Turkopauto

2017-08-30 22:33

http://imgur.com/a/Fl65E

Thanks for being patient with me, I never thought some damn plants would give me this much trouble. I hope I got it right this time because I'm starting to think about forest fires.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-04 00:50

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

Uncomfortable

2017-09-13 18:12

There are certainly some issues that come up. Firstly, in terms of your leaf and branch exercises, take a look at this. For larger leaves with multiple sections, break them down into individual sections and then merge them together afterwards. Remember that the point of the whole leaf construction process is to establish how a leaf flows (with the initial line), then enclosing the space the leaf occupies (with two simple lines, one on either end that start and end at the start/end points of the initial line). If you've got multiple independent directions of flow, then build them up separately.

For the branches, you've got to ensure that when you overshoot past one ellipse, you aim towards the next one. The idea is that the next line you draw will run directly on top of the extended portion of the previous one, so they flow together smoothly. If they end up breaking off and going in different directions, the continuous flow will not be maintained, and it will look quite chicken scratchy.

I did also notice that in general, your linework is very stiff. There are multiple reasons for this. Firstly, a lot of key areas in your drawings tend to be quite small and cramped. Here's an extreme example, where the actual forms are tiny despite there being loads of room on the page. You're also more than likely drawing from your wrist for at least some of these lines, as they lack the sort of gestural flow that comes from drawing from your shoulder with confidence.

Lastly, your lines tend to be very uniform in their thickness throughout, with no nuance. I talk about this in these notes (at the bottom of the page), so be sure to give it a read. Instead of keeping your lines entirely uniform and stiff, try to apply pressure such that you start and end a little more lightly, resulting in a bit of a taper.

Personally, I think you'd benefit most from starting a little further back and revisiting the lesson 1 material in order to help refresh your memory in regards to drawing more confidently and smoothly. It's always a good idea to go back as you have when you've found yourself going off track a little bit, but you'll get the most out of it by revisiting the basics, as nine times out of ten, that is where all of our struggles lie. That's why I encourage students to continue practicing those exercises regularly.

If you do decide to go back to lesson 1, make sure you read through the material there, rather than just jumping into what you remember of the exercises.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-14 20:22

I'd like you to give these notes a read, and then reread it a couple more times over. These are the major issues that are present in your work.

I'll outline them below as well, along with a few others I noticed:

• Your leaves are extremely flat. That is, when you draw them, you're doing so as though they exist in a space limited to the two dimensions of the page itself. Instead, you need to look at the piece of paper you're drawing on as though it is a window to a larger, three dimensional world. When drawing the initial line around which your leaf is constructed, you need to think about how it moves not only across your viewing plane, but also through the depth of the scene. Consider how it really flows - your leaves have very little flow, they're quite stiff. Try to think about fluidity. Once you've established that flow in your initial line, you then continue to enclose the remainder of the leaf around it, following that line.

• When drawing your branches, you're applying the method outlined in the exercise where you construct longer lines in planned segments, from ellipse to ellipse. That is good, however you are missing an extremely important element. Those segments must flow into one another, so they end up feeling like a single continuous line. Each of yours curl and arc away where they start and end resulting in a very clear and obvious break in that flow. When you overshoot past an ellipse, you need to aim towards the next one, so when you start up the next segment, it falls directly on top of the previous one.

• Your drawings tend to feel more like a collection of individual lines, rather than a collection of solid forms. This is partially because of the issue I raised in the last point, but in general you seem to be regarding them as just collections of lines yourself. What you see and perceive is a big part of what you will convey to others. You need to understand that you are drawing solid, three dimensional forms rather than just shapes and lines on a flat page, and if you don't buy into that illusion yourself, you will not be convincing your viewers of it.

• Don't just draw what is visible - draw through forms as though you have x-ray vision. This page is a good example, where you allow the leaves to stop where they are hidden by other forms. You should be drawing them in their entirety, so you can yourself grasp how they sit in 3D space.

• In general there is an element of sloppiness that I can see. It's true that there is a large element of you not yet understanding what you're drawing as being 3D forms, but beyond that, part of the issue is that you're clearly not taking the time and care with each line. This means that you are holding yourself back - it's not that you cannot execute the marks more effectively, but that you are not giving yourself the time you need to do so, and that you're not thinking and planning your strokes as you should be. You should probably be investing far more time into each drawing than you currently are.

Your observational skills need a lot of work, as they do for many people at this stage. As human beings, our ability to remember specific details is quite poor. We're great at remembering overall concepts and patterns, but when it comes to the amount of visual information contained in everything we see, we're awful. Instead, our brains are great at breaking down what we see into their simplest components.

This is of course not particularly useful when it comes to drawing. In order to get around this, we need to look at our reference images almost constantly, taking only momentary breaks to put down a few new marks before looking at our reference again. We need to constantly ask ourselves about what we're looking at, and refresh our memories.

Now, the vast majority of your drawings stick to the most basic construction, which is perfectly fine for now. That said, looking at what you've drawn thus far, and the few areas where you've attempted to go into a little bit of detail, suggests to me that you are primarily spending your time looking at your drawing, rather than at your reference image. As a result, you're drawing what you think you saw, rather than what is actually present.

Now, this is a lot to take in so I'll leave it at that. I encourage you to not only read and reread the notes I linked at the beginning of this critique, but also to do the same with the lesson material and the intro video. I raise a lot of important points throughout that are easily lost and forgotten along the way. It's more or less imperative that you go through the content repeatedly and frequently in order to absorb all that is there.

Lastly, I do have to ask - are you keeping up with the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 (as part of a warmup routine)? I know it's been many months since your last submission, and looking at your work here it seems likely to me that you've probably forgotten a great deal of what was covered there. If that is the case, it may be better for you to start over at the beginning.

That said, I remember your post previously about burning out, and in it you'd mentioned that you spent something like six months on lesson 1. As noted at the beginning of that lesson, that's not how these lessons should be handled, and you should only be completing the recommended amount before submitting them for critique. Going back in this way is not at all stepping back, or throwing away what progress you've made. It's often an incredibly wise decision to do so, and many people who've worked all the way up to lesson 5, 6 and 7 have decided to do the same in order to fill the gaps that have opened up in their understanding of the material due to long breaks and erratic schedules.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-14 20:31

It's coming along fairly well. I do have a few points to raise though:

• When it comes to detail, I think you should continue to push yourself to spend more time observing your reference image and less time drawing. Right now I think much more of your detail ends up being what you remember seeing, rather than what you actually saw. As our memories are quite bad at remembering specific visual information, we really do need to continually return our gaze to our reference images in order to keep from drawing things in an overly simplistic way.

• If something gets cut off the side of a page - like a flower pot for instance - don't just let the two edges along the sides stop suddenly. Instead, cap off the section (in the case of a cylindrical pot with an ellipse) to help reinforce the illusion of 3D form. Letting the lines suddenly stop will cause the form to flatten out instead.

• In cases like this page, where you've got a lot of overlapping elements, it's still important to draw everything in its entirety - even where the lines would be occluded by other forms. Remember that these exercises are all about understanding how each form sits in 3D space, and this is a key part of it. I also want to stress that in that page, you definitely could have been more mindful of how each stalk/leaf/whatever flows through space when drawing its initial line (step 1 of the leaf construction process). That first step is all about establishing how things are going to flow through space, so you really need to be bold and confident in how you approach it, so that sense of life and flow carries through into the resulting leaf.

• Your flower pots are cylinders, so construct them as such. That is, around a minor axis as shown in the 250 cylinder challenge notes.

• Also be sure to draw through those forms. Including the ellipse of the base in its entirety on this flower pot would have helped you maintain a believable form. Remember that these drawings are not about creating a pretty image at the end. They are exercises about understanding how all of these forms can relate to one another and move through 3D space. Drawing through your forms is a huge part of developing that mental model of space you hold in your head.

Anyway, keep those points in mind. Also, just for the hell of it, give these notes a read. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Also, congrats on the baby!

Uncomfortable

2017-09-17 03:29

Your leaves are generally looking pretty good, but one thing I want to stress is that for the most part, your leaves are limited to the two dimensions of the page. They move across a consistent plane with little movement in the third dimension, which is the depth of the scene.

Your branches are pretty well done, and are coming along well.

For your constructions, I decided it'd be best to write it out by hand. Overall while you're showing many signs of heading in the right direction, your work appears to be somewhat rushed.

