Uncomfortable

2016-09-01 20:33

Looking very nice. Some of your stems in the drawings themselves are a little uncertain (I'm not sure if you drew them before or after actually doing the stems exercises, but they are definitely small and somewhat cramped so that's a factor), but when you do them as isolated exercises they're pretty solid. Your leaves in general are pretty good, though again the isolated leaf exercises are very well done. I also really liked your mushrooms.

Overall, what I'm looking for is all there. Solid forms, a good sense of construction, and so on. You're absolutely moving in the right direction, so keep it up.

When it comes to texture (which of course is not important at all right now), there's certainly not a whole lot going on. If you are interested in working on that side of things, you should definitely take a look at the 25 texture challenge. Right now it looks to me like you need to work on your observational skills first and foremost. Another important point is to understand that felt tip pens really are fundamentally different from working in graphite or ballpoint. Where ballpoint is more like permanent graphite (which can vary in the faintness of the stroke), felt tip is always going to produce a full dark mark, with the thickness of the stroke depending on how much pressure is used. Therefore things like hatching/crosshatching, or subtle shading really isn't the way to go. That texture challenge will help explain what to look for when it comes to analyzing and studying the texture of an object.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-03 17:28

Overall you're doing great. This is really what I'm after - there's room for improvement, and there's definitely some here that are less good than others, but you've got some nice ones that really show me a growing understanding of form, construction, and even the use of line weight to really emphasize your overlaps and generally increase cohesiveness across all of the forms present.

I'm loving how you're drawing your stems - they feel solid and confident, and they flow nicely from one to the other. The knots, almost like the knuckles in a person's hand, are a great touch and demonstrate an understanding of the subject matter that really pushes the believability of your drawings.

Sometimes you do have a bit of a tendency to go a bit loose with your contour ellipses. The pitcher plant's a good example of this, so work on tightening them up. In the main drawing on that page, I actually get the sense that the one ellipse that spills way outside of the form feels more correct, and that the curve should have actually come out that far - but at the end of the day, we're drawing with ink so there isn't a whole lot of room for adjustment and fixing.

Also, I do think that your blobby cactus could have used a bit more in the way of contour curves - just one here, one there to reinforce the volumes of the cactus itself. The vase is looking pretty nice though - good construction. Keep that up and I think you'll breeze through the relatively challenging lesson 6 (once you get there).

Anyway, keep up the fantastic work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-03 22:51

Generally not bad. The areas where you filled large areas with black probably would have been better managed with pushing your line weights though (to clarify line weights). The heavy blacks feel a bit out of place since they're fairly isolated as cast shadows, rather than there being heavy blacks all over to demonstrate other kinds of lighting. Since we're not really looking to capture lighting right now, it's probably not worth delving into just yet.

Another thing I want to stress is that looking at your drawings, I'm getting the sense that your general process is to draw things in faintly, then come back and replace the lines with more final strokes. This is inherently different from simply adding line weight (which is rather than a replacement, an emphasizing of certain existing lines). There's a few reasons this is not ideal, but in this case the most prominent is that it downplays previous contour information you've added.

Instead of thinking so much about the final result (and how clean it is as a drawing), focus on drawing each stage with full confidence. Don't draw any marks to be "invisible". Any mark you put down should have purpose and intent behind it. Afterwards you just add weight to key lines instead of all of them, to reinforce points of overlap or to add a little bit more dynamism.

Lastly, you have a LOT of contour ellipses in your branches, and they're mostly unnecessary. Don't attack this with a quantity over quality strategy. Draw them only where necessary, and take the time to draw them carefully (and draw through all your ellipses!). Keep in mind what their purpose is - to describe the curvature of the surface of a form. One or two will do that just fine, you don't need a dozen per square inch.

Where you're struggling with detail and texture, it's always an issue of observation. Your skills in that area are just budding, so with time and practice they will improve. Always keep in mind that the details and lines and marks you generally see are the result of bits of form casting shadows across the surface of an object. You're not drawing the little bumps on something, you're drawing the shadows they cast. Think hard on that concept, as it can take a little while to sink in, but understanding the difference between drawing a thing, and drawing how it impacts its surrounding area will have a considerable impact on how you see these objects.

Now, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. Go ahead and move onto the next lesson, but make sure you apply what I've mentioned here as you continue to move forwards.

Oh, and one last point: https://imgur.com/a/33Fcl

Uncomfortable

2016-09-04 16:57

Patreon flair seems to be showing up fine to me. Anyway, your work is pretty well done! Your constructions generally demonstrate a solid sense of form and construction. There are a couple issues, but overall you're doing well.

The first thing that jumps out at me is that in you're very much drawing texture and detail much as though you're drawing with a pencil. Keep in mind that felt tip pens and pencils are veeeery different. With a pencil, you can build up value, creating a gradient of tone. With a felt tip pen, every mark you put down is generally going to be full dark or close to it. So, attempting to play with making fainter strokes (which only really occur when ink flow isn't optimal) is probably not the best road to take.

Instead, try and take advantage of the pen's strengths - for example, insteado of trying to control the darkness of a stroke, the general way to build up gradation and transition between white and black is to have alternating marks of white and black within a small area of space. I discuss this more on the 25 texture challenge page.

The other thing I want to mention that it's very easy to fall back to applying hatching lines all over, but it's really just a shorthand for "I don't know what goes here, I'm not going to look carefully at the surface to identify the textures present, but I REALLY want to fill in the space." It's often something beginners do that keeps them from even considering what that more complex textural information might be.

The last thing I want to mention is that the flower pot on the calla lily - I can see that you pointed it outyourself as being rushed. It may be worth while to at least look through the 250 Cylinder Challenge to better understand how cylinders can be constructed, and the various principle involved.

Anyway, you've generally done a solid job. Your construction is pretty well done, most of my concerns lay with your approach to texture, which is really a secondary priority. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-05 01:58

This is why I strongly believe that beginners shouldn't be allowed to have opinions - I think this is all fairly well done. Your linework is confident, and your sense of construction and form is coming along well. Your leaves flow nicely through space, and your more geometric forms are looking solid.

I have just two points that I'd like to mention, but like I said - pretty good work. First off, I think you are a touch too eager to draw marks on the page, and could stand to hold yourself back just a little bit to think through your lines more and apply the ghosting method more before you set them to the page. There's a bunch of extraneous lines that serve no purpose that probably shouldn't have been drawn in the first place. Really, it's that sort of loose sketchiness that comes from thinking on the page, rather than thinking in your mind before executing your marks.

The other point is in some ways related - you should probably avoid using hatching lines when it comes to filling in shapes or suggesting detail or texture. Beginners generally use hatching as a shorthand that keeps them from really looking at the textural information that is actually contained within their image - it basically says "I don't know what goes here, but I don't want to look more closely and just really want to fill in this space". Avoiding it as a rule, at least for some time to come, is definitely a good idea as it forces you to come to terms with certain things you may be skipping. Generally since these lessons focus way more on construction than texture, I'm more concerned with your forms. This relates more to that secondary detail phase.

As such, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work, and feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-05 02:04

Pretty nice work! When it comes to filling in those black spaces (which can be a pain with a regular 0.5mm pen) a brush pen can help considerably. Also, I really feel that the second last page shows a serious drop in quality (perhaps the break of 10 days caused you to forget a lot of the important concepts of building up construction and such, as your leaves seem to be somewhat rushed, with little focus on establishing that flow-line and so on).

That said, the other pages are looking pretty solid. You did a good job of replicating my demonstrations, and then did a reasonably solid job of carrying that information over to your other drawings. You probably could do with toning down the number of contour curves on your cacti and tree trunks, but generally your forms are feeling very solid and the whole approach of building up with successive passes, adding more and more complexity, is working well for you.

As for that ten day break - if the pages are in chronological order, that last page marks a sort of return to the strengths you demonstrated previously. You're being more careful, and applying the steps correctly.

Keep up the great work - I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-05 19:59

You've got some pretty solid constructions there throughout your work - sometimes you drop the ball a little (like the pot on the right side of page 4 which has no bottom and is left open) but other constructions come out fairly well, especially in your later pages (which I assume were influenced by the changes I'd made to the lesson).

Your approach to detail and texture is coming along, but I have a few tips. Firstly, I think you might be jumping into the whole "organizing your textural detail" phase a little too early. If you look at the 25 texture challenge you'll see how I talk about the two phases of learning how to approach texture - the first phase being getting used to really observing, drinking in all of the detail and visual information, and then conveying it on the page without worrying about organizing that information. The second phase is, of course, giving it structure and building a hierarchy. You're coming along well in some ways, but I think you're still at that first stage, so you need to focus more on that rather than the later one.

Also, I see that you tend to use a lot of hatching lines. This isn't always a bad thing (page 5 is okay, at least in what you were trying to do to capture the flow of the leaves' fibres) but In other areas you fall into the common trap of attempting to use hatching as more of a fallback to fill in space. Doing this usually discourages you from actually taking the time to study the textures present in your reference, and becomes a shorthand for "I don't know what goes here but I don't want to leave it blank."

Texture and detail is of course completely secondary to construction and form, so just be sure to keep these points in mind as you continue to move forwards. I'll mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one when you're ready.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-06 19:21

Lovely work. Really solid constructions, your leaves flow nicely through space, and your line weights bring everything together and make your constructions feel so solid and tangible. I also like the gestural, organic quality to your stems. They maintain their even thickness and feel solid, but you can really feel them swaying with the breeze.

