Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

6:22 AM, Friday August 14th 2020

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7:58 PM, Monday August 17th 2020

Starting with your arrows, these are generally pretty well done. A number of these show a good grasp of how foreshortening applies, compressing the gaps between the zigzagging sections to really sell that sense of depth. There are some however - mainly the two along the middle-bottom of the page, where the spacing didn't really compress in a natural fashion, so keep an eye on that. The top-middle is the sort of thing you want to go for.

Now, moving onto your leaves, there are a couple significant issues I want to point out. First and foremost, with most of these, you appear to have drawn down the 'simple' construction of the leaf reasonably well, with a good sense of how it flows through space. The issue arises when you start adding more complex edge detail, however. As explained here, you're not building on top of the structure you laid down in the previous steps. Instead you're attempting to replace that linework entirely, eliminating a good bit of the benefit of having solved those spatial problems first. Instead, you need to be building that complex edge detail directly on top of the existing structure - not redrawing the whole thing, but adding the little waves and bumps as needed as individual strokes.

Secondly, your maple leaf shows a clear instance of skipping major constructional steps, [as explained here](). You can also see a more specific demonstration of how I'd tackle a maple leaf here. Again - it's all about breaking a complex problem into a number of different smaller problems that build on top of one another. You've jumped way too quickly into capturing loads of complex detail without any structure there to support it.

It seems to me you may have jumped into this exercise too quickly without necessarily absorbing the material available to you in the instructions. One last thing I wanted to mention about this was how you tackled the 'veins' texture on the maple leaf. You drew these all as being each represented by individual lines. As we explored in lesson 2, texture should not be drawn with lines - it is made up of separate textural forms that exist along the surface of the object, and we imply the presence of those forms by drawing the shadow shapes they cast upon their surrounding surfaces. Using a series of branching lines is a common oversimplification that attempts to represent forms in a way entirely contrary to what we've explored in past lessons.

Moving onto your branches, there's some good and some less good here - first and foremost, I am pleased to see that you're trying to stick to maintaining consistent widths for your branches (that is, avoiding the tendency to have them taper or swell erratically). That simplicity helps maintain the sense of solidity. I also find the focus on drawing lots of these admirable, although it may not have been the best idea at this stage. Reason being, when we draw things really small, it tends to limit our ability to think through spatial problems. Starting out with the branches by drawing them larger on the page can help us get our heads around their core concerns before figuring out how to accomplish similar things at a smaller scale. That said, smaller branches/stems are pretty common across this particular subject matter, so there was some value in that, but it would have been good had you tackled some larger branches as well.

One other issue that stands out to me is that you often times didn't extend your line segments fully halfway towards the next ellipse. This resulted in much less of an overlap between the segments, which in turn made it somewhat more difficult to have them flow smoothly and seamlessly into one another. You still did manage to achieve a pretty decent flow from one to the next, but this was part of the instructions that you should not have missed, as it's outlined quite clearly in this diagram.

Moving onto your plant constructions, I can see that you appear to have drawn far less than the requested eight pages of plant drawings. Notice that the instructions did not state that you should draw 8 plants, but rather 8 pages of plant drawings. Now, I'm not so much picking at technicalities here, but there's a larger reason that I'm bringing this up. It relates back to what I mentioned in regards to your branches: purposely drawing smaller on the page limits our brain's capacity to think through spatial problems, and it also limits how easily we can engage our whole arm while drawing. It results in the drawings coming out more stiffly and more clumsily in many cases, and should be avoided.

Students are absolutely allowed to just submit 8 plant drawings, there's nothing really wrong with that, but dividing just a couple pages into reserved sections for each plant does not allow you to provide each drawing with as much room as it requires. What you should instead be doing is starting with a fresh page, and giving yourself as much room as you need to work through a single plant - and then if you suspect you have enough room for another, you can fit it in there alongside it. Don't section the page out, just place the second in whatever space is available, if you suspect it's enough. If it's not, it's entirely okay to just leave it as one drawing to the page and move onto the next.

Now, while the processes you're using for your plants are generally looking good (I'm not seeing you skipping major steps like you did when doing the leaf exercise), there are areas where the linework appears somewhat stiff or clumsy - especially when it comes to the ellipses used for flower pots. I can also see some of the issues I raised previously, in regards to treating subsequent phases of construction as opportunities to completely replace the existing linework, rather than building on top of those structures.

That isn't to say you don't have some solid results. This one is especially good, capturing a strong sense of flow for each of the petals, while also getting somewhat closer to building atop previous phases of construction. Your rose also has definite strengths, although when drawing the lines of its various folds and petals, it's important that you treat every mark you draw as being some bit of information that defines 3D forms in space. Don't think of it as though your goal is to replicate the reference you're following visually - you're to create something solid and seemingly tangible in 3D space, and therefore drawing the petals, each in their entirety, is important.

All in all you're moving in the right direction, but you've got some issues to address before we can move forwards. I'm going to assign some additional pages below.

Next Steps:

Please complete the following:

  • 2 pages of leaves

  • 4 plant drawings

When taking photos of your results, don't crop them to individual drawings. I want to see the whole page in full.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
9:44 PM, Monday September 7th 2020
9:48 PM, Monday September 7th 2020

This is looking much better, though there are a couple things I want to call out:

  • You appear to have forgotten what I said about drawing too small. Please go back to my initial critique and read it through, as I explain why it's important to prioritize ensuring that every drawing gets as much room as it requires, rather than cramming as many drawings as you can into a single page.

  • On the last page, I just wanted to point out that the smaller ball forms you drew there came out much better than the large one in the top drawing. The main difference is that on the better ones, you just added a contour ellipse at one end, whereas on the weaker, larger one, you put a contour curve around its midsection. I wanted to draw attention to this, just to show that the contour ellipse approach is generally much more effective. I also go into it in these notes.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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