In addition to that critique, I'd like you to give these notes a read.

Once you've had the chance to go through those, I'd like you to try another four pages, but this time I want you to focus only on construction, with no texture. I think you're getting distracted by detail, and it's causing you to make some odd decision as far as texture and line weight goes.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-17 04:10

Yup, looks like your pledge was processed so everything seems to be fine. Thanks for letting me know.

Your work here definitely improves over the set, and by the end of it you're doing a pretty good job. There are a few things that I'd like to mention however:

• For your leaves, right now they're mostly limited to flowing in two dimensions - so more or less across the page you're drawing on. One thing you'll want to work on is pushing past the idea that you're drawing on a piece of paper, to manipulating forms in a 3D space to which your page is a window. The leaves are more or less flat shapes that flow through three dimensions, and can move through the depth of a scene as well as across the viewing plane of the person looking out onto this 3D world.

• You've definitely got a bit of a habit of drawing quite small. This has the tendency of causing your drawings to stiffen up considerably. We can see this in your branch/stem exercises especially. They also suffer from the whole two-dimension vs three-dimension thing I mentioned for your leaves. Try to think about how the forms you draw flow as they move through space - it certainly is a matter of breaking past one's current manner of thinking, but it definitely is something we all go through. The arrows exercise in lesson 2 is particularly good for this. Try not to think of things like your branches as going from point-to-point, but rather think in more gestural, fluid terms.

I believe this page is where things started to pick up more. The stem is still quite stiff, but the leaves certainly do start to flow better. I do however want to mention that the top left leaf there starts off with a more complex shape than it should. If you look at the steps I outlined for constructing a leaf, the second step is to establish and enclose the space a leaf occupies - effectively taking the flow of the line (one dimensional object moving through 3D space) in the first step and extending it to a shape (2D object moving through 3D space). The extra ripples and waviness come afterwards. The constructional method is all about breaking things into individual steps, so you can deal with one challenge at a time, rather than trying to handle both establishing that flow and creating the wavy edges simultaneously.

Also, for a stem as straight as that, you've definitely used far too many contour ellipses. In my lessons, I share a lot of different techniques, but rather than memorizing them and learning it by rote, you need to think about what its actual purpose is, what it accomplishes and how it accomplishes that. Then you can put it in your tool belt for later.

In this case, the contour ellipses are used in two ways. Firstly, there's what was covered in lesson 2 - they are lines that run along the surface of a 3D form, and in turn help describe and reinforce the curvature of that surface. Often times two or three will do just fine through most objects. Contour lines are subject to diminishing returns. If you add too many, and especially if you do so at regular intervals, you'll end up making the form feel quite stiff and man-made. Breaking up the pattern (making them less evenly spaced out) and limiting yourself to just a few is best in this case, but of course you can determine what is necessary on a case-by-case basis.

The other way we're using contour ellipses here is specific to what is described in the branches exercise. Many branches require us to draw longer, more challenging tube forms, and it's often very difficult to maintain a consistent width throughout their length if they have a lot of twists and turns. We use the ellipses as markers to define those twists and turns (I describe here how ellipses can be used to show how a tube-form moves through space), and we also use those markers as a sort of connect-the-dots to help break up our longer lines into more manageable segments, drawing from one ellipse to the next, then overshooting it towards the third, before starting another line at the second ellipse to and past the third, overshooting to the fourth, ensuring that all of these segments flow together smoothly to appear more like one continuous stroke.

In the case of this stem, it's quite straight and simple with no major twists or turns. So, there is no real need to have quite so many contour ellipses.

I have just one last piece of advice to offer. On this page, you would have benefitted considerably from constructing that fruit form around a minor axis. It would have given you something to help align your ellipses around, similarly to how one would for a cylinder.

Now, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one, but be sure to continue working on the things I've mentioned here. It should also help to give these notes a read. They cover some of the matters I mentioned here, as well as a few other common pitfalls that should be worth reading.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-22 21:12

Good stuff! This is way better than your last submission, going back over lessons 1 and 2 was definitely worthwhile. I have just a few recommendations, that I've pointed out here. As far as I can see, your leaves are coming out just fine for the most part. The only thing I can recommend there not to be afraid to let your leaves fold back onto each other. Since they're thin, there's no real tension that keeps them flat and straight, so they have a tendency to bend and twist very easily.

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

imguralbumbot

2017-09-22 11:24

^(Hi, I'm a bot for linking direct images of albums with only 1 image)

https://i.imgur.com/0nP7jko.jpg

^^Source ^^| ^^Why? ^^| ^^Creator ^^| ^^ignoreme ^^| ^^deletthis

Uncomfortable

2017-09-22 21:18

Excellent work. Your grasp of the constructional method is very solid, and you have a good sense of how your leaves flow fluidly through 3D space. You're also doing great as far as texture goes, you have a tendency to apply it only where it counts, avoiding a lot of extra distraction and noise.

I have just a couple of points to raise. Firstly, there are places where you're a little too light of hand when it comes to drawing your lines. I generally try to discourage students from purposely trying to hide their lines while laying down their construction, as doing so distracts them from capturing the solidity of their forms. There haven't been any overly significant issues here, but it could become a problem later on. Just keep in mind that these drawings are exercises to develop your grasp of 3D space and of construction - the end results are entirely unimportant, so taking steps purely to ensure that your drawing looks nice at the end doesn't really serve a purpose.

Secondly, if you try to fill an area in fully, ensure that it is filled. Using hatching lines results in a lot of packed areas of light and dark, which becomes quite noisy and distracting. Any areas of high contrast like this should clearly be intentional and planned (hatching lines tend to have a touch of randomness to them).

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

Uncomfortable

2017-09-26 20:45

There's a lot of excellent work here. Many of the pages demonstrate a very good grasp of the material, both in terms of capturing the solidity of your forms, and constructing more complex objects from them. I think where things start to go a bit awry is when you started to tangle with texture.

It had two different negative impacts. Firstly, it seems to me that when you started a drawing knowing that you'd take it to full detail, you ended up somewhat more distracted while going through the process of construction, resulting in forms that did not feel quite as solid. Secondly, as you mentioned yourself, many of your textures ended up being more related to what you thought you saw, rather than what was actually present. Scribbling is never a good technique to use, because it sidesteps one's own specific intent. Your marks end up being erratic rather than planned, and that very much comes through in the drawing.

The other point I wanted to raise on the matter is actually what you'd said about how you attempted to use texture.

I tried to use texture less in a way to capture how the plant looks and more as a tool to enhance my 3d effect

While what you said isn't inherently wrong, that in combination with the results you achieved suggests to me that you were perhaps not just using the texture to enhance, but rather relying on it somewhat to achieve that end. That is ultimately not texture's job. The illusion of form, of its solidity and of its weight needs to be captured in the constructional phase. What we add texture to must already be fleshed out in that manner.

The thing about texture is that while its application can in ways reinforce those aspects, one should instead look at it as though texture has a greater risk of undermining that structure and solidity. Texture rests on the surface of a form - if that texture is applied in such a way that it describes the surface differently from how the underlying construction was established, that contradiction breaks the illusion for the viewer. The more texture you place, the more you risk falling out of sync with what you've already established.

So, in the future when applying texture, don't use it to establish those qualities. Instead ensure that it follows what has already been set down, and that it falls in line with the problems you've already solved in previous stages.

Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. While the more detailed work falls apart somewhat for the reasons I mentioned here, the earlier pages of construction are very well done, and that is what I am most focused on. In parallel with these lessons, you may also want to slowly chip away at the texture challenge to help you rely more on intentional, planned and observed marks.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-03 23:22

You're generally doing well, but there are a few things I want to point out.

Firstly, when you get to [this page](), which seems to be roughly where you move on from matching the demos to trying to draw from reference images, you have a tendency to jump into higher levels of detail too early. Construction is all about starting as simple as possible. The idea is that any detail we place on the page needs to be supported by the information that's already there. The absolute simplest kinds of things (basic forms, lines that follow a single, consistent trajectory, etc.) can exist on their own, but anything more than that requires some kind of scaffolding to hold it up without it feeling flat.

So, in terms of the actual steps for drawing one of those large palms, you'd approach it as mentioned here. Another issue on that page is that there are places where you've allowed shapes to stop where they are occluded by other elements. You should be in the habit of drawing through everything, as though you have x-ray vision. Don't get caught up in the cleanliness of the end result - while presentation is important, at the end of the day the exercise is about what you learn about how these forms sit in 3D space. Exploring each form in its entirety will allow you to grasp this. Focusing only on what you can see in your reference image will limit you to learning about how it sits in that two dimensional photograph.

