Hello,
This is my submission for lesson 3.
I felt satisfied with most of the drawings excecpt for that one plant and maybe the pumpkin.
I´ve also included 2 of the Demo-Drawings as i thought that a critique of those two could be quite useful.
All crtitism is appreciated! Thanks in advance.
Starting with your arrows, your work here is excellent. You've done a great job of capturing a strong sense of confidence and fluidity here, which really sells how they move through all three dimensions of space. This carries over nicely into your leaves, where you've not only established how they each sit in space, but also how they move through the space they each occupy.
I'm also pleased to see how you've tackled the addition of edge detail - you've been careful to build each individual bump one at a time, considering how you're modifying each leaf's silhouette, and how it impacts the resulting 3D structure. Just one small thing to keep in mind - right now you have a tendency to make those edge detail marks a little darker than the original linework. Try to avoid that, and keep the thickness roughly the same throughout, so the silhouette feels more cohesive.
Moving onto your branches, while you've generally done a pretty good job of maintaining a consistent width for each structure, I am noticing that you're a little sloppy in terms of following the specific instructions for this exercise. As explained here in the lesson, each segment starts at an ellipse, continues past the next ellipse, and stops halfway to the third, with the next segment starting back at the previous ellipse. This allows for a healthy overlap between them, which in turn provides are smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next. While your transitions are pretty decent, there does tend to be a touch of stuttering, especially when you make that overlap particularly short. In general, make sure that you are consciously following the instructions for these various techniques to the letter.
Continuing onto your plant constructions, your work here is frankly very well done. You're doing a great job of applying the principles of construction, building up from simple to complex, and ensuring that your forms feel solid and three dimensional. You've also done a great job handling the texture in this mushroom drawing. There are a few small issues I noticed which I'll call out, but all in all you're doing well.
The first issue I noticed was that when doing your own drawings, you have a tendency of squeezing them into a very small subsection of the overall page, leaving a ton of additional empty space. In general this is a bad idea - it can limit the amount of space our brains have to think through spatial problems, and can also make it harder to engage our whole arm when executing our linework, both of which can lead to sloppier work. While I'm not seeing too much of that in your constructions, it is definitely something to keep in consideration. When drawing the first thing on a page, be sure to give it as much room as it requires - don't go out of your way to limit yourself. Once it's done, assess whether there is enough room for another drawing. If there is, you absolutely should be adding another, rather than opting to do the bare minimum. If there isn't however, after having taken full advantage of the space available to you, then that's okay.
While I am generally pleased with your potato plant demo drawing, I definitely did notice that as you increase the number of lines/forms/elements present in a drawing, you're definitely reducing the amount of effort you're willing to commit to each individual stroke. We're going to end up getting into some very dense, complicated drawings before this course is done, especially in lessons 6 and 7 - it's important that you give each and every mark its due time and care, regardless of how many marks will be required for a given drawing. It'll simply mean that it's going to require more time for you to execute each stroke to the best of your current ability.
In this drawing, it seems like you were doing a good job of focusing on drawing the cast shadows for all of the little nodules coming down in columns from the center, but along the bottom, you shifted instead to focusing on the form shading of the structure itself. As discussed here in Lesson 2, form shading will not play a role in this course and should generally be left out.
When constructing flower pots as you did here, be sure to construct them around a central minor axis line, and also don't skimp on the ellipses. Here you should have at the very least, an additional ellipse inset within the opening to define the thickness of the rim, and another ellipse to define the level of the soil. While this lesson is focusing on plants, all of the lessons are just excuses to look at constructional drawing and developing spatial reasoning skills through different lenses - so whatever come up, treat them all as being of equal importance.
On this flower's petals, I noticed that while you avoided this in the leaves exercise, here you appear to be zigzagging some of your edge detail. Be sure to avoid that in the future.
Anyway, all in all, very nice work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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