Lastly, I especially like that you didn't go too far out with the difficulty of your subjects. Each one you've done here certainly is challenging in its own way, but it all lines up very much with the specific challenges outlined in the lesson. You focused much more on reaaaaally nailing each one rather than going too crazy with your subject matter, and it paid off very nicely for you.

Keep up the fantastic work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-18 21:50

Ultimately not bad. I've got a few little concerns, but generally you're moving in the right direction with the flow of your leaves and the solidity of most of your constructions. I also really like your stems exercise. Honestly though, the drawing on page 8 felt really sloppy relative to the rest of your work, like it wasn't really done to the best of your ability. This happens of course, so don't worry too much about it.

Here's a couple areas where I think you can improve:

• http://i.imgur.com/aQSKZRT.png

• http://i.imgur.com/jxeb2bf.png (this point also applies to page 10 where the tops of the forms feel solid, but where they connect to the ground/each other starts to fall apart).

I'll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto then ext one.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-21 18:52

Generally very nice work! Your leaves flow nicely through 3D space, and most of your constructions feel reasonably solid. There's certainly room to grow, but you're moving straight in the right direction, so at this point it's just more a matter of practice and mileage.

I did notice that your flower pot in one of your earlier pages was a little lopsided - for that, you should probably give the notes over on the 250 cylinder challenge a read(you don't have to do the challenge of course, but the concepts there are important).

The only other thing I want to mention is your page 3 drawing - I think you may have ignored a fair bit of the forms present in that drawing, which results in a sort of bare impression. It's important to be patient and break down your construction, ultimately building up to create that sort of density. If you stop short and then try and add that heavy black to compensate, you're only going to accentuate the lack of actual substance in the drawing. If you look at my demo, there's far, far less black than there is white. This particular weighting of dark to light is rather important when tackling a drawing like this.

Anyway, keep up the good work. I'll mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-21 19:08

Honestly, I prefer your newer drawings to your old ones. Though it's very true, you have applied your contour curves without much thought or patience, the silhouettes themselves are able to stand up pretty well on their own, giving the impression of clear three dimensional form.

The drawings near the end of the set are interesting, but you definitely go way too heavy on the texture there. It makes for some great experimentation in terms of what works and what doesn't, but what I'm seeing is that you're piling on more and more ink as you fail to get the effect you want, ultimately resulting in 95% darks and 5% lights. You need to strike more balance - in order to do that, think more about what you want to do, and draw less. It's all about the time you invest in planning, rather than execution. This kind of experimentation certainly is necessary though, so I'm glad to see that you did go through it.

Another thing I want to point out is that here and there you show a tendency to fill forms up with hatching lines - mostly leaves. While this can be an effective approach in certain cases, in your work it comes off more as "I want to fill this area in because I'm not comfortable with leaving it blank, but I don't want to put in the time required to actually capture the texture that should actually go there". It's a very common shortcut people take, but perhaps not the best route. There often is also a great bit of value in leaving things blank, rather than trying to cover more surfaces with visual information (especially when that visual information doesn't actually communicate anything).

Ultimately though I'm really, really happy with your general sense of form and construction. Your volumes are clear, and the drawings marked 'new' feel much better organized, much cleaner, and much more comfortable with balance and blank spaces. You do need to put more care in how you design and craft your contour curves, but overall you're doing great.

Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-25 17:22

Your constructions are looking good. Proportions are one thing, but if an object is constructed well (especially in the case of plants) your proportions can be off somewhat and it'll still look believable.

I have only one concern with your drawings - or rather, your approach. It looks to me like you're drawing with different pens of varying weights - your underlying lay-ins/constructions appear to be quite thin, and upon completion you seem to go over your drawing with a much thicker, bolder line.

I'd much prefer it if you didn't do that - these lessons are intended to be completed with a single pen weight (0.5), and any variation in thickness should be achieved by varying the amount of pressure you apply. Furthermore, going back over your work after the fact to replace lines with final ones has a tendency to produce stiffer line work, since most of the confidence and energy comes from those initial strokes, rather than the final ones, and in attempting to match them we often draw slower rather than with confidence.

Instead, when adding line weight you should upon completion try and pick certain lines you want to emphasize and bring forwards. This seems similar, but has a few key differences. Firstly you're not replacing the lines, you're emphasizing that which already exists (a minor and subtle, but surprisingly important factor), and secondly since much of the original linework is present as visible part of the final drawing, you still have to ensure that you put the correct amount of planning and preparation into each mark you put down.

Anyway, your work is looking pretty solid as far as construction goes, so keep it up. I'll mark this lesson as complete, feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-25 18:24

Generally pretty well done. Your constructions are fairly solid, and on that front I have only one concern, but it's a significant one - you've completely stopped drawing through your ellipses, and as a result they feel very stiff. This stiffness spreads through other linework in your drawings, where rather than drawing with confidence (after a good bit of preparation and ghosting) you seem to draw too slowly and carefully, relying on your brain to course-correct as you go. Yes, if you draw faster, you will make mistakes, but that confidence is something you cannot do without - you need to work more towards achieving smoother ellipses, and smoother lines.

The only other thing I figured that was worth mentioning is that when you want to create areas of solid black (or brown I suppose in this case), you should be more diligent in regards to filling it in completely. The little slivers of white will stand out in the sea of ink, and this will create noise that will draw the viewer's eye distractingly. Sometimes it can be a little tough to do this with a felt tip pen (though usually I find the 0.5 tip to do an okay job of this), but in this scenario it'd be perfectly okay to grab a brush pen to fill in the larger shapes.

Aside from that, you've definitely made a marked improvement. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep it up and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-28 21:30

Excellent work! Your use of construction is coming along great - I'm especially pleased with how solid your flower pots look (this early on, it's often a weak point for students as they get caught up in the fluidity of the more organic forms involved in plants). I'm also really pleased with how that radish came out.

The only thing I have to suggest is that when you draw, say, serrated edges for a leaf, don't draw the entire edge as a single continuous, repeating wave. Draw each 'spike' or 'tooth' section individually. The problem with that sort of approach is that it often ends up becoming literally just a monotonous wave, with not enough consideration put into the design of each component.

Aside from that, fantastic work. I'll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-01 00:49

Looking pretty good! I have only one issue I'd like to raise - underlying most of your drawings, you've got some really faint, timid marks. Your construction lines, of course. It's fantastic that they're there, but they should be drawn with much more confidence - looking at how you're drawing now, it's very clear to me that you're doing so with the intent to draw a pretty picture in the end, rather than focusing on the actual process behind it. These exercises are all targeted towards fully understanding, grasping, and appreciating the approach we take not to produce a good final drawing, but rather to convince ourselves of the illusion we are constructing. Don't draw those marks with the intent to hide them - draw them as confidently as you'd draw any other marks for that drawing. Make sure they have an impact on you and how you perceive the object you're creating.

An extension of this is that by drawing your initial construction lines faintly, you then go on to sort of replace them with darker, bolder ones. This 'replacement' of marks naturally results in a stiffer line, where you're trying not to veer away from the marks you've already established. This is not the best approach.

Instead, having drawn those initial constructions with regular lines (as opposed to lightly), all you have to do now is add a little line weight to emphasize some of the lines that already exist. Rather than replacing them, you're bringing certain key marks forward to help organize and sort things out. While the difference between replacing and emphasizing is subtle, and both involve drawing over existing marks, it is there. Furthermore, since the underlying marks are now part of the final drawing, they often carry much more energy and confidence, and tend to make that a part of your overall image rather than the whole thing being rigid and overly careful.

Anyway! As far as construction and use of form goes, things are coming along great, so keep it up. Just keep what I've mentioned above in mind, and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-01 01:03

Not bad. Your leaves are flowing pretty nicely, and your general buildup is pretty good. The only significant issue I'm noticing is that you seem to struggle somewhat with your cylinders. You may want to look into the 250 cylinder challenge for more practice, but I leave that up to you. In general though, when laying down the minor axis for a cylinder, you should put a little more care into ensuring that it is straight (and trying to be overly faint or use too light a touch for it isn't a great idea, for these marks or really any construction lines).

Also, on page 7 you've got a lot of attempts at what appears to be a hibiscus flower. When approaching this, there's a few things that should generally help. First and foremost, remember that you're drawing a three dimensional object. This means being aware of the forms themselves - don't leave the stem open ended, cap it off with an ellipse to establish it as a solid tube-like form. For the pistil, make sure you're constructing this as a tube as well - actually define the ellipse where this form connects to the core of the flower, rather than leaving it undefined. When drawing the petals, make sure you start with the center line in order to establish their flow through 3D space. And lastly, draw bigger on the page - cramming your details into small areas is going to make things considerably harder for you.

For your sunflower on page 6, one small point - the center of the flower is not flat, it's usually more like a hemisphere. Take a closer look at your reference image and spend more time actually observing them!

And finally, don't rely quite so much on hatching lines as a mean to show texture. Hatching is almost always a shorthand for "I don't know what goes here, but I don't want to leave this area blank". It's perfectly fine to leave an area blank, but if you do want to fill it in, actually take the time to really observe the textures that are present in your reference images and carry it over diligently. Never work from memory, as memory is flawed - keep looking back at your reference image after a second or two of drawing texture.