The last thing I want to mention also deals with the leaves - for the most part, your leaves currently come out somewhat flat. This suggests to me that at the moment, you're still somewhat focused on how those leaves exist on the space defined by the page you're drawing on - that is, the two dimensional piece of paper. There isn't a lot of movement through the depth of the scene, so your leaves have a strong tendency to flatten out. I go into this a little further on these notes, so give them a read (specifically the top left, about the arrows, though the whole page is worth going over).

I'd like you to do two more pages of the leaves exercise (from the beginning), then four more pages of drawings from reference (preferably those with a lot of leaves). Aside from that, your use of branches, and your construction of cylindrical flower pots is coming along well. There's room for improvement, but you're heading in the right direction in that regard.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-09 00:12

Very nice work! You're demonstrating a lot of solid understanding of the material here. Your leaves are drawn confidently with a strong sense of direction for their flow, and you're breaking them down properly into various steps to ensure that the details and textures don't distract you from the more fundamental levels of construction. Your branch exercises also demonstrate a very good understanding of solid form, and you carry that over into your plant drawings very nicely.

I think your experimentation at the end with allowing yourself to be bolder than you otherwise feel comfortable with really paid off. Often times jumping into that headfirst doesn't necessarily go that well, but it's still absolutely important to do so - and I'm glad that in this case, it did work out nicely.

I have just one teeny tiny recommendation for your work, and it's a bit nitpicky. On the pot at the base of this drawing, notice how it gets cut off at the bottom, with two parallel lines just kinda.. stopping? This will generally flatten out a form. Instead, what you want to do is cap it off (in this case, with another ellipse), even if the actual object doesn't end there. Just keep that in mind in the future.

Anyway, 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

2017-10-11 00:16

So what stands out to me the most right now is that your lines are very stiff. There's no real fluidity to your strokes, nor is there any subtlety to your marks. You're probably drawing your strokes quite slowly and carefully, rather than with any degree of confidence. It's an issue I raise frequently in ever lesson up until this point, but you haven't quite worked past that mental block that lets you loosen up.

Additionally, your leaves seem to be restricted to moving across the two dimensions of the page, rather than moving through 3D space. I actually raised this issue initially with your arrows - although looking back through my critiques, I realized that I totally forgot to include a link to some of the notes I had made on some of your lesson 2 work. I dug up the page I was supposed to link to: https://i.imgur.com/Yfr9JEO.png

The part there towards the bottom is still relevant - about figuring out which side is coming from farther away, and which side is closer.

Overall, I think there's a lot here that suggests you're not really reading through the material as carefully as you should. You need to be drawing through your ellipses, drawing through your forms, starting everything as simply as possible, and so on. I'm not sure if you read through the article on constructional drawing, either.

So, here are some notes on one of your current drawings. I'd like you to take another stab at the lesson. Oh, and here are some other notes on common pitfalls at this stage.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-11 00:27

Very nicely done! You've got a great body of work, and you're demonstrating a lot of flowing leaves that explore all three dimensions of space, and an assortment of different kinds of solid constructions. My only concern as it stands right now is that you should try and draw a little bigger. You're not running into any problems at the size you're working at, but in general you do risk ending up with stiffer results when you draw smaller. Better to be safe than sorry in this case, and giving ones self more freedom with space helps to better explore the forms themselves.

One other thing! You posted under the wrong account again! I'm going to continue attributing the lesson completion flair to -PixelManiac-, but in the future you've got to stick to the same account. I track both eligibility for critiques and lesson progress using flairs, so jumping around makes it more difficult to do so.

So, I'll mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-11 01:24

Pretty solid work! Just a few things to keep in mind:

• Good idea to draw through your boxes in these constructions. So for example, the pots in this page.

• You've got a maple leaf there that you jumped into with too complex a shape. Always start as simple as possible - in this case, build up the individual sections using the regular leaf construction method, focusing on the flow of those initial lines to drive the flow of each section individually.

• Also for your leaves, they're generally okay but they are somewhat restricted to the two dimensions of your page and don't explore the third dimension too much. Try and think about how they flow from a point farther away from you, to a point that's closer.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-10-11 03:14

Looking good! The flow of your leaves is coming along nicely. I agree that 5 came out pretty well - flattening things out in this particular case isn't actually a big worry, because the forms themselves are flat. It's just that they're flat shapes that flow through 3D space, so as long as you capture that sense of fluidity, you're golden. That's why the constructional process focuses first on establishing that directional line to summarize its flow.

Overall you're demonstrating a solid grasp of construction in regards to this topic. The very last page is definitely kind of weird (it's unclear how those leaves connect to the stem, and in general it's quite rigid and stiff) but the rest of the pages are well done.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one, where you'll encounter more constructional challenges, but from a slightly different angle with a different subject matter.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-14 22:54

I definitely think you've shown some marked improvement from the beginning to the end of this set. It took some iteration to be sure, but you definitely stuck with it and now your leaves do push into the third dimension - though there's plenty of room for improvement on that front. I think this page especially serves as a good example of the concepts you've grown to grasp, so you're definitely heading in the right direction.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I think you'll benefit much more from tackling this matter from a fresh perspective (with the subject matter in the following lesson), and you've shown that you should be ready to tackle it anyhow. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-15 02:35

I know you've got a lot of self criticism, but overall you're demonstrating a solid grasp of the main thing I'm looking for - construction. I do have a few things to recommend though:

• In the branches exercise, we go over the approach of drawing a longer, more complex line in segments in a way that causes the lines to flow together naturally (rather than looking separated and chicken-scratchy). You did struggle somewhat with this (you've got to make sure your line segment overshoots the next ellipse and keeps going towards the third ellipse). But anyway, you do manage to get this in numerous places. What's important is to note that you can use this technique wherever lines end up being too complex to hit in a single stroke without ending up stiff and awkward. For example, the darker more visible lines on this page would have benefitted from the approach. Admittedly, you should avoid situations where you lightly sketch your linework and then completely replace it afterwards with a darker stroke. You want to be in the habit of accepting that the first lines you put down are part of your final drawing, and that afterwards you may accentuate parts of existing lines with additional weight - but never outright replace them.

• Always remember that you go from simple to complex. If you take a look at the top left leaf on this page, you'll notice that there are definitely some complexities to its shape that should probably not have been considered when initially blocking it in. As a rule, always start with your basic directional line, then establish two continuously flowing edges that enclose it. From there you can build up and break down whatever additional shape detail is necessary, as you'll already have determined the leaf's flow through space.

• A minor thing - on this page, your flower pot continues down with two parallel lines that stop, with the form left open. Always cap off your forms, even if the actual object extends further. Leaving them open ended tends to flatten things out, while capping them off reinforces the illusion of form.

Keep those three points 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

2017-10-15 03:41

Okay, so you have given a great deal to work with here, which is good. But there are still a lot of points you're missing. Take a look at these notes.

The first thing that I noticed is that you're drawing quite small. You've got these large pages, and you're taking up a few inches in the center. Beginners will often draw smaller as a side effect of a lack of confidence, but it generally results in more mistakes, and certainly more stiffness in one's linework. It's particularly bad with your ellipses.

Next, waaay too many contour ellipses. When I see this from students, it almost always means that they don't really understand what the purpose of those contour ellipses is, but rather throw them everywhere in order to compensate. A contour ellipse is there to help describe to how the surface of the form itself turns in space. Since the contour line sits on the surface of that object, we can see how the surface moves and turns based on how the line does.

Including one or two contour curves along the length of a pretty long form is still enough, if not more than enough. So including a dozen is way overkill, and will do more bad than good, as it can stiffen out your form and make it look more man-made.

Next, always remember to draw through your forms. If two simple forms combine in some way, you never want to hide one form under the other - drawing both in their entirety will help you better understand how they intersect. This will in turn help you better grasp how all of this sits in 3D space, and in turn will make YOU buy into the illusion that they're 3D. The most important thing is that you yourself are convinced of this lie.

That pumpkin is definitely not great - you've got to make sure that when you establish a simple form in space, that you feel confident that it's three dimensional. In this particular case, defining the 'pole' of a simple ball (the little circle you'll see sitting on the top of my notes there, where you've got a contour line sitting on the form's surface that is a full ellipse) can help you understand the form better as it sits in 3D space. In your pumpkin, that 'pole' was basically right at the top, and this makes it seem like we're looking at the pumpkin from the side, kind of flattening it out. Your contour curves also do not wrap around the form at all, so you should definitely look back at lesson 2's section on that point.

