Overall you've done a really good job. Most of your constructions are looking very solid, and you've managed to achieve a good sense of flow with your leaf constructions. For the most part, you're really bold and eager to delve into construction, and are doing exactly what you need to do - weighing each and every mark you put down, figuring out what it contributes to the overall construction. If it adds something meaningful to either communicating the elements of your subject matter, or conveying aspects of how its forms sit in space, then you draw it. If not, you don't. You're showing a great deal of efficiency.
The only place where you neglected to do this was in your india red moon cactus. As I show here, the big bulb reads as being quite flat, due to how you delved too quickly into detail, and didn't spend enough time properly reinforcing the forms that were present. I didn't actually realize that there were ridges on this object until I went and looked at an actual photograph.
So what I would have done here (which I did on the top left), is to draw a sphere and reinforce it in two ways. A single contour curve around its midsection, but most importantly, a contour ellipse near its top, kind of like the "pole" of a globe. This marks the top point from which all these ridges would radiate. I then draw contour curves coming down like how one would slice an orange, and then built out my ridges using those. Lastly, I added a few contour lines showing how those ridges come off the surface. It is a lot of additional line work, but as this is a rather complex form, they're an important part of first convincing yourself that what you've drawn is 3D, so you'll be well equipped to convey that to your viewer. Ultimately we're doing these exercises to help convince ourselves that what we're drawing is 3D.
The other point I wanted to mention is shown on the right side of my redlinig there - when you've placed a ball into a scene, and you want to place some additional silhouette edge detail along it, you need to remember that the ball form is solid. You can build on top of it, but your subsequent lines should not slip into the established silhouette, as this will severely undermine the solidity of the overall construction.
Anyway, I definitely nitpicked on that one drawing as it stood out from the rest of the set's general high level of quality. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Much better. Your drawings look considerably more conscientious and solid, and you're clearly slowing down and putting more thought into each mark you put down. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Overall you're doing decently, but there are a couple things that I want to mention.
Your leaves exercises and branches are coming along fairly well. In the leaves, there is a slight issue that I will explain a little later, because it occurs to a greater extent in some of your actual plant drawings, but overall they're still pretty solid.
On this page, one major issue comes to light - you're not drawing each petal/form/element to completion. You're only drawing them in so far as they are visible and not occluded by something else. When it comes to construction, it's very important that we draw everything in its entirety, so we can fully understand how they exist in 3D space, and how they relate to the forms around them. Especially in the context of leaves/petals, being able to establish the entire flow from start to end is important when it comes to making them flow in a natural, organic fashion.
This page shows that you do have a ways to go in terms of applying observation effectively to your approach. You need to get used to looking at your reference not only a lot, but frequently - that means studying your reference, drawing a couple lines that reflect specific things you saw, then looking back to refresh your memory. Our memory escapes us very quickly and we need to continually remind ourselves of what we're attempting to draw, so as to fight against our brain's constant campaign to oversimplify things. This particular page does show the major components that would have been present in your reference, but the relationships between those components aren't reflected - that's where observing more carefully and more frequently comes into play.
In this page, I'm seeing that issue I referred to in regards to your leaves exercise to a much greater extent. That is, they tend to be much stiffer than they ought to be. When we draw our leaves, we start out with those central flow lines to define just how they move through space. It's easy to see those lines as having a start and end point, and occupying a specific static space. As a result, when drawing them as part of a plant, we tend to focus too much on that idea, rather than thinking about what that flow line really represents. The flow line is meant to be fluid, capturing basically the movement of the wind and air around the leaf - it's not something that inherently starts and ends, it flows continuously, and the line itself just reflects that motion. So when drawing this initial line, try and think about all the forces that influence the leaf itself. Sometimes I'll draw it with a little arrowhead to remind myself that there's a specific directional motion, and that this line does not necessarily end where my own line has stopped. Then, the leaf we draw around it echoes this fluidity, resulting in a more organic, flowing construction.
Lastly, here it looks like you did your underdrawing in pencil, or something equally faint. Obviously that's contrary to the instructions, so I don't want to see that in future work. More than that though, this does show an approach that some people apply when working in regular pen. That is, drawing the underlying construction faintly, and then going back over it to "clean things up" with a darker, richer line. This is something I addressed in the video for the form intersections in lesson 2, and is also something I am firmly against. A 'clean-up' pass replaces linework with a more carefully drawn stroke, which generally results in things stiffening up, losing the confidence of the original mark. This is not what I mean when I refer to adding line weight to a drawing. Mentioned in that same video, line weight should only be applied to specific localities - parts of existing lines where you want to clarify an overlap of some sort. Never the entire line, and certainly ever around a whole ellipse. The weight should be added with the same kind of confidence with which we would have drawn the original strokes.
It's worth mentioning that some of the mistakes I've outlined above reflect a desire to create a nicer, cleaner drawing as a final result. Only drawing lines where they're not hidden by other forms, clean-up passes, etc all align with this sort of a goal. That is not the purpose of these exercises. Lessons 3-7 explore two things. First, how to apply the constructional method to a variety of different kinds of objects (each lesson tackling a different one), and secondly to improve and develop your understanding of how to draw solid forms and manipulate them in 3D space. Each drawing is an exercise that teaches you how forms relate to one another, and how to not only sell the illusion that they are all three dimensional, but rather to really convince YOURSELF that it is all 3D, and that you're not simply drawing flat lines on a flat page. After all, the best way to convince someone else of something is to believe in the lie yourself. So don't approach any of this as though you want to have something you can show off for being pretty and clean at the end - you can do that for other drawings, but that is not what we're after here. So, for example, your rose is definitely out.
Now you've shown enough here to move onto the next lesson, but it's very important that you keep in mind the points that I've outlined here, and that you work to apply them to the next lesson. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
will continue with the leaves a bit more as I think I need to train and get the feeling of what you said a bit more.
in some cases I think my reference pictures were not so good, resulting in me wanting to get how the picture looked, rather then how to sell the 3D feel and fluid motion of things.
about the under drawing, I used a lighter pen, as you wrote in the HW description, but apparently got it to a bad point, where I used it to make cleaner/ pretty drawing rather then understanding the form and 3D feel of the object.
You can post it as a new comment on this thread or as a reply, as long as it's a reply to one of my messages so I get notified. As for the lighter pen thing, can you point me to where I wrote that in the homework description?
I think you're misunderstanding what's written there. If you're referring to the images of the faber castell and staedtler pens, those are two different examples of fineliners from different brands. You should be doing all of the work for drawabox using black pens, all of the same weight/thickness.
Great stuff! You're definitely demonstrating a really strong grasp of form and 3D space, and are applying it wonderfully to the concept of construction. There are a few very specific things that stand out to me as being particularly characteristic of this understanding, and it brings me great pleasure to see them:
When you add detail to a basic leaf construction (for example the serrated edges on the venus fly trap), you're very clearly building off an already defined, simpler edge, ensuring that your detail is grounded on this simpler, established flow (so you don't have to figure out over again).