Anyway, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, as my main focus here is on your ability to create those flowing leaf forms. As for more solid organic and geometric forms, you'll get more practice with that on the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-02 06:28

You're moving in the right direction, but as it stands your work is very stiff. Remember what you're drawing - plants, they're really at the core of what it means for something to be organic. They're living things, after all. Their leaves twist and turn, their stems bend and sway, they're all full of life.

You definitely understand the concepts behind construction - your forms feel reasonably solid, and I really do like that mushroom. The issue is just that everything feels like it's made of stone.

Look back at these arrows you did a month ago: http://i.imgur.com/hF0Lpjw.jpg. They feel considerably more alive, they're flowing through 3D space, not just shapes on a flat, 2D page. You need to get your head back into that space and convince yourself that you're not drawing pictures on paper, but that you're drawing actual forms in a three dimensional world.

I want you to do two more pages of leaves. Fill them to the brim, I don't want to see pages as sparse as this. Draw the shapes from your imagination, focus on things that flow, and that move from being further away from you, to closer (rather than going straight across in the same level of depth). Once you've got your shapes down, you can look at reference to inform more textural details. Remember that the "other demos" section of the lesson page is full of other demonstrations of how to approach drawing leaves, so go through them as well.

Lastly, from the rest of your plants, I do get the distinct impression that you're not spending a whole lot of time observing your reference images, and that you're working a lot from memory. Don't trust your memory - you should be looking back at your reference image every few seconds, never trusting your mind to hold on for more than the smallest morsel.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-02 17:18

Yup, free critiques reopened yesterday, but since you're a patreon supporter now, that doesn't really matter. I did most of my critique as a series of draw-overs, you can find that here: http://i.imgur.com/AM3yXn4.png

For the most part, I think your leaves flow nicely through 3D space, and your stems exercises are pretty solid. You could stand to push your construction steps a little further. Don't be afraid to draw those construction lines with confidence - it doesn't matter if they're still visible when you're trying to apply detail and texture. By effectively employing line weight and controlling the density of your texturing, those lines will recede into the background of the drawing, becoming far less noticeable.

Keep working on the things I pointed out in my draw-over, but feel free to move onto the next lesson. You should be able to tackle most of those points when dealing with insects.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-02 20:41

I saw your pledge, and sent you a message through patreon's messaging system probably a few minutes before you submitted your homework :P Just do a quick reply there when you get the chance.

Your work is looking pretty solid! Your drawings are well constructed, with a solid sense of form and how all of those forms come together to create more complex objects. I'm also really pleased with how your use of texture evolves over the homework set - the details on the hibiscus flower on page 8 is looking phenomenal. The only thing I really want to stress is the importance of drawing through your ellipses - the little ones that make up the stems of your various plant drawings aren't shaped terribly well. They're not a huge problem, but generally continuing to draw through your ellipses is a good way to maintain their shape while training your arm's muscle memory more effectively.

Aside from that, keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-03 23:19

Starts off pretty well, with your leaves and stems. When you get into plants though, I'm left wondering.. what's up with your pen? I don't know if it's dying, or if your drawings are really small, or your pen tip is just really fat... or if it's some combination of these, but in general that pen looks like it's had a bad day.

That said, for the most part your constructions look pretty solid, and you're hitting most of the points I'm looking for in this lesson. Just a couple bits of advice:

• Looks like you're overdoing your contour ellipses a little bit.

• If you are drawing very small, this can make your life a lot more difficult, as the problems we deal with are spatial ones, and small drawings leave us very little room to think through them. This is why many of your teeny branches or stems tend to look very stiff and awkward.

• When drawing repeating edge detail on, say a leaf or something, don't do it with a single continuous line, as this tends to make it look very much like a wave. It's very easy when doing this to stop paying attention and end up with something a little bit sloppier. Instead, draw each section as a separate stroke, being purposeful and designing each mark portion with intent. I'm specifically referring to things like this, especially towards the top-left of this drawing.

Anyway, keep that in mind as you move forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-04 20:31

Very nice work! Your constructions feel quite solid, and your use of line weight goes a long way to help organize and give structure to your drawings. I'm reasonably pleased with the bits of textural experimentation here too - there's not a whole lot of it, but there doesn't really need to be. I especially like the mycena interrupta.

The thing about your concern is that the goal here is not to make pretty drawings - it's about understanding and learning how all the forms sit in space and how they fit together. As a result, yeah - the lines are going to be messy because there's a lot of underlying logic that we have to parse in order to properly understand all of this stuff, and while line weight really does help to organize and structure it all, it's not going to result in anything truly clean.

One day - that is, after you've finished these lessons and then some - you'll be able to rely less on drawing all of these lines, and you'll be able to instead visualize them more in your mind. That's what all this repetitious mark-making is for, to help train your brain into thinking in this manner, so one day you'll see the marks without them actually being there. Or at least, you'll be able to draw as though they are present.

Until then, all we can do is limit ourselves to the marks that are genuinely valuable important. Drawing through forms is important, because it helps us understand the entirety of that form, and how it occupies space. Being needlessly sketchy however will result in a lot of wasted marks, and additional clutter that serves no purpose. Ultimately that's why the ghosting method is so important - to force you to really think and plan before making a mark gives you the opportunity to also consider whether or not that mark serves any real purpose. This is also why I don't recommend using any sort of randomness when tackling textures. Any sort of scribbling or erratic linework is going to read more as clutter than anything else. For instance, it's for this reason that your hibiscus' petals feel considerably more cluttered and disorganized than your mycena interrupta.

Anyway, you've done pretty well - and honestly, I think those grapes look pretty clear. The additional marks you added to the stem where it peeks through between the grapes was a nice touch. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-07 05:09

While free critiques are open (for one more day), you're missing the prerequisites for this lesson. In order to submit homework for this one, you must have already had lessons 1 and 2 marked as complete, in order to weed out more of the basic mistakes. Unfortunately I do not allow people to jump in half-way, as the problems that are much more apparent in earlier lessons have a tendency to get more hidden in later ones, making them more difficult to diagnose.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-07 20:22

Your general sense of construction and the patience with which you draw your plants does improve a fair bit over the set. Early on though you tend to be a little too quick and loose with your leaf constructions, leading to a lot of forms that feel flimsy and unconvincing. It's important to be patient and to think through your marks before you draw them - consider the purpose and goal of each mark beforehand, ghost through the mark and then execute it with a single confident stroke. Then move onto the next one. For much of this lesson, you were still very much thinking on the page, rather than thinking in your head and drawing the result.

Fundamentally aside from this over-eagerness, your constructions are well done. For the Winter Aconite though, I do believe you could have broken up those leaves into simpler forms, but I do understand that they were a rather special case.

Lastly, whenever thinking about applying texture, leave simple lines as your last resort. Hatching and other line-based textures are often the path of least resistance, so often times students will go down that road before considering what other alternatives may have been available to them. Often times there are opportunities to play with stippling or other more complex and interesting textures, and if you immediately jump to hatching, this can be easily overlooked.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I do want to mention though - it's great that you're continuing to carry on with the lesson 1 material as warmups, but it's not necessary to include them in your homework submission. Tends to make things a little easier for me if the album focuses on the work done for this lesson alone.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-08 20:45

Very nice work! Your organic constructions are coming along great, and they generally feel quite alive. The only thing I have to mention is that it's important that you not jump into some of the higher levels of complexity with your leaves too early - make sure you build up to that instead, like this: http://i.imgur.com/2taOj1Y.png. This allows you to deal with one problem at a time (for example, first establishing the basic flow of your leaf through 3D space, then dealing with how the individual little bits flow independently of that, and so on. Most of your leaves are fine, but these were more complex than most so I felt it was an important thing to point out.

Anyway, keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-08 20:54

I'm glad you're a fan of constructional drawing - it really is the core of all of my dynamic sketching lessons. Each one explores how the same principles can be applied to different kinds of challenges.

Overall, you are moving in the right direction. There's definitely some issues that will go away with time and practice (for example, your stems right now are a little stiff, where you're connecting your ellipses with fairly straight lines, rather than loosening up and allowing them to flow more organically.

I really liked the object on page 6 - the step isn't great, but the main mass of it demonstrates a really solid use of construction, where you're wrapping these petals around an underlying mass. I do want to point out though that your contour curves here are rather sloppy and somewhat overused. A few really well planned and executed curves will have a much stronger impact than dozens just quickly thrown at the drawing. After all, they have a specific job to do (describing the distortion of a surface in 3D space), and if they're not actually doing that job, they aren't contributing anything to the overall result.

Your (upside down) cactus on page 8 does highlight a few issues, specifically with the pot's cylinder. You can read more about constructing cylinders on the 250 cylinder challenge page, but here's two major things that would help:

• Never leave a form cut off in that manner, with its ends left open. Always cap it off, so in the case of a cylinder, with an ellipse. This applies even if the form goes on way off the page - the cap will help it maintain its solidity and form.

• All cylinders should be constructed around a minor axis

• From what I can see, you drew an ellipse or two which were somewhat loose, and then went back on top of them with a 'cleaner' stroke. The problem with this clean-up approach is that it results in a much more carefully (and therefore stiffer, more wobbly and less confident) mark. Instead, take your time to plan and ghost through your drawing motion before executing your mark the first time. Do what you can to keep your ellipses tight while maintaining their confidence. This won't come out perfectly initially, but keep pushing yourself to do that. Then later on you can come back to reinforce line weight in certain key places, but never outright replace a mark with a new, cleaner one. Just emphasize that which already exists.