I also definitely hope you're still doing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 regularly as part of a warmup routine, spending 10-15 minutes on 2-3 exercises at the beginning of each sitting. Based on what I see here, you're definitely getting rusty with those exercises, rather than steadily improving with them, which suggests that you've left them behind.

When you're working with any leaves or petals, it's extremely important that you apply the leaf construction method, starting with defining your directional line of flow and working from there.

When it comes to the texture you showed on the bottom right of my page of notes, you definitely relied far too much on your vague memory and not enough on direct observation. You seem to have noticed the spots, and then decided to draw a bunch of spots. Instead, you need to draw specific spots, arranged in ways that you see in your reference. Working from memory leads to problems, because our memories are inherently faulty - so we have to get in the habit of looking almost constantly at our reference image, taking only momentary breaks to look away and draw particular marks that we saw in the reference. Then we go back to observing.

Of course, texture is not a big deal at this stage - we want to focus entirely on form and construction. That said, if you want to read more about texture, check out the notes on the texture challenge page, where I go over matters of observation in greater detail.

Lastly, when constructing anything cylindrical (like your flower pots), do so around a minor axis to keep your ellipses aligned and consistent.

Keep what I've mentioned here in mind, and try the work for this lesson a third time. Remember to complete everything listed in the homework section - I don't believe you tackled the page of branches this time, unless the two pages containing one branch each was supposed to be it, in which case you need to be filling in your pages more.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-17 03:00

So I do have a few thinks to suggest for you to focus on.

• For your leaf exercises, one thing that I'm finding fairly often is that your leaves have a tendency to flow across the two dimensions of the page, rather than flowing through the depth of the scene as well. Remember that what we're drawing does not sit on the page, but rather the page serves as a window to a larger, limitless, 3D space.

• You definitely do need some work on drawing the segments of your branches. Part of it has to do with ghosting your lines more, but in addition to this, when you draw a line from one ellipse to a second, as you overshoot the second you need to aim towards the third so your subsequent line runs directly over it. If you allow there to be obvious separation between the different segments, you'll have a very broken flow through the length of the branch and it will tend to look quite chicken scratchy.

• For this page in particular, your leaf constructions are jumping in too complex too early. You do this elsewhere as well, but it is most prominent here. Read over the leaf construction steps again - you need to focus on enclosing the area of the leaf in the simplest terms first (your initial directional line to define the flow, then two simple curves) before worrying about how the edges of the leaf get wavy. This allows you to tackle one problem at a time, rather than trying to do everything at once.

• For your cacti, think about these as you would the organic forms from lesson 2 - you haaaaave been continuing to practice the exercises from lessons 1 and 2, right? It's been a month, so my guess is that you may have fallen off the wagon from there. If you look at your organic forms from lesson 2, they're considerably better than what you've done here.

• When drawing cylinders like your flower pots, remember that they should be built around minor axes. If you're not sure what that means, take a look at the 250 cylinder challenge.

• This page is pretty good. Most importantly, the lines are more confident, and tend to flow better through space. Elsewhere you have a tendency to be somewhat stiff.

I'd like you to try the homework for this lesson again, keeping what I've mentioned here in mind. This time however, I want you to steer clear of any texture or detail. Focus entirely on construction. I believe that with detail in the mix, you're getting distracted from the core constructional principles, because your mind is jumping ahead to focus on how you're going to tackle more of the superficial elements, rather than the more important, structural components.

And like I mentioned before, be sure to practice the exercises from lessons 1 and 2. Ideally, incorporate them into a warmup routine, picking two or three exercises to do for 10-15 minutes at the beginning of each sitting.

Oh, I forgot to include this - give these notes a read. These issues are common pitfalls I notice at this point, and they definitely apply here.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-17 03:42

There are certainly improvements here over the last two attempts. There are some places where you missed my instructions, but many more where you did apply some of the things I said.

Some of the things you missed:

• On this page, you did not draw through your leaves, instead stopping a leaf where it was blocked by another. Gotta treat these things as being see-through.

• The general construction of this page is better, though if you look at the star-shape on the top of the one on the left, that star is definitely a complex shape/form and should be built up from several separate leaves.

Other points worth mentioning:

• On this page, your construction feels a little weaker because you haven't really defined how those forms actually connect to one another. If you look at my constructions, I tend to draw an extra ellipse where two rounded forms meet to really solidify how they come together. This helps sell the illusion much better. Also, the contour curves aren't wrapping around the forms super well.

• These mushrooms came together quite well. See how the connection point between the cap and the stem is defined with an ellipse? That's what I mean about defining how things connect in my last point.

• Here you're definitely missing out on important information about the flower pot's form. Gotta spend more time observing your reference and breaking your forms down. While a lot of information can be set aside as detail and texture, it's important not to miss that which can still be expressed as part of your form construction.

Now, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. The next step, I'm going to leave up to you. I've mentioned this before and it is still very much an issue that is going to hinder you considerably - your linework is quite stiff and still has a great deal of wobbling to it. You need to iron that out, and the exercises covered in lessons 1 and 2 are designed to do that.

Unfortunately that's not something I can really hold your hand through - I've given you the tools to tackle it on your own, along with the notes and instructions, but you have to work through it yourself. Specifically, keeping your lines and ellipses smooth and confident, and eliminating the tendency to hesitate.

Of course, absorbing the instructions is something that has also given you something of a challenge - the material in these lessons certainly is dense, so you need to build up the habit of reading and rereading the material as often as you need - and frequently, being sure that you're armed with the freshest understanding of the exercise you're about to do before every time you sit down to do it.

So. I'll mark this lesson as complete. You can choose to move onto lesson 4, or you may want to spend time revisiting material from the previous lessons.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-25 01:10

You're definitely showing some improvement, but I do agree with your assessment, that your drawings - at least components of your drawings, specifically the leaves. What's most important here is that initial flow-line that we establish with the first step of the leaf construction process. From what I can see, right now when drawing it, you're not quite thinking about how this simple line flows through space. What might help is to think about how one point of the line sits farther away, and the other end sits closer to the viewer. Try and draw that mark with greater confidence, and in general if possible, you'll probably find it easier to build up a sense of that when drawing larger leaves rather than smaller ones. Get used to the bigger ones, and then apply that to smaller ones later.

I also did notice another point about your stems. Take a look at the branch exercise instructions. Notice how on step 3, we start constructing the edges of a longer tube/branch form as segments, rather than all in one go. I think you may benefit from this approach. It's tricky, and a little risky - we don't want to end up with something that looks like chicken scratch. So basically, we construct our segments so they flow from one ellipse, past the second and towards the third. Then the next segment runs from the second past the third, towards the fourth - flowing right over the previous line so they merge into a single stroke. This approach, when done properly, will allow you to achieve greater control over your cylinder construction, which in turn will help you keep it more solid.

Lastly, drawing through ellipses is still important! You're doing it some of the time, but not always. The more round forms on this page would definitely have benfited from it. Though I also want to recommend that you not go evenly over the entirety of an outline with a slow, deliberate mark to add weight. Weight should be added to portions of an overall line, rather than the entire thing all at once, as line weight is generally used to demonstrate specific overlaps. Here, it appears that you are instead going back over those lines to replace the line underneath, which should generally be avoided, as the new line will tend to be less confident.

Anyway, while I do want you to continue practicing those leaves and branches, I think you're generally demonstrating a decent enough grasp of the material and are certainly showing improvement over the set. I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, so you can move onto the next one. There you'll face similar challenges involving form and construction.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-28 03:22

Overall, pretty nice work. I do have a few recommendations to make that should help however:

• When drawing your leaves, think about one end being further away from the viewer, and another end being closer. You have some examples that did this reasonably well, while others were a little flatter, sticking to the limited depth of your piece of paper, rather than exploring all three dimensions of space.

• Flower petals are just like leaves - they're flat objects that flow through 3D space. Be sure to apply the same constructional approach to them, starting by defining that line of flow.