You are not afraid to draw through all of your forms, and draw them each to completion regardless of whether or not they are obscured or occluded by other objects. You draw everything, and then sort them out afterwards with line weight.
When it comes to really small elements (like the top of the waratah flower), you still do what you can to regard them as forms - at least in your mind (since the scale isn't always that conducive to it). You don't get overwhelmed and regress to thinking of your drawing as being a bunch of flat lines and shapes on a two dimensional page.
That's really where the focus of the constructional method as a whole, and drawabox's overall goal, comes in - to get people to truly believe that what they are drawing is not just a series of flat marks, but rather that we are constructing solid, tangible forms in a boundless three dimensional space to which our piece of paper is simply a window. And you're nailing that.
I do have a couple suggestions moving forward, but they're minor things:
When you have two branches connecting to one another, at the moment the actual connection point does need work. You're drawing the end of the "branch" mostly considering how it would flow with the branch, resulting it feeling disjointed from the "trunk". Instead, place an actual ellipse on the trunk's surface, and have your branch connect to it. Alternatively and perhaps more realistically, you can try creating a ball there that serves as the sort of knot that is often seen at these kinds of connections (though this isn't always present).
When you've got a form that you won't be drawing in its entirety for whatever reason (like the flower pot of the venus fly trap), it's better to actually cap it off (like you've physically cut the object resulting in a clear face and end to the form) than leaving the lines to stop suddenly. This capping-off will help reinforce the illusion of form and three dimensionality, whereas leaving it undefined risks flattening things out.
You're definitely making pretty considerable use of your contour lines at the moment - for the most part you're using them well, but there are some areas where you're perhaps taking their density and number a little too far. Always remember what the purpose of each contour line is, and what it contributes to the overall drawing. If you find that this job (establishing how the surface itself deforms through 3D space) is already handled by the contour lines present, then there's no need to add another one. It's pretty easy to get carried away with these, so sometimes it's necessary to rein one's self in.
Anyway, you're doing a great job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson!
Thank you very much for your encouragement and criticism :) . On the topic of connecting branches, I was wondering how the connecting ellipse should behave (when there is no ball). I was attempting to connect branches to the trunk using an ellipse that followed the principles of the rest of the branch but I know this was not effective. I suspect that what I should have done, and what you are suggesting that I do, is to draw an the ellipse that wraps around the form of the trunk.
Yeah, that's correct - you want the connecting ellipse to conform to the surface of the trunk, so the base of the branch is properly grounded and connected to it.
Much better! Your linework is a lot more confident here, and your leaf constructions flow a lot better because of it. You definitely seem to be following the spirit of the leaf construction method much more closely.
I have one very minor thing to mention that isn't actually related to the plants, but rather to the dirt itself. When you're drawing those little pebbles and particles, rather than trying to enclose each one, it's a lot more effective to focus on capturing the shadows they cast instead. Because of how cast shadows work (and how they can be grouped together to form larger shadow shapes depending on the lighting conditions), it can be vastly more effective to convey this kind of minor detail in this way, as it keeps you from adding a lot of distracting detail and visual noise.
Similarly, rather than using hatching as you had there to transition from dark to light, you'd be using a texture/pattern made up of these "cast shadows" from the little particles instead. Hatching lines of course don't correspond to any feature or detail present in that surface, so it wouldn't be an appropriate transition. I expand on this in the texture challenge notes.
I tried not to focus on the ground and dirt, because I really wanted to understand the leaves and how they flow, I felt I could do a better job with it, because it made my drawing a bit noisy indeed
I'll watch it more closely and took your notes to better the drawing in future works
Hi Uncomfortable! Here's my lesson 3 I really have to work on drawing every day....I kind of get overwhelmed because I can't finish fast enough (I know I know, it's not a race), so I end up taking week long breaks because of frustration, shame on me.....anyways!!!!!! Hope I did a good work, I'm not as happy with it as the last lesson though.
Overall, your work is fantastic. You're demonstrating a well developed understanding of 3D space and construction. Your forms feel solid, tangible and entirely believable. I honestly don't have a lot to elaborate on, you're more than ready to move onto the next lesson. I have only one piece of advice to offer, and for that I've drawn a quick demo.
As shown here, when you're drawing your leaves (or really following any kind of construction where you've laid down an earlier), it's important that you don't treat the previous stage as being something loose and approximate. You need to treat it like a scaffolding - something you have to adhere to as the structure that supports any further forms or details.
So if you draw a basic leaf shape, use it as the foundation for the wavier edge details, having them rise from and fall back to that initial shape. If you've got a flower with petals that radiate outwards and you establish that range with an ellipse, use the ellipse as the absolute bounds, the furthest those petals will extend.
Oh, also, with leaves that have many major arms or sections (like the top left leaf on the first page), it's best to break that down into many sub-leaves and then merge them together afterwards.
Side from that, you're really doing great. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Oh! sorry about the range part, I guess I forgot, I'll keep it in mind from now on though, thanks for the demo and the feedback! I'll practice that a bit on the side to drill it in my head :D
I'm not sure if I did the stem exercise correctly... For the first half of the page, I followed your technique of connecting the cross-section ellipses piece-by-piece, but I ended up with a messy look. In the bottom half, I tried connecting them with one fluid continuous motion. I think it was less chicken-scratchy but a bit more wobbly.
I went a bit overboard with the rendering for the first group of mushrooms, so I included the "before" pic of only the underlying construction.
Overall you're doing okay - there's definitely a lot of room for improvement, but at this point it's expected due to how you're approaching things in a rushed manner, so I'll try not to touch on that aspect of things. I do however recommend that overall, if you're dead set on this kind of approach, that you strongly prioritize construction over detail and texture, so you at least come away with a good grasp of the main focus of the drawabox lessons.
So for example, in the leaves exercise, don't worry about the veins and such, or the texture of the surfaces - put all your attention towards capturing the flow of these flat forms. Right now I think you're getting a little distracted from the idea that each leaf is meant to capture and convey how outside forces (mostly wind and air currents) influence this simple form. Because you're more preoccupied with the detail of each piece, your leaves tend to come out a little bit more stiff.
For your branches, one of the main focuses of the exercise is to learn how to create a longer line out of segments without it looking chicken-scratchy. So the issues you were running into were normal, but drawing the entire line with a single stroke isn't really a valid solution because you're inevitably going to run into a line that you won't be able to cover in that manner. You need to be able to get your strokes to flow together smoothly, and practicing this approach is how you're going to get there. You essentially have to ensure that when your previous stroke ends, it is aiming towards the next target - so the following stroke (which will start a little earlier and overlap the end of the previous one) will actually run directly on top of it and continue on as an extension of it. So the fact that you went with trying to pull things off with a single stroke through the whole length is something that does impact your later drawings a fair bit.