Anyway, you're definitely making some progress. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-11 22:41

Definitely moving in the right direction. I'm pleased to see that you started off really slow, tackling simpler objects, just keeping your own pace and not trying to rush too far too quickly. Your forms are alright, and your use of line weight to help organize things is pretty solid.

The only thing I want to stress is that right now I'm seeing a conscious effort at keeping your initial construction lines quite light. Keep in mind that this initial phase is often the one where we are the most confident, and draw boldly. It's where we imbue our drawings with their energy. If you actively try to subdue that phase of drawing, you'll end up with forms that look stiff and overly-careful.

Notice how you went over it with a much cleaner, more belaboured stroke? This one inevitably lacks that sort of confidence, because you're focusing on matching the path that was already set out.

The trick is to draw your first pass normally, let it be about as dark as a normal stroke. Don't go out of your way to make it super thick and dark of course, but don't go to any effort to keep it faint either. Construct your entire drawing this way. Then when you come back to it to organize things, don't think about replacing existing lines. For example, if a sphere happened to be a tough too fat, or something to that effect, don't try to hide that mistake - own it. The mistake's been made, so it's often best to just incorporate it into your drawing.

As such, instead of replacing lines, you want to focus on just emphasizing lines that already exist. It's a deceptively similar concept, but it's not the same - you're not trying to hide marks that are there, you're actually trying to bring them to the forefront by giving them extra weight.

Anyway, try to keep that in mind as you move forwards - it's not the simplest of concepts, it's got a lot of subtlety and nuance to it, so it will take time for it to sink in. Just let it roll around in your mind for a while, and see what comes of it. For now though, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete so go ahead and move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-19 20:07

You've done a fairly decent job. I do have a few suggestions that should help moving forwards though.

The big one is that you're drawing quite small on the page - this is something students often do when they're not feeling entirely comfortable with a particular subject matter or a challenge. Unfortunately drawing smaller has a negative effect on the result more often than not, as it reduces the amount of space the student has to think through the spatial problems involved. Drawing much larger (one plant per page, or at most two) is usually better and also forces you to draw more with your shoulder.

Additionally, I'm noticing that your ellipses do tend to be quite stiff still, so keep working on that - remember that you want to be drawing them with a confident pace. Sometimes just taking a blank page and drawing random ellipses on them (with no set goals or criteria) can help you to loosen up.

Lastly - and this isn't terribly important now since it has to do with texture which is not the focus of this lesson - when you are drawing details, make sure you spend a lot more time observing your reference image. It's common for beginners to spend more of their time drawing, but this results in them relying far more on their memory. Ultimately memory, especially untrained memory, is not terribly reliable. We have a tendency to simplify the things we see the moment we look away, so after a second or two of drawing you really should look back and start observing again.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-24 21:50

I caught your pledge and sent you a message through patreon's messaging system. Since you changed your patreon name to match your reddit username, I went ahead and noted it down and added the appropriate flairs to your username here.

As for your homework, there is some improvement over the set but overall I am getting the impression that you're a little too loose with your linework. When it comes to constructing your forms, you're not focusing on completing each individual form and making them appear solid - you seem to be half drawing different forms, being very exploratory and quite rough. This results in an overall construction that ends up feeling flimsy, and doesn't stand up on its own.

Additionally, when you add detail, I see signs that you're working primarily from memory, and not observing and studying your references close enough. The marks you put down in many cases just don't really reflect what's there. At best they're a serious oversimplification that comes from looking at your reference every now and then, but primarily relying on what you remember. Unfortunately, our brains are designed to throw away important information the moment we look away, and ultimately simplify everything down into the barest of symbols. Because of this, we need to look back at our reference and refresh our memories after a mere second or two of drawing.

Because you've been working on them for a long time, and because of the work itself, it seems to me that you may not have seen the newer content (the intro video, the new demos, etc.) that were posted in August. If you have seen them, then you need to give them another watch and pay closer attention to the things I discuss as far as the constructional approach goes.

I'd like to see another three pages of plant drawings, once you've had a chance to review the newer material. Be sure to do the following:

• Focus on constructing forms that are solid. Don't sketch loosely - actually construct these forms.

• Think through every mark you put down - don't just shoot from the hip. You should be applying the ghosting method to every single mark

• You're expected to include the lesson 1 and 2 exercises in a regular warmup routine - pick two or three exercises each day to do for 10-15 minutes before moving onto the day's work.

• I could be wrong, but it looks to me like at least some of these were drawn in ballpoint - make sure you're drawing with a fineliner/felt tip pen.

As far as construction goes, some drawings are better than others (this one's not bad) but I generally do feel like you need to focus a lot more on every mark you put down, and review my explanations of what the constructional method entails. Looking back on some of your work for lesson 2, you had some great examples of clean, conscientious drawing. You need to get back to that, it seems that in the 5 months between submissions, you've gotten rusty.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-28 22:36

You've done a pretty decent job. One thing that I do want to point out though is that you have a tendency to draw in a particularly delicate, sketchy manner - like you're skirting around the edges of the drawing, trying not to leave more ink on the page than you need to in the interest of having a cleaner resulting drawing.

This comes dangerously close to chicken scratching, and generally results in constructions made up of forms that do not feel particularly solid. It can be daunting to really pin down the exact mark you want to make - largely because of the fear (and in many cases, inevitability) that you won't draw it correctly - but you really need to push yourself to do that. This is what the ghosting method, which should be applied to every mark you put down, is all about. You set yourself up to make a specific mark, and you can see clearly whether or not you've nailed it.

There's nothing wrong with making a mistake - in fact, mistakes are entirely necessary in order to grow. If you tiptoe around and avoid challenging yourself to put down these solid, specific strokes, you will find your progress to be rather shallow.

This applies as well when you're texturing - you didn't apply very much of it (which is totally fine, we're really more focused on solid constructions rather than detail), but when you did, it was generally very loose, relied heavily on randomness and didn't reflect a whole lot of actual observation.

Here's a few things to keep in mind when tackling any kind of detail or texture:

• You should be spending far more time observing and studying your reference, than you spend actually drawing. It's very easy to get caught up in drawing from memory - within seconds of looking away from your reference, your brain will already have thrown away major, important chunks of information pertaining to what you had seen. You absolutely need to constantly look back, even after just one or two seconds of drawing.

• Be deliberate - try and identify the rhythms and patterns present in the textures you see, and consider what exactly gives that texture the appearance of the qualities it holds. That is to say, what makes something look rough, wet, smooth, spongy, and so on. As you identify these qualities, put down specific marks that reflect your observations. Don't rely on any kind of randomness.

• Avoid hatching - while hatching only really reflects a very small subset of textures, people tend to apply it all over as a sort of shorthand for "I want to fill this space but I don't want to take the time to really see what's there".

• Don't feel compelled to cover everything with texture - you're already pretty comfortable with blank surfaces, and that's a good thing. Don't ever feel that it's necessary to cover everything with detail, as that will only result in visual noise. Detail is merely a tool to draw your viewer's eye around your composition.

There's one last thing I want to mention - you last completed the basics lessons quite a while ago, so it's important for me to remind you that you should continue practicing those exercises regularly. Pick two or three exercises from lessons 1 and 2 each day to do as a warmup for 10-15 minutes. This will ensure that you keep sharpening your skills, and that you avoid getting rusty and forgetting important things (like the importance of the ghosting method).

Anyway, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. You're free to move onto the next lesson, where I hope you'll be more deliberate with your linework, and face the challenges of construction more directly. That particular subject matter - insects, arachnids and the like - are an excellent topic to really flex your sense of form and 3D space.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-30 18:15

It's definitely coming along. The reproductions of my demos are actually really impressive, though I suspect at least a part of that has to do with the final result being laid out for you. Still, it does show that the technical ability is there in a significant quantity, you just need to be able to figure out how to make the decisions that get you there.

As it stands, your drawings are a mix between clean, conscientious, planned marks, and a lot of very sketchy, more exploratory ones. Through my lessons, I want you to lean more towards the first type, and less towards the second. The second tends to be much more useful when it comes to just reproducing a photograph onto your page, but when it comes down to actually reconstructing the object (and fully understanding how it sits in 3D space), it'll result in really flat, unconvincing drawings.

Here's a few things I'm seeing right now:

• You're drawing somewhat small in a lot of cases. This limits the amount of space you have to think through spatial problems, resulting in stiffer, less confident drawings. The tip of your pen also ends up being much larger relative to the overall drawing, resulting in some clunkier looking line work as well. It's usually better to give yourself some more room.

• You're not drawing through a lot of your ellipses - I insist that you draw through each and every one you do for my lessons.

• Your leaf constructions are coming along well, though things like cylinders (mostly your flower pots) tend to be quite weak. Make sure you draw through your forms - so if a flower pot has a section that is somewhat wider at the top, like a lip or something, your pot is made up of two distinct cylinders. As such, you should be drawing the bottom cylinder completely first, then draw the next cylinder on top of it. Don't try to draw them both simultaneously in order to avoid drawing the "unseen" lines. Those unseen lines are extremely important, and help you understand how everything sits in 3D space. Always keep in mind that the final goal here is NOT to create a pretty final drawing. It's to understand the forms that exist in the object you're drawing. This also means that you should not be drawing through your ellipses and forms faintly or timidly - this generally makes your forms less solid.