• Draw bigger! You've done so with some, but other pages have a few drawings crammed together. Construction really does demand, especially at first, quite a bit of space in order to think through those spatial problems. This allows you to think more about how everything sits and moves through 3D space. Helps especially to keep your leaves flowing smoothly, rather than sticking to the 2D page.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. You're doing well, just keep those points in mind as you move forwards.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-30 05:14

While you're generally doing okay (your constructions are coming along well) there is one issue that I'm noticing across most of your work. Your linework tends to be quite stiff. You're definitely executing your marks rather slowly. They're not wobbling that noticeably, but the stiffness in general comes from not drawing with a more confident and persistent pace.

This applies especially when you're drawing your leaves, as the first step of their construction - the direction line - establishes how it flows through 3D space, so if you draw it timidly, your leaves will feel like they're stuck to the page. It's important to think about which end of your leaves is closer to the viewer, and which end is farther away, and applying that as you draw them. This will allow you to give the impression that the object you're drawing exists in a larger 3D world, rather than just restricted to the two dimensions of the flat page.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do three more pages of plant drawings. Draw through your ellipses, and execute all of your marks with the ghosting method - putting your time into the preparation phase and executing with confidence. Focus on achieving a sense of flow, and consider the space in which your objects exist.

Uncomfortable

2017-11-19 20:38

So I do have a few things to mention about your overall approach to the exercise in general, and to texturing.

• Your choice of drawing material isn't the best. Your pages are quite small, and you're cramming multiple drawings onto each page, resulting in drawings that are smaller still. Construction benefits considerably from drawing larger, as giving yourself more space allows you more room to think through spatial problems, like how different forms exist in three dimensions and how they relate to one another. Drawing on lined paper is also a bad idea, as it tends to automatically reduce your standards for the kind of forethought and planning you're willing to put behind your marks. We naturally rush more when drawing on lined pages, on account of the presentation already being rather poor.

• You're quite scribbly when approaching your textures - this is something I remarked upon for your lesson 2 dissections. While texture is not the focus of any of these lessons, you may want to give the notes over at the 25 texture challenge, as I do go over various matters relating to careful observation and considering the purpose of each mark one puts down.

Aside from those two points, your forms and constructions are okay, if a bit sloppy and rushed. So I am going to mark this lesson as complete, but you need to hold yourself back a little more in the future and think through each mark and form you're about to put down. Also in general, I am noticing that you're getting somewhat distracted by the promise of moving onto detail and texture. I recommend that for the first half of the next lesson's drawings, you not move onto texture and detail at all - focus entirely on construction, so as to learn how to deal with that alone, without the additional distraction.

Uncomfortable

2017-11-23 01:37

Very nicely done! Overall you're hitting the major points that I'm looking for - your grasp of conveying the flat, flowing nature of leaves and petals improves a fair bit over the set, and your more three dimensional forms are combined to create believable, solid objects. You're paying a lot of attention to how the different forms relate to each other, and you're generally avoiding jumping in too complex too early. Your patience definitely rewards you well, and you show a good grasp of 3D space.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-11-23 23:20

Some students tackle the lessons on their own as you have before seeking critique, but the way the lessons are structured requires that students start from the beginning, receiving critiques for each lesson in order and having each lesson marked as complete before moving onwards. Because of this, students who want to have me review their work will generally start over from the beginning.

There is logic behind this - the lessons are designed so that each one brings to light a certain set of challenges and struggles. Issues that are much more obvious due to the nature of the exercises in lesson 1 might be more difficult to diagnose at lesson 3.

So, unfortunately I have to ask that you start out by submitting the work for lesson 1.

Uncomfortable

2017-11-27 01:14

Nice work! I think you demonstrated a great deal of improvement over the lesson. At first some of your work, especially when it came to the full plant constructions, was a little uncertain, but your confidence increased over the course of the set, and with it the quality and solidity of your constructions improved considerably. Even when you ventured into more detail and texture, you were still allowing yourself to focus on the underlying forms and ensure they were solid and sturdy before moving onto anything more superfluous.

The only thing that comes to mind worth mentioning is that the fruit on this page was not terribly solid. I mean, it was okay, but I think you would have had better results had you started with two intersecting balls, and then wrapped them up together to create the compound form. This is a pretty classic case of going from very, very simple (where we can maintain greater solidity) and building up to something a little more complex, instead of jumping into the complex form and trying to reinforce the solidity that isn't really there.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-12-02 20:43

Generally you're doing okay, but one thing stood out to me a lot. In a few of your pages, you're not drawing your forms in completion - you're leaving shapes open, and also at times not drawing through them (allowing them to stop where they are blocked by other forms). An example of this issue can be seen on this page.

Remember that we're not simply reproducing what we see - we need to understand how each component sits in 3D space. Currently the way you drew those components was more akin to focusing on what you see in the two dimensional reference image, and merely reproducing those in 2D, with no intermediary step to define the 3D understanding of the forms themselves.

Just like with the arrows from lesson 2, you want to understand where the shape begins, and how it moves through space as it reaches its other end.

Another issue is that on this page, take a look at your leaves. You flesh out the basic form of the leaves (albeit way too loosely - this is not a sketch, you need to aim for some degree of precision and cohesiveness, don't go leaving so many gaps between your lines). But once you do that, you kind of ignore it when you move onto your next phase of construction. At best you use it like a loose approximation of your leaf, but then draw on top of it without adhering to its structure.

The point of this process is to build up your construction - each phase is built upon the last such that the previous one is a scaffolding. If you think of it like constructing a building, you can only deviate so far from your scaffolding, otherwise your structure will fall apart. You can however use one level of scaffolding to build more scaffolding, and so on until you can achieve a more complex construction that still retains its initial solidity.

I'd like you to do four more pages of plants while keeping these points in mind.

Uncomfortable

2017-12-04 00:00

Definitely better. Still room for improvement, but that'll come with continued practice, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. The one thing that did catch my eye though was that the construction for this page seems to have been done with a lighter pen, or perhaps a pencil. Don't do that - use the same pen all the way through.

Uncomfortable

2017-12-06 01:18

Very nice work! Overall you're doing great. Your constructions show a good sense of space and construction, and you still seem to be minding your forms even when you move into the territory of adding texture.

There is one thing that caught my eye though - in your branches, you seem to be trying to tackle the long, flowing lengths all in one go, which causes you to slow down and have your lines wobble somewhat. If you look at the instructions, you'll notice that I actually mention that you should try to construct them in segments, while taking special care to ensure that the segments flow smoothly together (so as to avoid looking like chicken scratch). We do this by drawing a line from one ellipse past the second towards the third - then drawing another from the second past the third towards the fourth, and so on. By making sure that we go past and aim towards the next with each stroke, we ensure that they flow on top of each other (as much as we can anyway).

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

Uncomfortable

2017-12-06 01:34

Overall your work is excellent. There are a few places where I'd chastise you, like the bonsai tree you remarked upon yourself (don't scribble or rely on randomness!) but overall you're demonstrating an excellent grasp of form and construction.

I have just one point that I want to bring to your attention - for your branches, you primarily seem to have been drawing the lengths of each side in a single stroke. In my instructions, I mention that you should draw them in segments, while taking care to ensure that the segments flow together nicely in order to avoid a chicken-scratchy appearance. The way I achieve this is by drawing a line from one ellipse past the second towards the third - then drawing another from the second past the third towards the fourth, and so on. By making sure that we go past and aim towards the next with each stroke, we ensure that they flow on top of each other (as much as we can anyway).

Aside from that, you're doing very well. You're obviously going to want to practice handling things with complicated textures more (maybe take a look at the texture challenge) purely because of the stress it's causing you (not because your textures don't look good - they're fine, aside from the bonsai tree which admittedly still looks okay despite using an inadvisable technique).

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

Uncomfortable

2017-12-10 19:11

Overall you're doing fine, but there are a couple things that caught my eye. Before that however, I want to point out that your general grasp of form and construction is coming along well. You're moving from simple to complex appropriately and not skipping any major steps in the process.

The things that I noticed were this:

• When you draw your branch exercises (and use those techniques in your drawings) I noticed that you're still largely attempting to construct the edges in one go. In the instructions I mention that it can help considerably to build them up as segments (but being sure to have the segments flow smoothly into one another so as to avoid a chicken-scratchy look). This usually means drawing from one ellipse past the second and towards the third before lifting your pen, then drawing from the second ellipse past the third towards the fourth. Continuing on past and aiming towards the next is what ensures that your lines overlap nicely and kind of blend into a single mark while maintaining better control of the form you're trying to construct.