Your initial construction of those mushrooms is decent, and I'm pleased to see that you're minding how the different forms connect to one another. You do however have a bunch of lines along the caps that seem to be caught between serving as contour lines and texture. At this phase, you shouldn't be worrying about texture and detail at all, and if they are contour lines then you are definitely doing them too sloppily and compensating by drawing more of them. Always go for fewer contour lines that have been drawn more carefully, rather than a bunch that are poorly planned.
When you get to texturing them, I strongly recommend that you stay away from any cross hatching altogether. Cross-hatching is basically a lazy stand-in for actually observing your reference carefully to identify the textures that are present, and if you catch yourself using it, there's an extremely high chance that you're selling yourself short.
Jumping ahead, this page raises an important issue. You've drawn the leaves, for the most part, so that when one leaf overlaps another, the second is drawn only partially. It's very important that you get used to drawing each and every form present to completion. Similar to the form intersections, you need to understand how each and every form exists in space before worrying about how it's interacting with the forms around it. We're not here to create a pretty, clean result - each and every drawing is an exercise to further develop your understanding of 3D space as well as your own belief that what you're drawing actually consists of solid forms.
In this cactus, it ended up coming out quite flat - as though the cactus itself were just simple cardboard cutouts. This is because you didn't go to any steps to actually give the cactus any illusion of volume or being three dimensional. That said, if it was actually intentional, then you did a pretty good job - because it really does look like a cardboard cactus in a three dimensional pot.
For the bumps along the outside of the cactus, two things:
Draw each bump individually, rather than with a single zigzagging line going back and forth. The continual, unbroken flow undermines the impression that these bumps are created by different elements, and as a whole helps further flatten out the form, kind of like when you want to cut a wavy edge out of construction paper, and you do so by continually going back and forth with your scissors. It feels more like construction paper pasted onto the page.
Your flower pot is decent, and I like that you drew the inset ellipse to give it some thickness. Don't forget to draw through all your ellipses, and most importantly, to draw the whole thing around a minor axis line. Generally you've done a better job with this on this page, though in that one your the end of the cylinders facing the viewer should have a narrower degree than the end facing away - you did this backwards.
I'd like you to do one more page of leaves, two more pages of branches (done correctly with segments) and two more pages of plant drawings with construction only and no detail or texture.
Your leaves and branches exercises are frankly looking really good, so congrats on that. Just one point on those: when you're adding more complex edge detail, you're doing a good job of keeping the individual bumps and waves separate (rather than zigzagging back and forth the whole length), and I'm glad that you're adhering to the previous step of construction's edge. In some cases however you'll add the complexity as an addition to the original leaf shape, and sometimes you add it inside in a sort of subtractive fashion. While it's not always clear which one you should use, generally I'd lean towards being additive rather than subtractive. For example, you've got one towards the bottom right of this page which was drawn subtractively and should have really been done additively. In general with construction, if you can at all help it, avoid cutting back into your forms.
On this page towards the middle at the top, you've got a great example where what seems to be subtractive is appropriate. Towards the right side there, you've got the waves going back into the silhouette you'd established - this isn't actually subtractive though. Because we understand this exists in 3D space, those ripples are actually still additive, but they happen to overlap back over the original silhouette. There are still places were proper subtraction is necessary, but it's virtually never in the context of leaves, and in most other cases should still be avoided altogether.
Now, you clearly know what you're doing in regards to these simpler exercises, but when it comes to actually drawing things you can see, you lose your grip on the core principles of construction a fair bit. You get a LOT more haphazard with your linework, a lot sketchier and tend to think a lot more on the page than in your head. You're exhibiting here a lot of bad habits that I want you to break sooner rather than later.
Remember that you are not sketching and exploring as you draw - you have to think through each and every mark you're about to put down and weigh what it's meant to contribute to the drawing and how it's going to help you develop it further. Some lines contribute to the underlying construction, others to communicate a specific aspect of texture. If however a line does not contribute anything, or if its purpose is already being served by another line, then you should not be drawing it at all. Following through the ghosting method for each and every mark is a big part of this, because it gives you the time to think and consider these important questions.
Constructionally you're generally doing okay, but a lot of it is getting lost in just how messy these drawings get. There are a few additional things I want you to keep your eye on however:
When drawing flower pots, always remember that they are compound cylinders and must therefore be built around a central minor axis line.
Always adhere to your previous levels of construction as though they're a scaffolding that helps support detail. For example, the petals/leaves/whatever of this plant have complex edge detail that strays a great deal from your simplified levels. This suggests that you're either not adhering to your construction enough, or that you should be placing some kind of an intermediary level of construction in there.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I definitely want to get this sketchy behaviour under control. I'd like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings, focusing entirely on construction with no texture or detail. Approach them exactly as you did with the leaf and branch exercises. You are definitely capable of doing it, I believe you just got overwhelmed by the prospect of actually drawing concrete objects you could see.
These are definitely better, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. One thing I want you to keep an eye on is largely on the first page there, that your leaves still feel kind of stiff. Always remember how important the initial flow line is, and how it's meant to capture and convey the flow of air and wind that governs each leaf. I often draw it with a little arrow head at the end to remind myself that it's not really something with a concrete start and end point - that it's a force that is merely being represented by this line that doubles as the spine of the leaf.
For the first page I forgot that it had to be without any details, so I did the 4 pages after that without any details (except for the cactus I guess, sometimes I just can't seem to stop). On the first page I went overboard on the ink, so I also tried to reduce that for the subsequent drawings.
Overall I noticed that I tend to mess up proportions somewhat, for example the stems usually were to big. All in all not my most favorite subject and I think it kind of shows in some places (e.g. page 4 right side). The mushrooms were a lot of fun however.
Honestly you've done a pretty solid job. Your initial leaves are a little bit more focused on detail than construction, though it's really only an issue in certain more complex ones which I'll touch on more directly. Overall though, your actual plant constructions are looking really good. You've got a great balance of solid construction and a subtle, light-touch with detail that doesn't overwhelm or contradict the underlying structure.
There's only a couple things worth mentioning. Firstly, when you've got leaves that are made up of many smaller leaf-like forms (if they're actually leaves, or even just individual arms), they should be approached with the same individual leaf approach, then merged together where appropriate. So for example, the maple leaf you've got towards the upper right of your first page, it should have been constructed as several separate leaves, then fused together. The dead center of that same page also would have been a good candidate for this kind of process, since you ended up deviating a great deal from the original shape, enough that it wasn't quite enough structure to support what you ended up drawing.
Additionally, if you look at the big leaf with the serrated edges on the last page, just a minor thing - instead of cutting into your initial leaf construction, build the serrations/spikes out from it. Construct additively rather than subtractively wherever possible. There are cases where it's not always possible, but in most cases (and especially in leaves) it is.
I really liked your mushrooms, especially on the second last page, towards the left side. You used the stem/branch technique really well, and the texture was subtle but communicated exactly what you needed to get across.