• When your forms get cut off on the side or bottom of a page, you tend to leave them open - I believe I mention this in the intro video, that you should always cap them off in order to reinforce the form. Leaving it open (basically two lines that just stop suddenly) will flatten your drawing out.

• The tree was probably a bad idea. Again, remember that the focus here is your forms and construction, not on detail or texture. As far as maintaining solid forms goes, if you look at your tree you'll see that the sides of any given cylinder that makes up a branch or the trunk are quite wavy. This inherently makes the tree feel much less solid. Always construct the simplest level of form first, then add more complexity and break up those forms in successive passes. This means drawing cylinders with smooth lines (rather than wavy or bumpy ones), then adding the bumpy detail later. Break everything up into stages, where you're moving from simple to complex. Still, a tree was definitely outside of the scope of this lesson, and was definitely very challenging because of its overall scale and complexity.

Anyway, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, but I want you to take everything I've said here to heart and apply it in the next lesson. Also, make sure you pay more attention to my intro videos, as many of these points are things I've mentioned there.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-16 00:29

That sounds pretty terrifying! I hope whatever it is, it doesn't end up being particularly serious. From what I can see, the lack of coordination doesn't seem to be coming to the surface in your work here. Your lines are reasonably precise and well executed. The drawings themselves are a little stiff, but this is pretty normal when one starts coming to terms with construction, and thinking in terms of solid forms. The constructional aspect of your drawings is coming along well.

I think you should be good to move onto the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete. Good luck with your appointment!

Uncomfortable

2016-11-18 20:58

You're doing okay. For the most part, your constructions feel fairly solid, and it's clear that you're working towards breaking everything down into their simplest components. One thing I did notice is that you have a tendency not to use minor axes when constructing your flower pots (which are often either cylinders, or derived from cylinders). This definitely results in them being flimsier. The use of minor axes for your branches/tubes is definitely good, however.

One thing I'd like to draw your attention to is the leaves on the aloe plant at the beginning. While many leaves are quite flat with negligible thickness to them, if you look closely at the leaves of an aloe plant, you'll see that they've actually got quite a bit of substance to them. When drawing contour curves, it's important to remember what those lines represent - they're lines that run along the surface of a form, wrapping around it. So, where the form has an edge with a little more thickness, you'll find the contour curve wrapping noticeably around it, creating a little lip. Here's an example of what I mean.

Another thing I'd like to point out is with the branching in this image. When applying the constructional method, the most important thing is to keep your forms as simple as possible. It's easiest to make simple forms appear solid and tangible - and it's also fairly straightforward to combine several simple forms to create complexity without losing that basic solidity. Looking at the points where your tubes branch in this image, I see one important feature - the main branch from which the second one comes out, tends to become a little more complex around that branching point. Rather than remaining straight, the tube kind of reaches out in the direction that it's branching. This undermines the inherent simplicity of the basic tube, which also compromises its solidity.

When doing something like this, it's best to draw both tubes as just tubes with no more interaction beyond their occupying the same space where they intersect. Then in a subsequent pass, you can add a little more transitional form to smooth over where one branch flows into the other. The key is to split things up into different passes and phases, rather than trying to accomplish too much in one go.

Anyway, keep all of that in mind as you continue to move forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-23 19:11

Generally you've done a pretty solid job. You're right that your steps aren't great - the individual sections should not be tapering in their midsections, you should keep them pretty straight and solid. Any kind of tapering will make the form more complex, which makes it more difficult to maintain that illusion of solidity.

Your actual plant drawings are quite well done. You've experimented with different levels of detail and texture, you've made solid constructions, and you're generally stepping through different passes with a good sense for how to approach the general build-up of complexity.

As for your question, I don't really stress accuracy. Instead, I stress solidity (as one would imagine, since I've mentioned it like twelve times in this critique alone) and believability. So while you're drawing a particular plant, there's no need for someone to be convinced that you drew this specific plant. All that matters is that the result could potentially be the same kind of plant, and that it feels like it exists in 3D space and isn't made of tissue.

Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-27 00:01

You're doing a pretty good job of applying the concepts covered in this lesson. You're drawing through your forms, moving from simple to complex, and establishing a good sense of how your objects sit in space. There's room for improvement, but that will come with practice.

There's two pieces of advice I'd like to share with you:

• The main thing that jumps out at me in regards to your drawings is that you might be jumping into the execution of your marks just a liiiiiittle bit too quickly. It's a minor extent, and as such is a little difficult to pinpoint, but it generally feels like some of your marks feel a little less planned and less intentional. On the other hand, much of your linework is fine, so it's not something you're doing across the board. All I recommend is that you keep in the back of your mind an awareness of the importance of doing everything with a particular intent. The particular way your marks curve, the shapes you draw, you should strive to have them all match something specific that you hold in your mind just before actually attempting to put that down on the page. One example of things being just a little less than intentional is with the little lumps on your mushroom. The shapes you chose for those lumps feel a little less than thought out.

• The other point is a very specific concern with your branches exercise. Try to avoid any sort of pinching in the midsection of a tube - keep the tube fairly consistent in its width. Reason being, when the form gets wavy, and you get inconsistent swelling and pinching through its length (between ellipses), this undermines the solidity of the form. Basically it's an instance of the whole idea that complexity tends to make a form harder to sell as being solid.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-27 00:38

Your leafs exercise is done reasonably well. The rest of this lesson however needs some work. I'll try and break down the core issues that I'm seeing:

• Not drawing through your ellipses. This is something I insist you do for all the ellipses drawn for my lessons. It helps keep the shapes even and smooth, allows you to draw them more confidently (and as such avoiding wobbling, stiffness and unevenness) and increases the amount of practice you get in terms of developing proper muscle memory.

• When doing your stems/branches exercise, your individual segments are very choppy. This is because you're not overshooting the flow of those lines enough (step 3 here) and are allowing what little you do overshoot them to fly way off the path of the stem. This causes it to basically come out much in the way that chicken scratching does.

• Speaking of which, you tend to chicken scratch a lot. This is an extremely bad habit that should be avoided at all costs. It's common among beginners, which is why I insist on the use of the ghosting method and drawing through ellipses.

• Your constructions aren't particularly solid. You are applying an interpretation of the constructional method, but you're focusing more on shape (2D) than form (3D), and your initial stages are generally very loose and sketchy rather than focusing on constructing the solid, tangible simple forms that make up the basis of the object.

For now, that's all I'm going to leave you with. You absolutely need to go back to the lesson material. Rewatch the intro video, as I cover the importance of construction and form here, reread the article on the constructional method and reread the lesson and demos. Another thing that may help you get into the groove of thinking in terms of solid forms is to try to replicate my demonstrations exactly as they are broken down.

Also, make sure you're doing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 regularly. You should be incorporating them into a daily warmup, picking two or three exercises each day to do for 10-15 minutes before moving onto that day's work. There's a lot of very direct instructions that need to be followed when doing these exercises and doing the work for these lessons, and it's very easy to let yourself slip on some of them. You cannot however allow that to become the norm, otherwise you'll continue to slip further and further off the path. When you fall off, you need to make sure you get back on and force yourself to reread the material as much as is needed to reinforce the concepts and ideas in your head.

Once you've had a chance to revisit this lesson's content, I'd like you to try this homework once again in its entirety. Oh, and you may want to get a new pen. A proper fineliner/felt tip pen won't allow you to draw such faint marks - it should vary only in line weight, with a fairly consistent solid black coming out regardless of how little pressure you apply. This also means that you can't treat it as though you're drawing with a pencil - you need to work within the limitations of having a tool that only allows you to make full black marks.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-12 23:17

Pretty solid work! There's only one issue that I noticed, but I see it across a few images. It has to do with how you deal with objects connecting to the ground. You tend to avoid establishing how they connect to it in three dimensions, resulting in that end of the object appearing quite flat, which in turn spreads to the rest of the drawing. Here's an example of what I mean. Most of the cases in your submission are things that would connect to the ground in an ellipse - you generally have them connecting in a flat, straight line.

Your forms in other areas are well done - I especially like how you tackled these cacti. There is a little bit of weakness early on in the set, but overall I'm confident that your sense of form and construction has improved considerably by the last half or so.

Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-18 19:45

There definitely is a lot of the stiffness you mentioned, but it's not coming from you drawing from your shoulder, so knock that out of your mind. We naturally have a tendency to point at the things that we're not used to yet as the culprit, ultimately hiding the actual reason.

Looking at your approach, when you draw your ellipses you seem to be slowing down, rather than pushing through with a confident pace. This isn't always the case, but I am seeing hints of it across the board. Additionally, you seem to try to draw most of your ellipses in one go rather than drawing through them as instructed in the past. These two points go hand in hand - you're meant to apply the ghosting method to each ellipse, execute with a confident stroke quick enough to avoid any course-correction from your brain as you draw, and then use drawing through to tighten things up.