• On this page, you attempted to apply texture to the soil by largely.. scribbling. Dont' do that - relying on randomness is only going to result in textures that don't feel convincing. As irritating as it may be for a complicated texture, you've got to draw each mark with a sense of purpose and intention. This means taking more time to observe carefully and really identify the rhythms and patterns that are present in your texture.

Aside from that, well done. I'm especially pleased with the smooth flow of your leaf forms. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-12-23 20:34

Lovely work! Overall you're demonstrating an excellent grasp of form and space, and are applying the principles of construction very well. There are just a couple of things I want to draw your attention to.

• On the page of leaves, dead-center, there's a leaf that appears to have a wavy, zig-zagging edge to it. Above it, there's a similar one that was done much better. The important thing here is that in general, zig-zagging a single stroke should be avoided. Each stroke should have one concise trajectory - as soon as the trajectory changes, start a new stroke, rather than trying to change it without lifting your pen.

• On page 9, top left, you've got a lot of leaves. Admittedly you've nailed their flow very nicely, and captured the forms well. That said, I want you to maintain the habit of drawing through all of your forms and applying the full leaf construction method for all of your forms through all of my lessons. Don't cut corners, you really need to get that stuff hammered in before you allow yourself to let the steps transition more fully to simply being visualized rather than drawn.

Aside from that, great stuff. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-12-27 01:45

Overall, pretty good. A couple things caught my attention though.

• On this page (i think it should link directly but I'm not sure - this is why imgur is better!), on the right side. Notice how the leaf's edges are wavy, going back and forth over their simpler construction? They're essentially ignoring that more basic construction, rather than adhering to it. You'd want the furthest extent of that waviness to align to the original construction, with the waves either going up or down from there - rather than going both up and down. Always adhere to your underlying construction, don't ever outright replace it.

• Check out this page. See that branch stretching across the top there? The edges are wobbly. You should be applying the techniques explored in the branches exercise here, specifically constructing your branch's edges in segments, going from one ellipse past the second towards the third, then from the second ellipse past the third towards the fourth (so these two segments overlap and blend together). This allows you to avoid a chicken-scratchy effect (if they do successfully flow together) while keeping a lot more control over your lines.

• I did notice that you're not drawing through a lot of your ellipses.

Aside from these three points, you're doing well. I'd recommend practicing your leaves and branches a little more (perhaps as part of your warmup alongside the lesson 1/2 material), but I am going to mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-12-29 23:06

Overall you're doing an excellent job. I especially love this mushroom, though many of your leafed constructions (like this one) also came out very well. I do have a few recommendations though:

• When possible, build on top of a form rather than creating a simple form and then creating something new inside of it. For example, your cactus. It feels more like you had a cylinder, and then you built a separate form inside of it when doing the main trunk. It would have been more successful had you added bumps to the silhouette onto the existing form - that is, building on top of the existing form rather than trying to make some of it go away, as you did with the branches.

• Using the same cactus as an example, when you've got a bumpy or wavy surface, don't draw a singular wavy edge - it will almost always look unplanned. Instead, you want to break things up into individual segments wherever their trajectory changes. As long as a trajectory is consistent (so a straight line, a continuous curve, or even a curve that accelerates) you keep it as a single mark. But bumps like you have along the silhouette of your cactus are really made up from individual elements - so you don't want to be blending them all together into one. You also don't want to end up in a situation where you're going to ignore the whole previous stage of construction to create a whole new line - so adding individual bumps to the existing cylinder will maintain the solidity of the previous stage.

• In some places (perhaps this page) you are going pretty heavy on the density of your contour lines. Keep in mind what their purpose is, and don't go overboard. A couple lines will usually be more than enough to communicate the curvature of a surface. Too many will start to look more man-made, especially if they're evenly spaced out like a 3D mesh.

Anyway, aside from that you're doing great. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-02 02:01

Overall you're doing a pretty good job, but I did notice a few things that are worth mentioning.

• In general you are a little (or very much) too preoccupied with the detail in your drawings. While your constructions are still pretty decent, this does have the tendency of holding students back a little, as they put more of their focus towards making a pretty final result, rather than really pushing the limits of their use of construction. One obvious side effect is drawing your construction lines to be purposely faint. This often results in a construction that has been drawn far less confidently, in the interest of hiding lines that will not be a a visible part of the final product.

• I notice that you have a tendency of 'cleaning up' your lines. That is, going back over the lines you truly intend to commit to and replacing them with a darker line. This may be the way you interpreted the use of line weight, but that is not correct. When we draw our construction lines, we draw them all to be equally confident, focusing only on the execution of smooth, consistent marks. This results in a lot going on, so we do need to organize it using line weight. We apply weight not to the entirety of an existing line, nor do we seek to create new, heavier lines. All we are doing is finding portions along existing lines and adding a little additional weight to those sections. Again, not the entire line, but just part of it, in order to clarify where one form overlaps another. Trying to go over the entirety of a line usually results in drawing slowly and carefully, which in turn throws the smooth confidence of our initial marks out the window.

• Many of your leaves are nicely constructed, but some of the more complex ones tend to neglect some of the basic steps. For example, when you've got leaves that have several different arms, you seem to stop following the technique of establishing your flow lines. In these cases, I would first apply that technique to the whole leaf (establish the flow and create an "enclosing" shape for the whole thing), then apply that technique again to each individual section. I explain this in the leaves exercise video, which was posted today.

• For the branches exercise, I notice that you tend to have a lot of rigidity, where there is a clear break in the flow of your lines at each ellipse. What this tells me is that you are attempting to correctly implement the matter of drawing your entire branch in sections/segments - but that you're only drawing from one ellipse to the next. What you should be doing instead is drawing from one ellipse, through the next, and towards the third. I explain this in the branches exercise video (also posted today), though it was mentioned in the step-by-step demo as well, where I talk about "overshooting".

• I noticed that you have a tendency to not draw through your ellipses. Please make sure you draw through each one two full times before lifting your pen for every ellipse you draw in these lessons.

I certainly do think you're ready to move onto the next lesson. Just be sure to keep these points in mind. I also really want to stress the importance of moving from simple to complex. Whenever you're approaching a part of a drawing, think to yourself - do I have enough constructional scaffolding down to support the visual information I wish to add next, or is what I wish to add too complex? If the latter is true, then you need to work your way up to that complexity, starting at the simplest of forms and shapes.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-02 17:58

There is definitely a lot of good here, in terms of your application and understanding of constructional techniques, and while you start out more sketchy and vague, you do improve on that front throughout the set.

There is one considerable issue however that you need to tackle: patience. You have definitely improved a fair bit, but your linework is still somewhat rushed, and as a result your marks don't bear the hallmarks of each being planned individually and executed using the ghosting method. You still are to a degree caught up in wanting to flesh things out quickly, and end up using far more lines than is necessary, with those lines often times missing the mark. More than anything, it is a matter of breaking a habit. Don't allow yourself to think directly on the page - split each mark into forethought and planning, followed by confident execution. It does take longer, but your forms will come out feeling considerably more solid for it.

Another thing I believe will help is to try and draw bigger. The matters of construction that we are now wading into are very much a spatial problem, and our brains handle those kinds of challenges much better when given more room to think. You do appear to give yourself more room later in the lesson, but I still felt this was important to emphasize.

Lastly, with your branches, watch how the segments flow into one another. Right now there is a visible break of flow, moving from one segment to the next - I always recommend aiming your segment towards the next ellipse, and overshooting slightly, so your next line will flow directly over the previous one. I explain this further in the new 'branches exercise' video linked from the lesson.

I also posted a couple full demo videos where you can see how I make my marks in a deliberate manner, thinking before each one.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to draw just one more page - focus entirely on each mark, and take your time. I think limiting the scope of the assignment to just the one drawing will help you to keep from rushing, enough to show you what can come of a greater demonstration of patience and care. That alone should be enough to improve your work considerably, as I do believe the understanding is there, but it's being held back by impatience.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-07 05:04

You should go ahead and post this directly to the subreddit and have other members of the community review your work and offer advice. You can also hop onto the discord server and have folks there look at your stuff.

This thread is reserved for those who help support drawabox through patreon - in return, I critique their work. They do however have to adhere to certain requirements (drawing with the required tools, starting with lesson 1, etc).

Uncomfortable

2018-01-14 04:22

Thanks for repledging! I'm glad you decided to return.

