Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

7:24 PM, Thursday July 9th 2020

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Well, after a long pause caused by the quarantine, I'm back with DAB again xP

Not pretty much to say, the worst parts for me were foreshortened leaves and... branches, being extremely sloppy at the beginning, (the shown was the first one). During the warm ups I have become a little better at them... I think...

Also, for sure I'll start trying to take my lines in general more serious, feel like most of the sloppy one are sloppy because I'm not focused enough xP

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8:01 PM, Thursday July 9th 2020

To start, your arrows are generally looking pretty good, though as we look farther and farther back, be sure to keep emphasizing and exaggerating the foreshortening, especially as it applies to the gaps between your zigzagging sections. Moving onto your leaves, these are definitely moving in the right direction, and you're capturing a nice sense of flow and movement to them, although I do feel that a little more time can be invested in your individual marks. Remember that the lines you're drawing on their surfaces are contour lines, not representations of the actual veins, since we'd instead be capturing those using cast shadow shapes as discussed back in lesson 2's texture section. I'm pleased with how you approached the little bit of extra edge detail you added on one of your leaves, but as a whole you definitely focused on this exercise at its simplest level, rather than pushing it as far as it could have gone.

One last point on that front - try drawing these a little bigger in the future. Giving yourself more room to construct your forms will help you engage your brain's spatial reasoning skills, as well as your whole arm when drawing. Drawing things smaller tends to cut those off, resulting in a more cramped, and stiffer result.

Your branches are largely moving in the right direction, although these could also be drawn a fair bit larger to really lean harder into what the exercise is developing in your skillset. You've got varying results when it comes to getting those segments to flow seamlessly with one another, but those visible "tails" are actually pretty normal. Just try to make a point of extending them fully halfway towards the next ellipse - you have a lot that extend only a little ways, resulting in far less room to overlap with the next segment. Having a "runway" before shooting off towards your next target helps a great deal, as shown here.

Moving onto your plant constructions, again - the size thing really becomes noticeable. You're really not taking advantage of all the space available to you on the page, often leaving gaps equal to the amount of space actually used for your drawings. It's not that you should fit additional drawings in there, but rather that working through all of the spatial calculations your brain has to do in order to construct each individual form in its rightful place really requires a lot more room. Often students will draw smaller specifically because they're not confident in their ability to do so, and they end up self-sabotaging to an extent.

Another major problem I'm noticing is the tendency to treat these drawings as though the intent is to create something pretty and clean at the end. This results in you skipping a lot of steps, or making choices to leave certain lines out in favour of avoiding clutter. Every single drawing you do within this course is, itself, an exercise. The point is about how it trains your brain to think about working in 3D space through every mark you draw, every form your construct, and how you fit them all together.

One critical element to this is drawing through your forms. That means drawing each and every form in its entirety, regardless of whether another form sits in front of it. Even if something else is blocking the viewer's vision of something, it still exists there in the world, and therefore should be drawn in its entirety so we can fully understand how it sits in the world, and how it relates to the forms around it. So, cases like the drawing on the right siude of this page where you only drew the portions of the petals that were visible is incorrect, even though those petals were otherwise drawn reasonably well. Looking at the drawing on the left side of this page, it largely ends up flattening down into 2D shapes, and any sense of depth or a third dimension in the scene is lost.

As you continue progressing through the set, there definitely is improvement. Drawings 9-14, though still very small, start to come together much better as a combination of a series of solid 3D forms. The top of 12 still only has the "visible" portion of those leaves, but I do quite like how you've drawn through the flower pot, the trunk, etc. 14 however is showing the value of drawing through your petals, and you're able to wrap your head around how all of them sit there in the world.

All in all, I think that you're making a lot of mistakes in terms of how you're approaching the material, but despite that are still showing that your understanding of 3D space is improving. I do however want to ensure that these mistakes are resolved before we move on, so I'm going to assign a few additional pages.

Next Steps:

I'd like to see the following:

  • 1 page of leaves. Draw the leaves bigger, get into more edge detail and focus a lot more on how those leaves actually flow through space with a confident initial flow line.

  • 4 pages of plant drawings. Draw them all bigger, taking full advantage of the space on the page, and draw through your forms. Don't worry about detail or texture, focus entirely on construction and the manipulation of forms defined within 3D space.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
9:47 AM, Wednesday July 15th 2020

I honestly thought that those first exercises came out poorly because while doing them I wasn't really focused, but even focused, ghosting, and pushing myself to draw them bigger... ooooof...

https://imgur.com/a/vhPvjC0

Little question... If I'd really want to improve my feeling of form and line quality during this summer, could spending 1h-2h of new + old random DaB homework be a good approach ?

3:37 PM, Wednesday July 15th 2020

A number of these are looking vastly better. I especially liked the constructions on this page - they demonstrate a strong grasp of form and how those forms relate to one another in space. They're also drawn big, and clearly take full advantage of the space available to them.

There are a few issues I want to point out:

  • On this page, the potted plant there is obviously way too small. Also, for the petals on the other plants, the petals are supposed to extend only to the tip of your flow lines, ideally - so don't get in the habit of purposely adding space between the end of the flow line and the end of the petal (or of having the petal end before the end of the petal either).

  • In this drawing, you drew the stems only as lines. Lines imply that those forms are basically paper-thin, which in this case they certainly would not be. Make sure you draw the forms in their entirety, even if they're very narrow. Additionally, the top level of the soil in the glass vase should have been drawn slightly inset within the container (again, to imply the thickness of the vase's glass) and also should have first been blocked in with a basic ellipse. Don't jump into complexity too early.

  • For the potted plant on this page, both remember to draw your cylindrical forms around a central minor axis line to help align your ellipses, and also be sure to draw through your ellipses as well.

All in all you have definitely shown growth compared to your last submission. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

As to your question, I'm actually a little confused. First off, you should be picking 2-3 random exercises at the beginning of each sitting to do for 10-15 minutes as part of your warmups (as explained back in Lesson 0) so as to keep sharpening the basic skills from the lessons you've already completed. Beyond that, Drawabox as a whole is specifically geared towards developing your grasp of form, of how those forms exist in 3D space and how they relate to one another. So your best bet to continue with that is just to continue moving through the lessons as assigned.

I'm honestly not really sure what you mean by 1-2 hours of new/old exercises, or how that differs from how you're meant to be working through Drawabox in the first place.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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