Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants
10:38 AM, Saturday September 4th 2021
Heya, Thanks fro reviewing my work,
I know i compromised line quality a few times in these, im really trying to break the habit.
Starting with your arrows, these are coming along quite well - you've executed them with a good deal of confidence, and in doing so have captured how they move fluidly through the world.
This carries over fairly well into your leaves, where the focus on how that flow line pushes through the world helps to capture the manner in which each leaf not only sits statically but also how it moves through the space it occupies.
One issue I did notice in a few of these was that when you started adding more complex edge detail, you appeared to trace back over the earlier phase of construction, both adding the parts that changed, and redrawing the parts that didn't. Construction is all about building upon the structure that's there - adding the parts that need to be modified, but not outright replacing what was there before. Each alteration - every individual bump or spike - should be drawn as its own individual mark, rising off the existing construction and returning to it, as shown here.
Continuing onto your branches, I think you may have missed an element of the instructions here - currently you're starting each segment roughly where the previous one ends. As explained here, there needs to be a healthy overlap between them, achieved by drawing each segment at one ellipse, past the second, and halfway to the third (with the next segment then starting at the 2nd ellipse). This is critical to help achieve a smoother, more seamless transition between them. The way you're approaching it now results in a little hitch from segment to segment.
Moving onto your plant constructions, these are for the most part quite well done. There are a few little things I want to call out to keep you on the right track, but as a whole you're building up your constructions with a good focus on starting simple and gradually building up complexity to maintain an overall solid result.
One of the main issues I noted was that you do have a tendency to be a little loose in some areas. Construction itself is all about maintaining really tight, specific relationships between each phase of construction. Each step asserts a decision being made for the structure - and so we need to be sure to build directly on those decisions rather than treating them in a looser, more approximate manner, to ensure that every step reinforces the choices made previously rather than potentially contradicting them.
So, an example of this can be seen in this flower - here you've got visible gaps between the end of each petal and the end of that petal's flow line. This arbitrary spaces are the kind of looseness I'm talking about - the petal itself should end where the flow line does. In the case of this flower in particular, you actually skipped a constructional step and dove into a greater level of complexity in adding that little inward curve at the end of each petal - after the flow line, we should be drawing a complete, simple petal shape, right to the end of that flow line, then cut into its end to create the inward curve as a separate step.
In the case that you employ an ellipse (like in the hibiscus demo) to define the perimeter of our petals, we need to make sure that the flow lines all end right at the perimeter of that ellipse - not shooting past it or falling short. I saw you using this approach a few times, and while you were more strict in some, you were a bit looser in others.
A more minor issue that I noticed was that in these fruits you built them up with a series of ellipses - remember that the degree of those ellipses should be shifting wider as we move away from the viewer. The reasoning behind this is explained in the Lesson 1 ellipses video.
Lastly, another minor point - for the pomegranate drawing, you filled in the negative space with solid black. I would recommend against this in the context of this course - try to resesrve those filled black shapes for cast shadows only.
Anyway, all in all your work is coming along well. Be sure to review the instructions for the branches exercise, but I will go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
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.
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