When doing your tubes/branches/stems/whatever they're called, the curving lines that connect the ellipses are quite stiff as well - it looks like you're drawing them more from your wrist (perhaps without realizing it), and/or are not applying the ghosting method correctly. Because of the stiffness, they don't line up correctly, leading to the lines looking rather chicken-scratchy rather than all the segments flowing smoothly together. The thing about drawing from your shoulder is that when done correctly, it doesn't allow for precise changes in direction, and focuses more on things flowing in a more consistent manner. Wobbling is, by definition, a lot of changes in direction within a small space.

The other thing I wanted to point out was that the couple drawings where you added flower pots - you should have drawn through those flower pots, dealing with each one as a separate cylinder, constructing it all the way through. Because you didn't, they don't feel solid at all.

I'd like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings - focus on the use of your shoulder, the ghosting method and drawing through your ellipses. Additionally, spend all your time on the construction phase and don't add any texture.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-28 18:20

There's a few things that jump out at me here. First and foremost, your mind jumps right to texture way too early. Before we worry about that, we want to be sure that our sense of form, 3D space and construction is allowing us to create solid representations of the objects we're constructing.

The amount of space you're giving yourself for each drawing is definitely a problem - working small gives us very little room to think through the spatial problems involved, and also results in the clunky effect of overly thick lines (relative to the overall size of the drawing). Both of these points cause us to seriously stiffen up, and it comes through in the resulting drawings. This is also causing you to draw through your ellipses less (likely to avoid making them even thicker).

I actually just noticed where you wrote the notes "need bigger sketchbook". My recommendation to you is that you draw on loose leaf printer paper instead of a sketchbook.

Furthermore, I'm seeing what appears to be underlying pencil marks beneath your ink in some of these drawings - I'm sure you already know that you should not be using pencil at all in any of this work.

Another point - when dealing with flower pots, construct them as cylinders, minor axis and all.

The last thing I want to jump to is your use of texture. Now, as I said, it's distracting you at the moment so we're going to be setting that aside. That said, a lot of your application of texture has relied on somewhat more random, less planned marks, where you've identified a pattern, and then gone to town on that surface a bit mindlessly. Now this isn't always the case - there are a lot of examples where you've been more deliberate, but the sort of sloppy lines on the bottom right of this page won't contribute much to your overall drawing.

I talk about the process of approaching learning how to tackle texture in the 25 texture challenge - keep in mind the fact that there's two separate stages, and I think much of the time you're jumping into the second stage (organizing your details) before properly completing the first stage (training your eye to observe all of the detail in your reference image).

Now, what I want you to do is another 5 pages of plant drawings, on larger pages, with absolutely no texture whatsoever. Focus entirely on construction, draw from your shoulder, and ensure that your forms feel solid and three dimensional. Plan and execute each mark you put down with the ghosting method.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-02 20:26

Just for the record, I mentioned in my last critique that you posted three submissions in a very short period of time. Your fourth comes only a few days later. You need to slow down and for my sake, give some thought to what is fair for the compensation you are giving me in return.

Anyway, moving onto your homework. Your leaf forms are looking good - you seem to be fairly comfortable with having them twist and turn through space, whilst maintaining the focus on the fact that they're flat, like the arrows/ribbons in lesson 2.

Your first page of stems (or half page as the case may be) were quite sloppy, though you rein that in on the second.

Your drawings from there onwards do tend towards the sloppy side of things, however. You're very focused on the final result, the idea of producing a pretty drawing with shading and texture and all that stuff, but when you actually try and tackle texture, 90% of your attempts involve simple hatching. The thing about hatching is that it's what people tend to use when they don't actually know what kind of texture exists on a particular surface - it's an easy way to fill in a space without actually taking the time to study and observe what you're drawing, to identify the bumps and scratches and whatnot that exist there. When it comes to texture, the greatest thing you're missing is patience - patience to observe your reference carefully, and the patience to actually apply your marks thoughtfully rather than relying on randomness.

Looking back on your textures in lesson 2, you had patience then - you were careful, and while you used a lot of cross hatching there (probably would have been better just to fill those areas in with solid black to reduce the unnecessary contrast that resulted from the crosshatching). Here you're mostly just messy and sloppy.

As far as you degree of patience goes, it does improve somewhat as you move through, but I want you to think more about texture and not about lighting/shading. You'll notice that I didn't actually teach anything in regards to shading, and this is on purpose. More often than not, students will use shading as a crutch to demonstrate form, rather than relying on the construction and silhouette to do so. Silhouette and contour lines are often enough to convey the three dimensionality of a form, so I want you to rely on those instead of worrying about any sort of lighting information. The only place you should be thinking about lighting is when tackling texture - and only because texture itself is the result of the shadows cast by the small forms that exist along the surface of an object.

On another note, whenever you have an object cut off the side of a page, you tend to leave the lines open - like the two sides of a flower pot extending downwards and just stopping. You should always cap forms off, otherwise the form will flatten out completely and cease to read as a three dimensional object. In the case of a flower pot, you'd draw an ellipse as its base, effectively constructing a cylinder of arbitrary length.

Aside from that, your constructions are generally well done, but the way you're applying shading/lighting to everything bothers me a little. From the looks of it (it's always hard to be sure with these things), you're drawing with what appears to be a ballpoint pen - this lesson, and all lessons from 3-6 require a fineliner/felt tip pen. The thing about these tools is that they do not easily allow you to create gradients by varying the amount of pressure you use. In this way, ballpoint pens are much like permanent pencils.

By using a felt tip pen, you're forced to make decisions - both in construction and in texturing - and it does not allow you to waste lines so easily. Before I mark this lesson as complete, I want you to do four more pages with the proper tools. Look at my demonstrations once again. Though the demonstrations are done with digital media, the brush I use is specifically tailored to replicate that kind of unforgiving nature of a felt tip pen.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-04 01:59

The unfortunate thing here is that your procrastination kinda shot you in the foot. Because it's been so long since you last touched the previous lessons, you've loooong since forgotten a great deal of what you learned there. The thing about them is that you're not ever done with those basic exercises. Having the lesson marked as complete means that you understand the material - not that you've perfected it by any stretch. Therefore it's important that you continue practicing them. My usual recommendation is that you pick two or three exercises from lessons 1 and 2 to do as a 10-15 minute warmup at the beginning of a sitting, and that you do this pretty regularly. Every day, every few days, whatever. But if you try and jump in once in a blue moon, you will forget and you will get rusty. That's what has happened here.

Overall there's a lot of stiffness to your linework, and your forms don't read as being solid. You need to loosen up, remember to draw from your shoulder and push yourself to draw with a more confident pace.

Rather than going into the nitty gritty of your work here, I'm going to ask you to go back to the beginning. Start at lesson 1 again, and read all of the material carefully. Take your time, and present to me your best effort for every exercise. It doesn't need to be perfect - it just needs to be the best you can manage right now.

By going back to the beginning like this, I'll be able to point out where the issues are at their source, rather than doing so here where they're more difficult to identify beyond general broad strokes.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-06 00:55

Not bad! I was actually wondering when you'd post lesson 3, because of how active you've been in the community.

Through the bulk of the lesson, you demonstrate a pretty decent understanding of construction. When it comes to the more organic forms of the plants themselves, you generally understand what you're doing. Early on however, and even at times through the first two thirds of the lesson (here and there), you tend to let your details get ahead of you. Later on however, you reel that back, and focus more on your underlying forms. Definitely the right call.

Another weakness I noticed is that while your organic constructions are pretty solid, your geometric ones (flower pots mostly) tend to fall short. Remember that a cylindrical flower pot is just a cylinder. Maybe a couple cylinders stacked on top of each other. Check out the 250 cylinder challenge page to see how you should go about constructing them. The minor axis is especially important in this regard. Similarly, your boxier pots could also use some work - though I find that more often than not these particular drawings are quite small relative to some of your more successful ones. Keep in mind that drawing larger is generally better, because it gives you more room for your brain to think through spatial problems. Form and construction is after all, nothing if not a spatial problem.

Lastly, I see some hits and misses in terms of texture - as I mentioned before, early on you demonstrate a tendency to let it get ahead of you, adding detail and texture too early before the construction and form is established. While you do show considerable improvement on this front very early on, it still does rear its ugly head here and there, like the starwberries and poinsettia on this page.

Never let your textures dominate the form - a drawing can easily come to a point where the texture and construction fall out of sync, where the form tries to communicate one thing and the texture says something different. The texture should support but be somewhat subservient to the construction.

One last thing - don't use hatching or cross hatching when drawing actual objects with real texture to them. It's very easy to fall into the trap of using hatching as a shorthand, but it usually implies either a fear of blank spaces, or a lack of willingness to look close and really see what textures exist there. And of course, if you want to fill something in with black - actually fill it in solidly. Felt tip pens should be used for this exercise (it looks like you've used ballpoint for some of these, though it's hard to be sure sometimes), as they focus heavily on the all-or-nothing no-varying-faintness application of ink, though even they can make filling things in rather tough. A brush pen can be a timesaver in such situations.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-07 20:55

You definitely made the right decision there - working through lessons 3-7 will give you the chance to solidify your grasp of the stuff covered in lessons 1-2.

Looking at your work, one thing that I noticed is that your linework tends to be quite stiff. For example, take a look at your stems/branches page. The ellipses look to be connected with relatively straight, disjointed lines, rather than lines that flow smoothly from one to the other. Make sure you're drawing your lines from your shoulder, and that you're overshooting them beyond the next ellipse as pointed out here in step 3.