Looking over your submission, there are some areas where I can certainly help you. First and foremost, I do get the impression that you probably started your work on this lesson before new years. I say this because I actually added a few more videos pertaining to things like the leaf and branches exercises, as well as a couple breakdowns of how to approach drawing a plant. In these videos, I talk about some of the common pitfalls that you've exhibited here.

Here are some things I observed in your work:

• For your branches, two things. Firstly, draw bigger - spatial problems such as these benefit considerably from giving your brain more room to think. Secondly, in the branch notes (also in the video), I explain that you should strive to construct the edges of your branches in segments, being careful to have them flow together smoothly (to avoid a chicken scratchy look). If you tackle it all at once, you're either going to end up with an inaccurate stroke that goes all over the place, or one that has been drawn far too slowly and ends up looking wobbly and stiff.

• Another point related to the branches - draw through your ellipses.

• Your leaves aren't bad, but try to focus on the idea that these leaves flow through three dimensions of space, with one end being closer to the viewer, and one end being farther away. This is quite similar to the arrows exercise in lesson 2. Thinking in this manner keeps you from limiting yourself to just the two dimensions of the page you're drawing on.

Specifically for the plant drawings:

• You've got a lot of hatching lines being applied to your drawings - this is best avoided. People tend to get a little mixed up when they think about texture and detail. They'll use hatching because they actually are thinking more about rendering light/shadow in a drawing, rather than communicating the textures present on the various surfaces of the forms. By forcing yourself to avoid hatching, you end up having to think more about what your reference image is actually telling you, and how to go about communicating that to those looking at your drawing. Remember that we are not worrying about light in these drawings, so at no point will you be putting marks down explicitly to tell the viewer about how light hits it.

• In this page, you drastically overuse contour lines. I usually see this when one is not entirely sure of what purpose the contour lines serve, and so they overcompensate. A contour line just describes the way a surface deforms through space. More often than not, just a couple will be more than enough to do the job, while overloading a drawing with them will cause it to stiffen up and start feeling more like a 3D mesh.

• Draw through your forms. If you've got two leaves that overlap one another, don't limit yourself to drawing only the visible sections of each. Draw both in their entirety, as fully enclosed forms. These drawings are exercises not in drawing plants, but rather about construction and understanding how forms sit in 3D space and relate to one another. In order to understand this fully, we need to draw each form in its entirety.

A lot of your drawings are actually quite nice, but these issues that I've outlined here are important when it comes to grasping the specific concepts the lesson tries to impart. I'd like you to first review the new video content and then do another four pages of plant drawings.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-21 17:26

You're doing pretty well, but there are a few things that stood out to me:

• Draw through your ellipses. This is most visible in your branches, but it is present everywhere. Because you're not drawing through your ellipses (you should be doing that for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons), your ellipses aren't entirely evenly shaped. This is an important factor when it comes to constructing forms that feel solid.

• For your leaves, they're alright, but they are quite limited to flowing through only the two dimensions of the page itself rather than all three. Try and think about which end of the leaf sits farther away from the viewer, and which end sits closer, so you force yourself to work in all three dimensions. The new leaf exercise video (I added many new videos between christmas and new years) discusses this.

• On this page, the constructional approach you've used for the petals doesn't quite demonstrate a proper grasp of construction. Construction is all about breaking the process of drawing something into multiple phases, where at each point you tackle a question and decide on an answer. From then on, you stick to that answer regardless of how it impacts the accuracy of your drawing. In this case, you fleshed out those ellipses first, but didn't actually end up heeding them at all, as were not respected as the bounds or any other such answer to any constructional question. They could just as well have not been present. Also, the flow of those individual petals is a little stiff, and it gives the impression that you were still thinking more about how they flowed across the flat page, than how they would be flowing through space. This is related to my last point about the leafs exercise. My newer hibiscus demo touches on both of these points, so be sure to give it a watch.

• The flower pot on this page is quite complex. You definitely jumped in a little too far forward in its construction too early, resulting in a form that ended up feeling somewhat flat. When approaching something like this, always build around a minor axis (as one would do with any cylinder), and build a series of ellipses through its length to define the different major widths. Also don't forget that the lip of the pot has thickness, so it should be composed of two ellipses, one inset within the other. Also, of course - draw through your ellipses.

• I mention this in the new leaves exercise video, but on this page you've got leaves with rippling, wavy edges. You've drawn them as a single continuous line going all the way around. Instead, whenever a line's trajectory fundamentally changes, lift your pen and start a new line. What you don't want is this sort of zig-zagging pattern, going back and forth, continually changing your trajectory. After all, you can't really ghost or apply those same preparation methods to a zigzagging line, so it should be broken down into sections where you can apply that methodology.

• This page certainly went wrong. It happens, it's no big deal, but I did want to use it as an example of where you waaay overdid it with contour curves. You've done this elsewhere as well, though in this example is to quite an extreme degree. Keep in mind what the purpose of a contour line is - to describe how a surface deforms through space. You need only one or two at most to do this even for quite a large form. Whenever I see someone applying them all over the place, it usually signifies that the person at least at the time did not fully grasp their purpose. You also definitely went off the rails with your detail/texture, but based on the fact that I've seen you do much better elsewhere, I won't dwell on this.

• For the sake not just pointing out the mistakes, I really liked this page. The leaves flow nicely through 3D space, and your construction feels more solid than it has in other pages. This one is also quite decent, though it does show some of the issues I mentioned earlier (like the ellipse being entirely pointless).

• The last thing I want to mention is that you should focus more on construction. Don't let yourself be distracted by texture and detail.

I'd like you to do three more pages of plant drawings, this time focusing only on construction and form. Be sure to watch all of the new videos I added for this lesson, and also consider reviewing some of those for lessons 1 and 2, as there are new videos for each exercise.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-21 18:12

Your constructions certainly get better through the course of the exercise, but there are a few things that jump out at me. First and foremost, I feel like you're likely drawing very small on the page. It's hard to really be sure of this, because you've compiled them all into one strip (I'd really prefer it if you didn't do this, it's kind of a pain to sift through and to refer to specific drawings). There are however tell-tale signs that you're drawing smaller than you ought to, like your linework coming out stiff in certain cases.

I'm also catching a certain vagueness to much of your linework, where you're not quite putting as much time as you could into the preparation phase of all of your marks. Some are planned and executed well, while others are much more haphazard. Furthermore, you don't ever really formalize many of your constructions. That isn't to say getting into detail - I just mean completing your forms and unifying them to feel cohesive. They're often times just a mess of some very faint lines, and other very dark ones.

While you're moving in the right direction, this doesn't feel like completed work. It seems sloppy and rushed, and far below what you're definitely capable of.

I'd like you to do six more pages of plant drawings. Take care to give each drawing the room it needs (even doing just one drawing per page is perfectly fine). Your brain will benefit greatly from this additional room with which to help think through spatial problems. Make sure your forms feel solid and complete. Plan and ghost your marks out before executing them confidently, don't treat these as loose sketches.

As for your question, if your ellipses represent solid, 3D forms, draw them from the shoulder. If they're more a part of a texture, then you may use your wrist. But I think that this question was largely born of you drawing too small.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-21 18:32

There's a bit of a mixed bag here. Some successes, and other areas with plenty of room for growth.

To start with, I think this construction came out quite well, especially in how you handled the flowers themselves. It shows a growing understanding of how to see these objects as a collection of simpler forms.

Overall however, I do feel that you have a tendency to draw first, think later, though this lessens over the course of the set. You tend to draw back over the same lines many times, and generally treat things as a rough sketch, rather than taking the time to think through your marks before putting them down. This results in lines having a generally heavy weight to them, which somewhat diminishes one's ability to organize one's linework by applying a subtle addition of extra thickness here and there. You need to get your linework under control - don't think on the page, plan things out in your head before executing them. It's not easy, but when you're unsure of how to approach the next line, rather than guessing at it, take a step back and think about the problem you're facing.

In the leaves, I noticed that you show a tendency to avoid folding a leaf over itself. This isn't always the case, and I'm glad to see that there are several instances where you jump into that area of discomfort, and those leaves do tend to come out better for it. But generally when you don't allow yourself to twist those leaves, they end up coming out flat. So keep chugging away on that front.

Before we move forward, I do want to mention that between christmas and new years, I released over 20 new videos, spread out across the lessons. Most were between lessons 1 and 2 (where I explain each exercise in its own video - even though you've moved past those lessons, since you're still expected to continue doing that work as part of a regular warmup routine, I encourage you give them a look), though four new videos were introduced for this lesson as well. One for each of the leaf and branch exercises, and two drawing demos with full commentary. It's important that you watch them.