Overall you're doing great. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Overall you're doing a pretty good job. You're demonstrating a well developing grasp of construction, and you're pretty fastidious in following through all of the steps, rather than rushing forward. There are a few little hiccups here and there - all of which are entirely normal of course.
The first thing that caught my eye was that when drawing your leaves, you're always rather careful about adhering to your previous step of construction. This is excellent, and I'm very pleased to see it. For example, when your leaves have serrated edges, or other kinds of complex edge detail, you always ensure that the edges return to the bounds of the previous stage of construction. The only issue I noticed was that you tend to construct in a subtractive manner - that is, you do your simple leaf, then when you want to add extra edge detail, you cut away from it. Instead, I find that wherever possible, try to work additively, attaching new components to an existing construction.
This quick demo was actually done for students who tend to ignore the bounds altogether, or treat them more as a suggestion or sketch - but if you look at the drawing on the right side, you'll see that I'm building out from that leaf's simpler edge. Even along its right side, it may look like i'm cutting back into it, but I'm actually just lifting the edge up (rather than actively carving back in). There will always be situations where you've no choice but to cut into a form, but I've found that in most cases it can be avoided and the results tend to come out better. It's merely a matter of getting used to starting smaller and building out, rather than starting bigger and digging back in.
I'm glad that in your branches, you really stuck to the concept of trying to construct the longer edges in components. It is definitely an area that you're going to want to continue practicing, as you are still ending up with the ends of previous sections flicking out slightly from under the next segment - but you're absolutely on the right track. Focus on drawing confidently (it's easy to stiffen up, and I see signs of this in your branches) and applying the ghosting method, and as you draw a segment and it passes the second ellipse, try and aim it towards the third as though you were going to draw all the way (but lifted your pen early). The goal is always to have lines that flow directly on top of one another, merging into one.
When it comes to your main plant drawings, you've got a lot of strengths, but the biggest thing that jumps out at me is that you tend to really dig into detail and texture, and as a result I feel that it distracts you somewhat during the earlier constructional phases. It's something I see pretty often - knowing that you're going to go into detail often causes one to change how they draw during the earlier phases, even though you're not yet tackling that problem. Looking ahead can often be distracting.
It's important that whenever you set out a task for yourself (like drawing a single leaf or branch or even a single line) that you focus on what you need to do in order to draw that line as it needs to be drawn. First we identify the parameters of this mark, based on the context in which it'll exist - but once those parameters have been defined, we focus entirely on ghosting through the motion to build up muscle memory, and then executing the mark with a confident, persistent stroke, fully committed rather than hesitating and worrying.
I definitely see stiffness across your work where I feel that knowing you're going to tackle detail, and perhaps getting a little caught up in the goal of creating something pretty at the end causes you to lose the confidence that is needed to draw lines that are as smooth as they ought to be.
So, I'd like you to do 3 more pages of plant drawings, but this time I want you to stick only to construction. Take that construction as far as you can, but don't delve into any extraneous detail, texture or rendering. Focus on keeping your strokes smooth and confident, and always push yourself to draw from your shoulder using the ghosting method.
Thank you for the constructive feedback! Along with the extra plant drawings, I drew another page of stems as well. Here's the link: https://imgur.com/a/ednFUFn
Later in your new set you definitely show improvement, especially on this page. There are a couple things that jump out at me though:
In my previous critique I mentioned how you were, when constructing leaves, generally adhering to the simpler construction more closely, which was good. My only adjustment there was that you had been cutting back into it in order to add more complex edge detail, rather than building out from it. In these new pages (like this one), you continue to cut back into it, but you also stop adhering to it at all and end up treating it more like a loose suggestion. Look at the demo I linked previously. The middle example is what you're doing now, the right side is what you should be doing.
With constructions like the prickly pear, don't be afraid to allow your forms to overlap and intersect with one another. In that drawing it definitely seemed that each form was just barely touching the others, which resulted in a weaker connection between them. As shown here, letting your forms overlap and intersect can be a very good thing - just make sure that you establish how they're actually intersecting by placing a contour line to help define it.
Aside from the first point I raised about your leaf construction, on this page there's a couple issues that stand out to me. Firstly, your linework feels rather stiff. This is likely in part because you're zigzagging back and forth, so you need the added control that comes from drawing slower (instead of zigzagging, construct each stroke separately, each one applying the ghosting method). The contour curves there are also very stiff. I think it may be likely that you are drawing things too small on the page, as it's a common cause for students' linework coming out stiffly in this manner. The other thing I noticed was that you added your complex edge detail with a considerably heavier stroke. I strongly recommend drawing everything without consideration for being overly dark or overly faint - just focus on drawing the marks confidently. Once everything is down, you can come back to add further line weight to key areas to clarify overlaps. In this case, your results end up feeling very disjointed, because the back edge of each leaf (which is much simpler and smoother) is very faint in comparison, and so it doesn't feel like they're all part of a single object.
Not to any specific point, but I think taking a look at these common pitfalls may help as well.
I'd like you to try another 3 pages. You're getting there, but the issues I've outlined here are very important, so try to focus on them in particular.
You're largely doing a pretty good job, but there are a couple things I want to point out to you. Before that however, I do want to mention that overall you're demonstrating a good understanding of 3D space and construction - you're being quite mindful about combining simple forms and I don't really see you skipping a lot of steps through the constructional process.
The issues I'm noticing are as follows:
What jumps out at me the most is just how thick and bold your lines tend to be. This can be caused by a number of things - the most obvious one is that your pen may simply be thicker than the recommended 0.5mm tip. Alternatively, you may be applying a great deal of pressure to your average strokes. Or, lastly, you may be drawing things quite small on the page (so the relative thickness of your lines ends up looking larger). If any of these things describe you or someone you know, please call your situation, then try to adjust those parts of your approach.
Overall your linework does feel a little stiff in a lot of cases. Not always - your branches were quite fluid and your leaves weren't too bad on this front, but your actual plant constructions definitely had lines that wavered a lot more and showed a great deal more hesitation. It suggested to me that you were drawing slower, and (as mentioned in the previous point) perhaps applying too much pressure by default. This is a very common issue, and it's a problem for a couple reasons. There's the stiffness, but there's also the fact that it'll damage the tips of your pens and their flow of ink, which in turn will force you to press even harder. A new fineliner really only needs enough pressure to contact the page in order to make a rich mark, so try and hold yourself back a bit.
For your leaves, I did notice in a few places that when you add further edge detail to the simple leaf shape you've constructed, you do it with a bit of a zigzag, back-and-forth stroke that doesn't quite adhere to the simple edge. Instead, I want you to actually build right off that first edge, drawing individual strokes that come off that edge and return to it. I demonstrate this concept here.