The general stiffness though is usually caused by a combination of three things:

• Focusing more on accuracy than on smoothness/flow, and therefore drawing slowly enough for your brain to course-correct as you draw, resulting in a wobbly, stiff line. You should be investing all of your time in the preparation/ghosting phase, and executing your marks with a confident pace so your brain doesn't have the chance to interfere at that point.

• Drawing from the wrist when you should be drawing from the shoulder.

• Drawing too small - when things are really small, they tend to be much more challenging for beginners to tackle, as they're left with very little room to think through the spatial problems involved. Additionally, the tip of their pen ends up being much thicker relative to the overall drawing, making it look and feel quite clumsy.

Now this raises one important question - upon completing lessons 1 and 2, did you leave those exercises behind, or did you continue to do them? My usual recommendation is that students do a 10-15 minute warmup at the beginning of each sitting, consisting of two or three exercises from those first two lessons, ensuring that all of the exercises are done fairly regularly. This will allow you to continue to develop those basic technical skills, and will overall have a significant impact on the quality of your more complex work.

The last thing I wanted to mention was about the ear of corn at the end. It makes for a great example for explaining how texture should always follow the underlying form and ultimately wrap around it. It can be very easy to end up with texture and details that actually contradict that form, and that is what is happening here. The individual kernels you've drawn are arranged in a way that actually speaks to the surface being fairly flat, rather than curved and rounded. In this video, I talk about how the surface turns away from the viewer near the edges, and how texture will be compressed in those areas.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do two full pages of the branches exercise. I want to see those lines and ellipses loosen up.

HeartlessKing13

2017-01-10 00:41

Your textures are beautiful.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-11 00:09

Lovely work! It's clear that you grew a lot over this set, though I think there was a rather nice, flowing quality to your leaves from the beginning. Your constructions are generally quite solid, and your texturing in areas like the mushroom and the flower at the end are very well balanced and develop strong focal areas.

The thing with your leaf textures is that you're focusing too much on each leaf as an individual component, rather than the whole plant as a singular composition. This has several downsides - like in the potato plant, those front leaves feel really abnormally high-fidelity in comparison to most of the rest that ends up being quite blank (because you probably got tired, as anyone would). Honestly though, even if you'd stuck through and detailed the shit out of the whole thing, it'd be too noisy and distracting. I think that it would have been best to maybe pick just a few leaves within a very close radius and detail them more heavily, but leave most of the rest with something more like the leaves near the top of that drawing. I think those ones play nicely with line weight, giving a sense of form and dynamism without being particularly attention-grabbing. From there, even further out from the radius of your focal point, you could leave some leaves blank, and it would flow and balance itself nicely.

You'll notice that even if you look at the drawing to the right of it, where all the leaves are completely blank, it's much less stressful to look at because while there's less visual interest there, it's more balanced.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by detailing the foreshortened angles at which the leaves bend in your marijuana plant, but I'd say it suffers from much the same issue - you're dealing with them individually, rather than the whole plant as a single entity that needs to be balanced against itself.

One thing my instructor actually recommended was to actually draw a literal circle around our intended focal point, and then to detail the crap out of everything within that circle, and leave the rest blank. I find the literal circle to be a little bit heavy-handed, but it certainly does keep you on target and keep things balanced.

Anyway, you're doing great as it is. Your actual approach to texture on an individual basis is good, and your constructions are solid. Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-11 00:55

Overall, you're demonstrating a pretty well developing sense of construction, and your textures are coming along quite well too. Most of your leaf forms tend to flow quite nicely, and your constructions show an improving understanding of how those forms interact with one another.

I did notice one thing about that palm tree trunk you drew - it was very uniform, which caused it to look quite boring. Here's how I would approach it.

As for your questions about those particular flowers, there's two points to be made:

• Those flowers, and rather, those particular arrangements of forms (where things are very thin, but arranged into spheres, or generally with no clear direction of flow) are very challenging. While I understand the desire to delve into anything and everything (and that's perfectly fine), there will be some things that will simply be very difficult while you continue to establish your grasp of the simpler end of the spectrum. Go ahead and try them, but talking about them beyond that isn't going to help you much right now. In general your time and effort should be focused more on constructing solid, heavy forms (both organic and geometric) and on capturing the flow of flat forms with a more clear direction to them.

• When approaching anything like this, it's important to give the form some manner of structure. Contour lines in this case are definitely your friends, and jumping into detail too early (or really, at all at this point) is going to be quite detrimental as it will distract you from the goal of establishing something more tangible. It's very easy to go off into texturing in the hopes that it'll bring the drawing together, but unfortunately detail will never make a drawing feel more believable.

Anyway, aside from those overly challenging examples, you're doing a good job overall. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. You may want to revisit these particular challenges once you've worked through the rest of the dynamic sketching lessons, and see if your grasp of form in general has improved to a point where you can conquer them. To be honest though, I myself struggle with these particular kinds of challenges - I might have tried to do a demo myself of them, but I know that it'd take me a great deal of studying those particular flowers and I have far too many critiques to get through tonight for that.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-11 01:18

I'm going to be including my critique for the cylinder challenge here as well - that lesson thread got locked (reddit automatically archives any post that's older than 6 months old) so I can't reply directly to that submission.

So your cylinders are generally coming along well - they definitely improve in confidence over the set. There is one thing I'd like to point out though. Later on in the set, you stopped using your minor axes for many of your cylinders. This isn't something you should abandon so quickly - it's important that you continue using your minor axes as the first step of your cylinder construction for some time, as not doing so will cause your ellipses to become misaligned without you being entirely aware of it.

Aside from that, good work, and consider the challenge complete.

Moving onto the plants. One thing that definitely jumps out at me is that you have a tendency to draw quite small on the page - this is something that can actually cause some of your drawings to stiffen up in certain ways, and while many of your drawings have come out quite nicely, I can see it in certain cases (for example, the pitcher plant on the third page.

Basically, when you draw smaller, it leaves you with less space to think through the spatial problems involved with constructional drawing. Additionally, it has the tendency to make your pen tip quite thick relative to the overall drawing size, resulting in drawings that can look a little clumsy.

Jumping back to your leaves exercise, I do want to point out that you should be focusing entirely on a given exercise the way it's assigned and instructed. There were very specific steps laid out for this exercise - you followed them in some places, but in others (the flower, the maple leaf, etc.) you went along on your own way. This exercises are designed to force you into a particular mode of thinking, so if you start interpreting them, skipping steps, etc. you'll miss that and then not end up following the lesson as intended.

We can see some of the consequences of this in some of your later drawings. The drawings themselves are quite well done, but you miss key concepts - for example, the raddish's leaves. Here, you jump right into the complex edge detail of each leaf without ever establishing its basic flow through space. This means you're tackling two separate challenges simultaneously. Instead, establish the general flow of the leaves, then add more complexity on top in another pass, like this.

In general I think the reason that your drawings are coming out fairly well is more because your observational skills are already very strong. This is both a blessing and a curse - it means that you'll have to push yourself extra hard to go through the steps of construction (always going from very simple to complex without skipping steps), because you'll always want to jump ahead to adding detail. The most important thing to remember is that if a drawing is not solid and tangible after you're done constructing it (and before adding any detail), detail will not fix this problem.

Now while you have skipped steps in a lot of areas, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. I feel that the next one will be a much better place for you to demonstrate your grasp of construction, as the subject matter tends to be more solid. Make sure you read through my instructions and follow them to the letter.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-17 20:51

Overall your use of construction is coming along well, though your drawings feel a bit small. I can't be sure because they're cropped rather tightly, but when comparing the drawings to the thickness of your lines, it does feel like they're on the small side. This tends to cause our linework to stiffen up, which is definitely something I see to varying degrees in your work - though primarily in those leaves. On that front, you'll definitely want to loosen up - try doing more of the leaves exercises, as well as the arrows from lesson 2. Think about how those leaves flow from a point father from you, to a point closer to you, or vice versa, and try to fill up all the space on the page.

I do like your use of cylinders - you're clearly paying attention to the thickness of the flower pots and other such geometric forms, and are applying the minor axis properly. Your cactuses are also looking pretty nice.

Overall, it's just a matter of loosening up your linework, drawing more from your shoulder, and letting yourself draw larger so as to give yourself more space to think. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one. You'll find the next lesson will give you ample opportunity to work through these issues.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-18 22:27

Overall your construction is looking pretty good. There's a few places where it's a bit weaker, such as the bottle tree (where you seem to be way too focused on creating a clean drawing, which is far from the purpose of this exercise), but generally you're doing well. The biggest piece of advice I have to offer here is that I am seeing places where you're drawing your lay-ins, purposely trying to keep them faint and hidden. Don't do this. Don't separate your drawing into under-drawing and clean-up phases. Draw every mark confidently, and do not distract yourself with the need to hide things. Ultimately we aren't here to draw pretty drawings - these are all exercises in thinking and constructing in 3D space.

As far as confidence goes, your house plant was definitely better - you're not going way out of your way to hide any line work, you're using line weight and black areas to create a sort of hierarchy of information and organize things afterwards, rather than worrying about what should and shouldn't be visible while drawing those initial lines. Your leafs also flow nicely through space, as you're following the method in the leaf exercise more closely than elsewhere.