In the branches video, I explain an issue you're running into a lot. I'm glad to see that you're constructing the branches from individual segments, from ellipse to ellipse, but right now they are not flowing together. You can see the little bits of each segment sticking out, while the next line turns away from it, resulting in a chicken-scratchy look. In the video I reexplain what I mention in the written instructions - that you need to overshoot past the ellipse towards the following one, so that it runs along the same path that the next segment will.

To clarify, you draw a line from the first ellipse past the second, and overshoot towards the third, hooking your curve as needed. Then you draw a line from the second ellipse past the third (so that it runs over the overshot extension of the first) and towards the fourth. Again, the video explains this more visually, so be sure to watch it.

On this page, at the top, you'll see that your leaves have a wavy edge to them. This waviness is complex information. When it comes to the construction method, we want to start out as simply as possible, with simple curves enclosing the leaf, then we break it down into these kinds of waves. This is something I mention in the new leaf video.

In a lot of these drawings, I do think that you get way too preoccupied with texture and detail, and end up scribbling quite heavily on your drawings. This only adds to the previous haphazardness I mentioned earlier, and causes things to sometimes fall apart.

Once you've had a chance to review the new video content, I'd like you to try four more pages of plant drawings. Keep what I've said here in mind - take your time with each mark, prepare and ghost through them before executing each stroke. And lastly, don't forget that you are expected to keep up with the exercises from lessons 1 and 2, picking two or three at the beginning of each sitting to do for 10-15 minutes before moving onto that session's work. You submitted your work for lesson 2 five months ago, so my guess is that you've likely forgotten a great deal from that material. Building on top of a weak recollection of the other exercises is going to result in shaky work going forward, so be sure to get that in order sooner rather than later.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-21 18:42

This is pretty solid stuff. There are some minor issues I'll touch upon, but overall you're doing a good job and are demonstrating a solid grasp of 3D form and construction.

Before I start, I do want to point out that between christmas and new years, I released over twenty new videos. Most were pertaining to lessons 1 and 2 (one for each exercise), but four were for this lesson. If you haven't yet seen them, I'd recommend giving them a watch.

One thing I explain in the new hibiscus demo is how one should go about using the initial ellipses we sometimes use to establish a bunch of leaves or petals that radiate out from a central point. Take a look at the left side of this page. Those ellipses are quite vague, and the leaves themselves don't really seem to do much with the information the ellipses provide. In the hibiscus video, I talk about how the ellipse should be treated as though it defines the furthest extent to which the leaves should extend. Basically, construction is a matter of breaking things up into individual, discrete problems, which are solved through clear decisions being made. The ellipse/ball/volume/whatever defines the bounds of that part of your construction. Once made, you must heed it - even if that steers you away from being 100% accurate. Heeding that decision (rather than remaking the decision to suit your whims at this point) will keep things feeling solid and structured, and will ultimately maintain a believable construction.

Similarly, take a look at the first leaf on the second row in your leaves exercises page. It's the one with the wavy edges. Notice how the wave is going both above and below the simpler preliminary bounds of the leaf? You want to pick that simpler line as defining either the high bound or the low bound - not the middle, because the middle isn't substantial. Also, whenever a line's trajectory fundamentally changes (like a zig-zag pattern), it's often better to lift your pen and then start the next section as a separate segment. Zig-zagging will usually result in a weaker sense of form and solidity.

Lastly, I did notice that when you were adding texture, you often times (especially earlier on, less so later in the lesson) resorted to hatching, or other half-hearted measures. Notice how much better the cactus looks, despite its relative simplicity? Scribbling hatching lines, or being indistinct and vague with your texture doesn't generally look good or believable. You want your marks to exude a sense of intent - even if a lot of it is left implied rather than explicitly defined, as long as there is a clear purposefulness to the marks, your texture will be communicated much more believably to the viewer.

Anyway, those are the main things I noticed. Keep them 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

2018-02-06 21:38

You're doing a pretty good job overall, I've got just a couple things that I'd like to point out.

• For your leaves, the one on this page, towards the left side with the wavy edge that goes back and forth caught my attention. Wavy lines are quite tricky, in that there are very few cases in which they're the appropriate tool for the job. Because of the repetitive sort of motion, when we draw them we tend to lose a sense of the space we're working in, and end up focusing on how that line flows across the 2D page, repeating the same sort of action over and over. Instead, I believe it is considerably better in most situations that when your line's trajectory changes, you should lift your pen and start another stroke. This allows you to plan and prepare for each section individually, giving more thought to how it should be designed. In this particular case, I'd say to left your pen and start a new mark every time you reach that previously constructed edge. It sets a concrete limit to the bounds of your leaf, which is quite useful in this case.

• As you move through, your drawings seem to get a little smaller. Remember that when it comes to construction, and thinking through 3D problems, giving yourself more space to think is going to help considerably, while drawing smaller is going to cause you to cramp up, mentally speaking.

• For your branches and the similar components to your drawings, you've got a pretty good degree of control in most cases when it comes to keeping the sides of your branches equidistant form each other and maintaining a consistent width. When things get narrower however, your control dwindles. This is completely normal, and brings to light the specific methodology I present in the branches exercise. That is, constructing the curves as segments, ensuring that they flow into one another. Please review the branches exercise video and practice this technique, as it can come in quite handy.

• Try and ease up on some of the extraneous lines you're adding to your leaves and petals. There's no need for most of those when focusing on construction (when it comes to contour lines, you only need a minimal amount to do the job). When it comes to texture on the other hand, you'll need to apply more observation and try and capture marks that actually reflect what you see, rather than a loose grasp of what may be present there. A lot of people end up doing this when it comes to leaves - that they merge the matters of contour lines and texture, and end up falling somewhere in the middle with a lot of marks that don't contribute much.

Overall you're doing a pretty good job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2018-02-15 02:14

Looking good! Just a couple things:

• Don't use hatching lines. It's either demonstrating that you're trying to apply shading to your drawing (which we're not dealing with, we want to focus on conveying 3d form through line alone, with any further rendering serving more as decoration on top of an already solid object) or in your case, it's a stand-in for more involved texture. If you drop in hatching, it means you wanted to add that kind of complexity, but didn't want to take the time to really look closely at the texture present and capture its details. Don't fall in the middle - pick one or the other. No texture/construction only, or go into detail properly.

• Construct your cylinders around minor axes. This flower pot felt kinda sloppy, especially in how you curved those lines coming up from the base ellipse, rather than actually fleshing out the top of that cylindrical section (which would sit near the top of the pot).

• This page is somewhat catastrophic. You're using the hatching to shade because you couldn't get any semblance of solidity and it generally went wrong. Honestly this doesn't feel anything like your other drawings, and doesn't capture the understanding of form and construction that you nailed elsewhere - so honestly, I'm going to leave it be. I think it was a one-off, and if it's a more persistent problem, it's one that we'll be able to contend with more easily in the next lesson (since insects are made up of a lot of volumes like these cacti).

Aside from that, nice work. Your leaves are flowing nicely, and your constructions (other than flower pots and the cacti) are getting noticeably more solid.

Uncomfortable

2018-02-22 00:53

I felt like I'd received your last submission pretty recently (although it's been a week - the days are all blending together in my head at this point) so a big part of me expected the work to have been rushed. I was definitely pleasantly surprised! You've done remarkably well with this lesson.

Your forms flow very nicely through space, and you capture each subject with both the sort of simplicity I look for when it comes to construction, as well as the kind of layered complexity that gives each drawing character. You're not too heavy on detail, and in most cases you're mindful of how your forms come together. You've even got some really lovely textural experimentation near the end there, and the big swoopy what's-its came out very nicely on that last page.

I have just a couple minor things to point out:

• Try not to double up your lines - be it reflexive reinforcement from not being confident in the initial stroke, or trying to correct a mistake. You did this a fair bit on your first page of leaves, though you eased up throughout the rest of the lesson.

• Your flower pots were a little bit lacking - I am of course glad that you attacked most of them with a minor axis. One thing you did miss out on though was the thickness of the rims of those flower pots, and the fact that the bed of soil sits a little inset.

• Don't let your tubes just stop as two parallel lines floating in space. Cap them off, flesh out how they connect to other forms.

Here are some basic notes about the points above.

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