drawn quite well and convey a strong sense of fluidity and confidence as they move through the scene. I do however recommend that you exaggerate how the gaps between the zigzagging sections compress as we look farther back, to provide a better sense of depth in the scene, as shown here. Also the page definitely has some more room where a few more arrows could have fit just fine.

Continuing onto your leaves, you definitely carried that sense of fluidity over nicely, capturing not only how they sit in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. That said, there are a few issues that stand out:

  • I'm noticing that when you're cutting back into the silhouette of your leaves, you filled that area with black. Don't do this. Filled areas of solid black should be reserved only for cast shadows and nothing else. Similarly, I also noticed that you used white-out to remove mistakes on a couple leaves for some reason. These actions suggest that you're focusing more on each drawing as a presentation of the end result. Every drawing we do in this course is an exercise - the end result doesn't matter, so much as the process and what it teaches you. So don't worry about going out of your way to make things neat and tidy - doing so takes time, effort, energy and brain capacity, all of which (aside from time) are limited. Focus them all on applying the exercises instead.

  • There are definitely a lot of areas where you break the principles introduced in lesson 2's texture section. Most specifically, you're not employing implicit drawing techniques to capture textural forms, and are instead relying on outlines. In order to avoid this in the future, you can make a point of employing this two-step process when making any textural marks. It not only forces us to work in shadow shapes, but it also helps us to think about how the shadows themselves relate to the forms casting them.

  • You're also filling the backside of your leaves with some really rough hatching. Hatching lines in general should be avoided when drawing actual objects (aside from primitives forms like boxes, where they serve a different purpose entirely). Hatching is usually employed as a sort of generic shading technique, but as discussed here, the drawings you do for this course should not employ any form shading at all. Taking that a step further, as explained here, you should absolutely avoid any kind of randomness or scribbling.

Continuing onto your branches, it appears to me that you didn't entirely follow the instructions for this one. Most notably, you seem to be drawing line segments from ellipse to ellipse, rather than following the process shown here. What we want is for the line segments to end up overlapping, as this helps us achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next. This is so we can practice creating the illusion of a single continuous edge when we have to draw lines that are simply too long or complex for us to pull off in one go.

Moving onto your plant constructions, it's a bit of a mixed bag and I think the major culprit is the fact that you've clearly prioritized drawing cleanly, focusing on that end result, instead of the techniques and principles explored in the lesson. There are a few cases where you held to those principles quite well, like here and to a point here (specifically you were drawing each and every leaf/petal in its entirety, which helped you to establish how they sit in space and relate to one another within that space), but throughout most of your drawings you opted not to do this.

Instead in the majority of the drawings, you cut your forms off where they were overlapped by others (like the leaves here) which focuses entirely on how they exist as flat shapes on a page, rather than forms in 3D space which continue to exist regardless of whether another form blocks our view of them.

I also noticed that on this same drawing, you skipped steps of the leaf construction process, jumping straight into a more complex, wavy edge for each leaf rather than building it up steadily, first with a simple edge, then building the wavy ones on top of it as shown here.

Looking at your flower pots, many of yours are actually drawn pretty well. For most of them, the only thing that's missing is that you it is always good to construct such cylindrical forms around a central minor axis line, in order to help align the ellipses. I did however notice that in this one you left the flower pot quite simple without establishing the thickness of the rim (by placing another ellipse inside the top one), and without establishing another ellipse for the level of the soil.

All in all, I think there is definitely a lot to be desired. Initially I was considering having you fully redo the lesson, but instead since I see clear signs that you know how to do this correctly (and simply got derailed by aiming to draw a bunch of pretty pictures), I'm going to assign a number of pages for revision instead.

Next Steps:

Please submit the following:

  • 1 page of leaves

  • 1 page of branches

  • 4 pages of plant constructions

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
6:57 PM, Sunday January 3rd 2021
8:30 PM, Monday January 4th 2021

While there are overall steps in the right direction, there are a number of specific points I raised in my critique that you appear not to have resolved, which suggests to me that you may have missed them, or not had them fresh in your mind when going through this work. Perhaps you didn't give yourself enough time to read and absorb the critique and complete the work, and should be allowing yourself to address these issues more patiently to avoid rushing.

There are definitely a lot of areas where you break the principles introduced in lesson 2's texture section. Most specifically, you're not employing implicit drawing techniques to capture textural forms, and are instead relying on outlines. In order to avoid this in the future, you can make a point of employing this two-step process when making any textural marks. It not only forces us to work in shadow shapes, but it also helps us to think about how the shadows themselves relate to the forms casting them.

In a number of your leaves, like those on this plant you represented the veins on the surface of the leaves as lines, instead of treating those veins as three dimensional tubes that cast shadows on the surfaces around them. I just finished redrawing the leaf construction demonstration for the lesson and purposely included a veiny leaf texture to provide you with an example.

Looking at your flower pots, many of yours are actually drawn pretty well. For most of them, the only thing that's missing is that you it is always good to construct such cylindrical forms around a central minor axis line, in order to help align the ellipses. I did however notice that in this one you left the flower pot quite simple without establishing the thickness of the rim (by placing another ellipse inside the top one), and without establishing another ellipse for the level of the soil.

Not much to be said here, you just didn't follow this point at all. For the sake of completeness, here is a specific example of what I mean. In addition to the minor axis:

  • Draw through all of your ellipses. You also neglected to do this in your branches exercise. This is something I want you to do for every ellipse you draw throughout this entire course without exception.

Aside from that, everything else is fine, but because I addressed these points specifically in my original critique, there is no reason for these areas to be completely unchanged. There should have at least been an attempt at correcting the issues. You are very close to completing this lesson, and the only thing holding you back is the care with which you read through the material and the critiques you are given.

I'm going to assign the same revisions as before.

Next Steps:

  • 1 page of leaves

  • 1 page of branches

  • 4 pages of plant constructions

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
9:12 PM, Friday January 8th 2021

https://imgur.com/a/yk05e41

hello,

where you stated this (Looking at your flower pots, many of yours are actually drawn pretty well. For most of them, the only thing that's missing is that you it is always good to construct such cylindrical forms around a central minor axis line, in order to help align the ellipses. I did however notice that in this one you left the flower pot quite simple without establishing the thickness of the rim (by placing another ellipse inside the top one), and without establishing another ellipse for the level of the soil).

it is true but the drawing of the plant in the pot is from the first submission of the lesson3 and not from revission reply. thank you for reviewing my attempts and other for reviwing my home work, happy new year. i know i still have to properly alined everything togather i feel im slowly getting there , i dont mind not passing and repeating the lesson, i care about learning properly.

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