When it comes to texture, your corpse flower is definitely quite messy - you've got LOADS of contrast from all of the alternating areas of white and black, so it becomes very noisy and distracting. To diminish this, merging things into areas of black tends to help - and similarly, on the area where things get brighter, letting your whites merge together helps in the same way. Just because you see a line that runs down the full length of a petal does not mean that you need to draw it as such - that line can get 'lost' halfway through, and then 'found' again later on. The texture challenge has some material that might help.

Overall you're doing okay, so keep it up - just make sure that you always remind yourself of the purpose of these drawings. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one. Oh, one last thing I wanted to mention was that I noticed that this is your fourth submission in half a month. You should probably slow that submission rate - at this rate, we're looking at 6-8 critiques in a month, which when held up against your monthly pledge is, to put it lightly, a little much. For now I leave it to the students to self-regulate, pledging what they feel is fair for however much they use the service. I don't really want to be putting hard limits on how many submissions a student can make based on tiered pledges.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-23 03:25

Pretty well done! Your sense of construction is definitely coming along great, and you're doing a good job of conveying the solidity of your forms. I especially enjoyed the line weights on these, and these constructions as well.

I have two recommendations for you:

• Draw through your ellipses! I'm noticing that a lot of your ellipses, like here are uneven, and this is because you've completely stopped drawing through them, and are instead trying to nail them with a slower, more deliberate stroke. This lack of confidence in your execution is what results in a less even shape.

• Try not to let any flower pots stop arbitrarily - like when your drawing stops before the bottom of the flower pot, don't let it end in two parallel lines. Cap it off with another ellipse so as to maintain the illusion of 3D form. Otherwise it'll give way to flattening out considerably.

You're definitely ready to move onto the next lesson, so feel free to do so whenever you like.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-04 00:20

You're generally doing pretty well, and I think you show considerable improvement over the set. By the end, your leaves flow quite nicely, and your linework has gained quite a bit of confidence, especially in this one. There's only two things I'm not terribly fond of for that drawing. The bigger of the two is the texture on the pot, as it's done rather haphazardly, so those little ridges you've built up don't quite follow along the curvature of the rounded pot, causing it to feel somewhat flatter. This is also in part due to the base, where it doesn't seem that you drew through that ellipse.

The other point is the texture on the leaves themselves. This is more minor, and in some ways I'm actually kind of pleased with the way you tried to imply that veiny detail without getting too visually noisy, but I do have a strong recommendation on how to improve upon it. Those lines are very uniform - equal weight all around. The thing about lines is that they don't actually exist. They're the result of shadows cast by small changes in form along a surface. Having uniform, consistent lines like this ignores that fact - you'll find things coming out better if you try and consider how some sides might have a little more weight (like a heavier cast shadow), and other sides might have less. Additionally, the way you've got those lines coming in and out is good, but I also think your particularly haphazard approach to it gives a sense that you might not entirely understand why they come and go like that. It comes back to the play of light once again - just as shadows can deepen and expand on some areas, causing lines and shapes to fuse together into larger, consistent areas of black, white - or rather, light - can do the same, blowing out lines in some places. After all, if your detail lines are really just shadows, shining a line directly at a shadow will cause it to disappear.

Aside from that, I have just one more point to make - don't let forms stop open-ended. Make sure you cap them off. The bottom of the pot in this image is a good example. If you allow the form to just stop like that, it will flatten the image out. In this case, you would cap it off with an ellipse, even if the actual form doesn't end so early. Same goes for branches and so on.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-05 22:35

Lovely work! Your use of construction is coming along quite nicely. Over the set, I see some definite improvement, but I'm also pleased with a lot of your experimentation. That celery was quite the challenge you bit off, but you did a pretty decent job of it. For the grapes, you did quite well, though I would probably have recommended actually drawing the different spheres for the grapes, then emphasizing the line weights that you drew there. That is, instead of going from the overall mass right down to the selective linework. While what you did is the way you'd certainly approach it later on, right now the still developing grasp of 3D space resulted in some of the grapes themselves feeling a little flat without the underlying construction to prop them up. All said and done though, this is after a fairly minute inspection. At first glance they look lovely.

Anyway, keep up the great work! Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-04 20:29

It's a start, but I think you've already moved well beyond that stage with the lesson 2 work you redid. These lesson 3 drawings are building in the right direction, but they have a tendency to be very small and cramped (which generally leads to stiffness and greater challenges in dealing with spatial problems). You're also not being terribly thoughtful when it comes to texture (a fair bit of erratic scribbling), and you're not drawing through your ellipses either.

I'm quite confident that your next attempt will be considerably stronger.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-08 21:17

These are looking pretty nice. For the most part your linework is looking quite confident, and your constructions feel more solid. There's certainly room to improve, and some of the drawings feel a little more energy and less forethought and planning (like this one), but things are coming along decently.

As far as the potted plants go, I quite like this one, though those contour ellipses through most of the trunk don't actually contribute anything. They're not aligned to the minor axis, their degrees don't reflect the orientation of those circular cross-sections in 3D space, and in general they're just wasteful and rushed. The rest looks nice enough despite them. For the pot itself, just two things to keep in mind - the base should have a wider degree (as discussed in the 250 cylinder challenge, and the rim at the top of the pot should have some thickness to it. Right now it reads as being paper-thin, since you didn't draw an ellipse inset from the outer one.

Anyway, keep up the good work. Just slow down a little when it comes to thinking and planning. A couple well planned contour lines will far outperform a dozen sloppy ones, so instead of drawing quite so many, hold back and think about what purpose they serve, and how best they will achieve that.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You'll find that the next lesson will give you ample opportunity to rectify those issues.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-11 01:09

Very nice work! I can see clear examples of you absorbing many of the principles of construction that I tried to convey in the lesson, and as a result your constructions generally feel fairly solid. I have only one recommendation - I can see that with your earlier phases of construction, you tend to draw more faintly, being a little more timid with those marks so as to keep them hidden.

This is something I'd like you to try and avoid. The most successful drawings are confident, and timidity really robs the sense of energy and solidity from constructions. Yours didn't suffer too much from that here, but as a rule, it's not a great habit to get into. Don't think of these drawings as works of art that you'd like to preserve and perfect - think of them as exercises and drills. They're meant to be practice and nothing more - you could burn them after completing them and you would not have lost a thing of value, since all the value is in the process.

Keep that in mind as you continue to move forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-12 00:35

You're demonstrating a decent grasp of the constructional method through many of these pages. There are some definite issues in some places - the most consistent of which that I can see is the fact that you're not drawing through your ellipses. Keep in mind that you should be doing this for each and every ellipse you draw.

Additionally, your linework still tends to be quite stiff - you're afraid of making mistakes, so you hesitate somewhat when making those marks. I don't actually see much wobbling, which is good, but there still is a certain degree of stiffness to most of your marks.

Overall, this page was quite solid (aside from the ellipses).

This page however shows some leaves that are not constructed too well, as you jump into a much too complex form too early. When faced with a complex leaf like that, try to break its various sections into individual components, each with their own directional center line (around which you can build the rest of that section, and then merge them all together.

Anyway, I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. You've got some room for improvement, but I feel you'd be better off moving onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-12 21:59

One major concern I have is that the majority of your drawings are less of isolated objects and more of larger things that have been cropped down. The nature of cropping is that it makes us see what we're drawing more in terms of how it exists in the two dimensional photo we're referencing than as a representation of three dimensional forms. Additionally, by not focusing on a singular object, your drawings end up becoming scattered, and it seems to me that you're not able to put enough brainpower towards establishing any one thing.

Another concern I have is that when you have many layers of objects - leaves for instance - you only draw each object where it is visible. This again comes back to perceiving the two dimensional projection present in your photo reference, not the objects it has captured. Similarly to how I stress the importance of drawing through forms in the 250 box challenge, you should be doing the same thing here. By drawing each leaf in its entirety, you grasp how it sits and turns in space.

Don't make the mistake of trying to create a pretty drawing - these are not pretty things to post on your fridge, they're merely drills and exercises. The value in them is not what comes at the end, but what you learn in the doing of it. By avoiding drawing certain lines in favour of a good end result, you don't end up learning as much as you could have.

Now, this particular page from your homework is a much better example of what you should be aiming for. Drawing through your forms, considering how they all connect to one another, and so on. The little leaves you've drawn there are still rather sloppy in that they're tentative, hesitant, and don't really clarify how they connect to the stems - but in general it's much better, as you're properly exploring how those stems and the flower pot all fit togehter in 3D space.

I'd like you to do another 4 pages of plant drawings, keeping what I've said here in mind.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-21 00:54

Generally not bad. The only thing that really jumps out at me is this page of leaves. To put it simply, you're skipping steps as far as the constructional method goes. You don't have enough information laid down to jump from the basic singular-direction leaf shape to all of the different sections, so the result ends up feeling very weak. Instead, when you have a leaf that gets broken up into all of these different sections, try handling each section as you would a separate leaf - with its own directional line, then building up a sort of leaf form around it, and so on. Then you can fuse them together.

In general, your main plant constructions are pretty well done. The only worry I have here is that you have a bit of a tendency to jump into detail/texture way too early. The veins on a leaf are really unimportant and should not constitute something you drop in early on, unless they serve as contour curves. Your sunflower for example, is a good example of jumping into detail too early - you get distracted from the core construction, and end up building on top of a very shaky foundation.

I think you have plenty of room for growth, but you're moving in the right direction, and things seem to be going pretty well as is. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.