A last point, not that important since it's not related to construction, but it's about how you tackled the texture at the center of your sunflower. You drew little circles, with each little bud or whatever they are enclosed individually. The lines you're drawing to enclose them don't actually exist in real life. Instead of attempting to draw each bud, we generally try to draw the impact they have on their surroundings. A form's most apparent impact in this situation is the shadow it casts by occluding a light source - ie: its cast shadow. The great thing about cast shadows is that they're incredibly dynamic. They're not limited to a single thin line, and they're not forced to enclose the entirety of a form. They can be thick, they can create "shadow shapes", and these shapes can merge with the shadows cast by other forms to create large swathes of solid black whose contents are merely implied by the way the edges of this massive composite shape behave. Furthermore, the opposite can happen - if a light source were to bare right down on a surface, it'd blast away all the shadows creating a swath of solid white. It's a bit of a complicated thing, but I want you to think on that a bit. I explain it further on the texture challenge page's notes.
Anyway, there's a lot to digest here, but overall you're doing a good job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but I definitely want you to work on applying less pressure, and generally reducing the stiffness of your linework.
I think I know what the exact problem is with the line thickness...when my nice pen died I might have cheaped out and got the nicest pen I could get from the nearest drugstore >.> oops. Wont do that again
i did spend much less time than 8 hours so i hope it doesn't look rushed.
also i didn't pay attention to detail or textures cuz i thought there is no need to do that until i finish Dynamic sketching then maybe i'll learn texturing.
You're definitely achieving a nice sense of fluidity, but it's true - your work does appear rushed in a lot of ways, and as such there's far less solidity to support your fluid, gestural lines than there ought to be. As a whole, it seems like when you're drawing these objects, that you set your focus to a specific part, and then fail to take any other aspect of what you're drawing seriously.
you've done a fantastic job with the leaves, especially those towards the center. Further out to the side (especially the cluster on the right side) you're putting less effort into planning and preparing with the ghosting method before executing your mark. The cylinder underneath is actually pretty well drawn (I'm very pleased to see that you're capturing the thickness of the pot's rim, for example), but the lines throughout are extremely faint and light, which contrasts heavily with the leaves. You also drew through the ellipse of the base there way too much - you should only draw through an ellipse two to three times, but I'm sure that one was an outlier.
On this one, you really got the flow of the leaves down quite well, and I can see you trying to apply the segment-by-segment method of constructing branches to the the stem (which I'm very pleased to see, though you need to continue working on getting the lines to overlap smoothly rather than having the end of each segment stick out). The bit at the top was notably more haphazard, however.
Now that's not really that bad in this case, as it's a complicated sort of construction to tackle with a lot of smaller details, but it is very clear that you've approached it in a way that involves less thinking and more drawing by instinct. That's the sort of thing we're trying to work against - we don't want to draw from our gut, just putting marks down where they 'feel' right. We want to think through each and every line we put down. Everything should be thought out.
Lastly, on this page the individual leaves on each larger cluster were definitely drawn quite sloppily. In this case, it's best to view each smaller element as a leaf of its own - and so you apply the same leaf construction method (starting with the flow line and then building around it).
So overall, there's definitely a reason it didn't take as long as you expected it to. You've got a lot of strengths with how you draw fluid, flowing lines, but you need to think more before each mark you put down, and you need to make sure every form you put down feels solid. Don't make your drawings disjointed, where one part is extremely faint, and another is much darker, and don't purposely try to make certain lines especially light. Draw each and every line with the same kind of confidence, and then come back later to organize things with a little additional line weight here and there to clarify specific overlaps.
Also, you mentioned that you didn't pay attention to detail or texture - that's perfectly fine, and I can see that reflected in many of your drawings.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do another four pages of plant drawings, taking into consideration what I've said here and generally putting more time and planning into each mark and each individual form you construct.
Mixed is pretty accurate. There are a number of things you're doing quite well, but I one thing that really jumps out at me is the fact that you're somewhat preoccupied with getting more detailed than you need to, but without working your way up to it and devoting enough time to observation and mindfully drawing your marks with consideration for what each stroke is meant to represent or help capture.
For example, your leaves flow quite nicely through space in the first exercise, but for the most part you approached most of the texture/detail on autopilot ("there's lines here so I'm going to draw a bunch of lines") rather than taking the time to consider how each individual line should be drawn in order to have the greatest impact. Also in other areas, you leveraged hatching purely for the sake of rendering (adding light/shadow), which is something I'd like to discourage. When you shade for shading's sake, you end up missing out on a lot of the finer surface detail that could be communicated through more careful use of your linework. All in all, try and stay away from hatching (I don't mean any and all lines, just the ones that don't actually relate directly to a texture present on the surface). So the second from the top right on this page is fine, and fairly well done, but the bottom left on this page is not.
All in all, texture and detail is a distant second to construction, so it's usually best to push it out of your mind until your construction is really solid. And when it comes to construction, don't rely on any kind of shading. The techniques we've covered in lessons 1 and 2 (contour lines, drawing through forms, etc.) are going to be more than enough to capture the illusion of 3D form, and if you're not confident in your ability to do that just yet (which you should be, that's actually coming along fine), the answer is not to lean on shading as a crutch.
Your branches are coming along, but you certainly do need to be more mindful of how each segment ends, putting more effort into steering them towards the next ellipse so your next segment runs directly on top of the previous one.
Jumping into your actual plant construction, there's some good and some less so. One of the biggest issues I'm seeing across the board is that you're often times skipping steps. We're getting into constructional drawing here and the very core of it is that you never add detail or information that the existing structure and scaffolding cannot yet support. A good example of this important rule not being heeded are the berries here. You drew the outer enclosure, which is correct, but then you drew a bunch of cloud-like bubbly blobs rather than a series of balls all clumped together. That bubbly blob is WAY more complex than individual spheres, and there simply isn't enough structure there to support such a complex form.
Keep in mind that the goal here is not to produce a bunch of visually pleasing images. Each drawing is an exercise in construction and spatial reasoning. The end result doesn't matter, it's all about what you learn about navigating and working in 3D space, and manipulating simple forms to create more complex objects. You've got to make sure each and every form you construct feels solid and three dimensional, and work on developing your own understanding of how they itneract with one another.
Another issue is that on your cabbage page, you've got a lot of different leaves, but you did not draw each leaf in its entirety. Where it gets overlapped by another leaf, you stopped. We want to draw everything completely in order to fully understand how each leaf sits in and flows through space. It comes back again to this being an exercise. We're not going out of our way to create cluttered, messy drawings, as we still want to think before each mark we put down to consider what it contributes to the construction and drawing, but if a line has an important role to play to this end, then it should be drawn fully and confidently.
All that said, you are showing a developing grasp of construction - you're just not all the way there in terms of the habits and focus I want you to exhibit.
I'd like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings.
yeah, i was deliberately not drawing through because i wanted at least somewhat of a readable drawing, along with construction lines i was worried it would end up being a huge unreadable mess of lines, but that's the challenge i guess. i think i am just going to re-do the ones that suck rather than searching for new plants.
