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Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

5:23 AM, Monday April 29th 2024

DrawABox - Lesson 3 - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/jFSUlob

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Thank you in advanced for any feedback!

The demos at the bottom of the album do not count toward the 8 plant constructions, I only included them for completeness.

This lesson was hard! I'm not particularly happy with how any of these pages turned out, but I feel like I learned something different with each one; I know, I know - these aren't finished drawings and "how they look" is secondary to "what I learned", so I think the system is working? I'll leave that for the community to decide. I had fun regardless!

3 users agree
4:37 AM, Friday August 23rd 2024
edited at 4:42 AM, Aug 23rd 2024

Congratulations on completing lesson 3! I will try to give you some feedback on your plant drawings.

Arrows

Great job on these. Your lines are smooth, and the arrows have good foreshortening. My only critique is to be more confident when adding line weight to the overlaps since they seem a little wobbly compared to the rest of your lines. Don't worry if they don't exactly follow the curve since this is meant to be practice.

Leaves

Your leaves have a nice variety of shapes and textures. However, try to construct your complex leaves out of simple shapes first. For example, I think you should've approached your maple leaf by first drawing basic leaf shapes around the stems and then adding complex edges on top like in this example: https://imgur.com/a/5fJIBAU, instead of just drawing the silhouette around the stems.

Branches

Great job on this exercise. Your ellipses are aligned well with the minor axis lines and the knots look solid.

Plants

You should definitely NOT feel bad about your plant drawings. As you said, the goal is not to make pretty drawings but to construct solid forms, and your plants do a great job of that. Your stems and branches have a good variation in the degrees of their ellipses which make them bend convincingly. I like how you put contour ellipses on your spherical surfaces, like with the blueberries and oranges. I also liked how you matched the contours of your forms with their silhouettes. For example, the ridges on this pumpkin match well with the bump in the outline: https://imgur.com/a/mavqSS3. Overall, great work!!

Next Steps:

Move on to lesson 4.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 3 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
edited at 4:42 AM, Aug 23rd 2024
10:24 PM, Friday August 23rd 2024

Thanks for the critique! I definitely agree with all of your notes - I'm confident adding line weight to straight lines, but the curves I still struggle with. My leaf construction method could have used more intermediate steps, for sure. Going forward I'll try to break objects down into even simpler forms early in the process.

Thanks again for the feedback!

12:04 AM, Saturday August 24th 2024

No problem, I was glad I could be of some help. Good luck with the rest of Drawabox!

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These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).

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