When it comes to judging the quality of your work, there's little to be gained from comparing yourself to others. There's no standard you're meant to reach here, and there's no real way for you to fully grasp just what route one has taken to reach this point. Some have been at this a lot longer, some have spent their time more efficiently, some have simply been exposed to more along the way. None of that matters, nor has any bearing on you.
Furthermore, comparing yourself to some personal standard of achievement - for example, a rate of completion that you might personally like - is equally unhelpful. There's no way for you to know or grasp how long you're supposed to take to complete any of this, and thinking about that is only going to draw you away from your singular job: providing me with what I've asked for.
All I ask for is relatively simple: I want to see the best you can currently do, with your skills as they are now. I want you to follow my instructions to the letter and to invest as much time as is needed to come back with the best you can currently manage.
Anyway, overall you're not doing particularly poorly. There are some issues I want to address, but nothing stands out as being uniquely bad.
Your leaves flow quite nicely through space, and I think you've done a pretty good job with the basic construction of those forms. When you get into greater edge detail however, I am seeing a pretty common issue students have. Firstly, the way you're adding the extra edge detail doesn't build directly off your simpler, previous phase of construction - it merely treats it like a suggestion, especially in the way that your more complex edges tend to cut in and out of that line. Instead, if at all possible (and it almost always is), build directly off that edge. Your lines should come off the edge, and then return to it - and generally work additively, as though you're adding onto the initial simple form, rather than subtracting from it. Secondly, don't draw a continuous zigzagging stroke back and forth through the entire length of the edge. Build up individual strokes, one by one. I demonstrate this further in this demo.
Also worth mentioning, when your leaf contains sub-sections which themselves can be characterized as themselves being smaller leaves, apply the method to them as well. Don't think of these techniques as being very specific things we do in specific cases - they are general techniques that, whenever you see the opportunity to use them, you should.
Your branches exercises are coming along well, but keep working on getting your segments to aim towards the next ellipse when they stop, so the following segment runs directly on top. Right now you have a tendency for those segments to stop pointing slightly away, resulting in loose ends sticking out along the edge. Remember that the final goal is to have all your segments blend together fluidly into a single perceived stroke.
Your plant constructions, especially towards the beginning, are fairly well done, but one issue I see is in regards to how you handle line weight. You are treating it largely as though you're replacing your "final lines" with a clean-up pass of fresh, darker strokes. Instead, line weight should only be used to clarify the overlaps at specific local sections of existing lines. They should be drawn with the same confidence you'd apply when drawing the initial line (meaning, leverage the ghosting method so as to achieve a smooth, fluid stroke rather than drawing slowly and carefully, which results in a noticeably stiffer mark).
A few pages into your plant drawings, you start to think a lot more about detail and texture, and I think this is where you get hit the most. I'm seeing something that again is common to students at this stage - when you know you're going to get into detail, you allow it to distract you before you even get to that stage. The way you do your construction changes - you make efforts to use less linework, you skip some steps here and there, all because you're focused on the end result. A good example of this is this page, where you jump ahead to all kinds of crazy wavy edge detail on those leaves without the proper underlying, constructed structure to support that kind of complexity. Your actual texture and detail also fails to flow along with the leaf, to the point where you have what appears to be the stem of the leaf represented as texture, and completely misaligned.
Always remember - texture and detail doesn't really matter that much. Construction is everything, and while you are going through the process of constructing your object, you should not be thinking or leaving room for texture or detail. Detail should be left as an afterthought, to be added only to that which already feels solid and well constructed. Our drawings here are not meant to be focused on the end result - they are each and every one of them exercises, meant to train us in our spatial reasoning and construction.
This page was admittedly much better - the texture wasn't great (it was largely quite erratic rather than carefully planned and directly observed, so you'll want to work on pushing yourself to look at your reference more frequently to ensure that you're not working from memory, or trying to auto-pilot your way through a texture), but the underlying construction was much stronger and you took the time to draw each leaf in its entirety. It's not perfect, but it's much better because you were focusing more or less in the right places.
All in all, there's plenty of room for growth, but you're headed in the right direction. Just remember to always focus on construction above all things, and to ensure that when you want to add more complexity, make sure there is enough structure and scaffolding there to support it - otherwise you're probably skipping a step.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson, and be sure to keep what I've mentioned here in mind.
You did the second from the top left correctly (although you added edge detail subtractively instead of additively), but not the far left center. Take a look at this: https://i.imgur.com/n2QRSG7.png
Your results here are a bit mixed, but overall you do demonstrate a considerable improvement over the set. There are a number of things that I want to point out however.
To start with, when you go through your leaves exercise, you only really seem to be thinking about the steps outlined in the lesson in the simplest of terms. You've got to think of them as being a tool you're stowing away in your toolbox. IKEA furniture is a good example: the techniques I impart are not the full set of instructions, specific to any one piece of furniture. They're the little hex key you're given to tighten all your screws and bolts. When you're done, you put it in your toolkit for later, and pull it out whenever anything that could ostensibly fit on its end needs to be tightened.
Similarly, anything that shares the qualities with leaves - anything relatively flat that has a strong sense of directionality and flow - can be used to this end. Even elements that exist as part of a larger leaf - like maple leaves, which have many arms to them - can use this concept. You've done many of these on your one page of leaf exercises, and you explored with a few different approaches, but here's how you really should be tackling it: https://i.imgur.com/BbC3qYv.png
There are two other major issues:
You are very preoccupied with detail, but you're working largely from memory when it comes to adding such elements, resulting in the texture you add looking rather cartoony and overly simplified. Detail is time consuming, and cannot be rushed - you need to get into the habit of observing your reference not only carefully, but also frequently. Ensure that every mark you put down relates directly to some specific feature or element you're trying to capture, and don't let yourself draw for more than a few moments without looking back at that reference. Always remember that human memory, especially as a beginner, is not designed for this kind of task.
You're drawing all of your leaves quite small, which has a number of negative repercussions. Firstly, we think through spatial problems a lot more easily when we give our brains a good deal of room to work. Secondly, when your lines are much thicker relative to the overall size of the drawing, we lose any real sense of nuance or delicacy - all your details end up merging together unintentionally, making it look messy. It's common for students to end up drawing smaller out of a lack of confidence, because they feel like it'll help them hide their mistakes, but in truth it just causes them to make more mistakes.
Moving onto the branches exercise, you're moving in the right direction, though your lines are definitely a little stiff. Apply the ghosting method, and ensure that when you actually put a mark down, you do so with a confident, persistent stroke. When you're putting a mark down and your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake is gone - all you can do is push through without hesitation, and try and invest more time into the preparation and planning phases of the ghosting method.
Now moving forward into your constructions, you do continue to show that general stiffness but there is considerable growth and demonstrating of a stronger grasp of the constructional method. For example, this construction was actually done quite well. You do not skip steps, you draw through your forms, and you're quite conscientious about putting everything down. Your leaves could definitely stand to flow a little better (always remember that the leaf is driven by external forces - similar to the arrows in lesson 2 - don't think of them as being a single static object with a start and an end point - think of them as being something that reaches and extends itself, attempting to go further than its own physical bounds will allow). Again, it comes down heavily to the confidence of your execution.
This one was also quite well done, though don't have your leaves end as you've done where they enter the soil of the pot. Each leaf tapers down to a stem, even if it's not visible in the drawing - it's important to draw each form in its entirety (which you're mostly doing), so as to best grasp how it exists as a concrete entity in 3D space. Having them stop like this and leaving them as an open-ended thing undermines both the illusion of their solidity and your own understanding of them in space.
The rest are a bit of a mixed bag, with others that are quite successful, and others (like this one, this one and this one) falling very flat due to issues already mentioned.
You are absolutely on the right track though, and while there is plenty of room for growth, I still feel fairly confident in marking this lesson as complete. I've said a lot here however so make sure you take the time to read through it all and apply it to the material in the next lesson.
Hi Uncomfortable! I tried to take note of with you said and be more careful with my linework, hope that my work shows improvement. And while drawing plants, sometimes I got confused with the direction of contour line, please let me know if I got wrong.
Your submission is a bit of a mixed bag. Largely your drawings are quite nice, but in a number of ways they stray from the focus of this lesson.
The biggest issue is that you're extremely focused on the end result. Your attention is primarily on detail, texture, etc. and by and large you're approaching things in a somewhat sketchier manner than what is espoused here. Along with this, while you are being mindful of construction, you're treating previous phases of construction more like suggestions and explorations rather than solid, concrete scaffolding meant to support further forms and detail. Every phase of construction serves to answer a question - for example, how far out do a set of leaves go. If in the next phase you push your leaves further out, then you're wasting focus and energy on answering a question that has already been resolved. Not only does this steal attention away from those that haven't yet been answered, but it also leads to contradictory information in your drawing - where two simultaneous answers exist to the same question, undermining the cohesion of the overall result.
Lastly, you're largely overusing contour lines. I see this a lot in students who aren't really thinking about what purpose that technique is meant to serve. A contour line is meant to help describe the deformation of the surface of an object - two is certainly more effective than one, but you quickly end up with diminishing returns. One or two well placed, well planned and well executed contour lines are vastly more valuable than a dozen that have been done quickly. Usually when I see this issue, the given student has a bunch of sloppy ones all jammed in there - yours are actually done fairly well, you're just adding so many for no real reason.
In your page of leaves, you've got a number of these that don't actually follow the steps for the exercise. You're visibly skipping steps on those towards the bottom left of the page, and jumping into more complex edge detail without the appropriate scaffolding to support it. In others you are applying the steps, though you're actively drawing construction lines to be might lighter and fainter, in order to hide them. Don't - I want you to draw each and every mark with the ghosting method, focusing entirely on putting them down confidently rather than wasting effort on hiding certain marks, or even thinking about which ones should be hidden. Before you put a mark down, think about what it's going to contribute to the drawing. If it serves a constructional purpose, or adds some other value to the drawing, then draw it with that same confidence. If however it fails to serve any concrete purpose or its contribution is already being covered by another stroke, then leave it out. Later on you can come back to add line weight to key local areas in order to help organize and create a hierarchy of your linework, but that should not be considered at this point.
Here are a couple leaf-related demos that you should take a look at:
The last thing I wanted to mention was in regards to your branch exercises. You're doing a good job, though you do still need to continue to work on ensuring that your segments aim towards the next ellipse as you lift your pen up, so the next segment goes directly on top of it. The end result (ideally, though this is difficult) is that all your segments will blend together into a single visible stroke. Right now you've got a lot of fly-aways that fall out of line.
I'd like you to take another shot at this lesson. Take your time, and focus on following the instructions directly. A lot of students come in with familiarity with sketching and other approaches to drawing. Remember that we're following a very specific approach here, with a specific goal. We're not really concerned with texture or the end result - each drawing is an exercise that teaches you about how to manipulate form within 3D space, and the real value there is not a pretty picture we can pin to our fridge door, but rather what the process of each drawing teaches us about construction.
I'm not sure if you're currently using a fineliner or a ballpoint pen, since you're currently showing a lot of purposely faint lines that are a lot more difficult to achieve with the former. Lessons 3 onwards must be completed with a fineliner, so be sure to pick some up if you haven't been using them thus far. For the redo, I don't want you to worry about texture or detail - focus entirely on the construction of the plants, and take that as far as you can before moving onto the next drawing. No hatching, no texture, etc.
Lastly, you generally seem to be completing this work rather quickly (for better or for worse), but as a result you've had a lot of submissions this month. As such, I ask that you hold onto your work until November.
Ah, that explains it. In the homework section, I recommend a 0.5mm, as the 0.3's tend to be a bit too narrow. Not horrible or anything, but they definitely make it easier to scratch away on the page rather than making bolder, more confident marks.
So the first thing I do want to point out is that in a number of pages, you fell back into your habit of using hatching in your drawings - something I mentioned at the end of my critique that you should not be doing for any of these drawings. It's really important that you take the time to read and note all of my instructions - both in the lesson and in my critiques. Hatching in general isn't something you should be doing in any of these lessons. Hatching is usually used as a form of shading, which you'll notice we don't cover at all in these lessons. The reason for that is that unlike most drawing courses, I find that most students will rely on shading in order to convey the illusion of form, and as a result, it ends up being a crutch that never quite does it. Adding more shading to a drawing isn't going to fix it if it feels flat - instead, we focus purely on constructional methods, like drawing through forms, well thought out contour lines, etc. We leave hatching and shading out altogether to keep students from attempting to rely on it.
Another issue is that while you're perhaps a bit more intentional in working through more of the steps of construction (though not always - I can see places where your leaves don't have any clear sort of deliberate flow line as a starting point), you're generally very vague and loose in how you employ those steps.
Construction is a process that focuses on the idea of answering questions, or solving problems. A drawing is essentially a series of answers. How far out do these leaves reach, in what direction does it flow, how many leaves are there, how big is this stem, and so on. We start with the most basic questions, and work our way towards the more complex in successive phases.
Once a question is answered however, we have to hold true to that answer - we can't treat it like a loose suggestion and approximate around it. That answer has been given, so even if it's wrong, we cannot replace it with a new one - at least, not in this drawing. We keep moving forward, accumulating answers.
What happens when you draw more loosely is that you end up with several different answers to the same question. Often they're subtle things, but they lead to subtle contradictions in the drawing which the subconscious picks up on, damaging its suspension of disbelief. That is ultimately all we're trying to achieve - we're trying to lie to the viewer, tell them that what they're looking at is not a drawing of a plant, but rather an actual plant in a three dimensional world.
You'll notice that in demonstrations like these, I'm very deliberate with every mark I put down. Each flow line is a representation of the forces driving that leaf. Each leaf shape is built directly around it, and I'm striving to limit the number of gaps. I'm not expecting perfection or anything, but it's really about what one is trying to achieve, and that comes through in one's drawing.
With that in mind, I'd like you to do just three more pages of plant drawings. Before you do however, reread the lesson, rewatch the intro and demo videos, and reread my critiques. Don't get ahead of yourself - take your time applying the ghosting method for each and every mark you put down, planning out your strokes, and so on. Remember that we're not sketching here. We're constructing.
I did mean to go and do some sketching from life but I couldn't get close enough to any interesting plants.
I feel like I'm still struggling to balance construction which kinda feels rigid, and the fluidity of organic forms, particularly leaves and petals. I did a lot of grinding on leaves. I very much struggled with the leaves that have multiple arms (like maple leaves) and I tried the method you did a demo of but I still couldn't get it to work. Leaves that fold around like this were also a problem.
The only things I'm reasonably happy with are my textures (where I've applied them) and line weight.
All in all you're doing a really great job. You're demonstrating a well developing understanding of construction and are working towards fully grasping how each of the forms you draw exist in 3D space. All in all, your understanding of 3D space has come along really well and in a relatively short period of time.
There is of course room for improvement and there always will be, and I am seeing a few bad habits here and there (which I've written out on this page of redlining instead of typing it all out, which my sore hand now regrets). That said, keep in mind that overall you're absolutely trouncing down the right path with considerable haste and gusto. Just keep those things in mind as you continue to move forwards - especially when it comes to your tendency to be sketchy before committing to your lines, as that goes against the core principles of drawabox. Sketchy drawing and that general approach is totally fine outside of drawabox - but we're stressing this particular methodology of one mark per line, ghosting through everything and making sure every mark we put down is confidently drawn, because it infuses students with good habits that will then allow them to be more economical and deliberate even when being a little looser in the future.
You'll notice that even when I do my demos, I pick a specific brush that allows for no opacity variation, only size. It's pretty unforgiving (even moreso than a regular fineliner), but I use it because it embodies the general approach I want my students to follow.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
Edit: Oh shit, I forgot that I meant to do a quick demo of a maple leaf for you. That will be coming in a moment, I'll edit it in soon.
Edit 2: Here's your maple leaf. I made it more generic so it'd apply to other students struggling with leaves as well.
Thank you for the demo. I'll have to try it later. I think the enclosing shape is probably the step I needed.
A couple of things on the redline I realised I probably should've mentioned.
Most of the extra little bits where I'm figuring out leaf shapes, etc are my attempts at figuring things out in the more observational way I'm used to and usually these studies came after trying to apply the constructional way in my main drawing. As a result, they're sloppy and very much "thinking on the paper" but they did help in a few cases and I was able to pick out forms to start with by laying out shapes first. I don't really care about ruining the page I'm working on so it made sense to put them on the same page as my plants.
I also think you've picked up on an unfortunate tendency of my pen. When I use a lighter touch, it tends not to put down as much ink and when I'm laying in initial forms, I'm not pressing as hard. As a result, I get these really light thin lines that don't really show up well on a scanner, so I tend to go back over them so they'll show up. It's not that I'm not happy with the initial line, it's just that it hasn't gone down on my paper dark enough to begin with. That probably means I need to replace the nib in my pen again, which is fair enough since I did half my box challenge, all of my lesson 2 + garbage and this with it.
The bit you noted of the texture where I noted I did shittily, that was an early experiment, was my use of texture okay where I applied it later?
Yup, you actually had some pretty good textures on your actual plant drawings. As for the nib, yes - you'll want to ensure that your pen makes confident, rich marks regardless of how much pressure you're applying. Otherwise it's too easy to fall into the bad habit of taking advantage of the lighter, fainter marks, and generally getting sketchier.
Hi Uncomfortable, here's my Lesson 3 submission: https://imgur.com/a/WFR8tJs (Apologies for the image quality. I could go and take some better photos if you need me to.)
I didn't finish adding detail to some of my drawings because I wanted to focus more on the constructions rather than on doing lots of laborious work finishing loads of leaves. Not that I mind doing that, I just didn't feel it was the point here.
I feel like I did improve over the set at least a little at being able to see single forms in 3D and knowing how to place them. I think I sucked at organising lots of forms together though, e.g. the leaves of the potato plant in places look like they are not really related in 3 dimensions because of my weak initial construction and then losing track of it as I struggled to make sense of tons of overlapping forms.
All in all you're doing a pretty good job, though at times you are notably... a little rushed. Not terribly, but there's definitely signs that you may be pushing through a little more quickly than you ought to, and as a result there are places where you could certainly be doing better. For example, in your olive branch, the leaves aren't bad, but you've got a lot of gaps where lines should be meeting that undermine the solidity of what you've drawn.
In your cactus, you've gone to great lengths to reinforce all of your lines with darker marks, effectively replacing the underlying linework with a "clean-up" pass. This is not how lineweight works - you are never to outright replace lines, or apply a consistent weight to the entirety of a single stroke. It is only meant to clarify certain overlaps with the addition of weight to specific localities. In that sense, the initial lines put down as part of your construction are always to be treated as though they're a part of the final drawing. You also need to ensure that your weight is drawn with the same kind of confident execution (and use of the ghosting method) that all your linework uses, so as to avoid the kind of stiffness that arises when we try to match an existing line too closely.
Also, for the same cactus, you should have constructed the cylindrical flower pot around a central minor axis, as it is a cylinder after all.
Jumping back to the right side of this page, you've definitely rushed through the smaller fern-leaf things along each smaller arm, and have fallen into the trap of drawing them in a more auto-pilot sort of fashion, resulting in a very repetitive, automatic pattern that doesn't do much good for the end result. Also, you should ensure that the smaller arms extend all the way to the edge of the enclosing shape. That's what that earlier step of construction defines - how far out these arms reach.
All in all I think you're moving in the right direction, but I am going to ask you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings, this time taking your time with each drawing. My ability to offer you directed, relevant and helpful advice is definitely stunted when students don't invest all the time they can and submit work that is not representative of their current skill level.
These are excellent! Very solid construction, and you've clearly taken your time with every aspect of it. Keep up the fantastic work and consider this lesson complete. You're welcome to move onto the next one.
Here's my lesson three homework, tried to really take my time on this one. Was actually planning on doing one or two more this weekend but after a pretty unproductive morning, I think the 'well' is empty for now if you know what I mean.
Spent quite a bit of time split up with the cylinder challenge on this one. Pretty happy with the cherry blossoms but had a really rough go the last two weeks trying unsuccessfully to alternately draw orchids and calla lilys. Don't suppose you had any demos for those lying around?
For the bonsai tree I included a picture of the initial lay-in in case that's helpful as much of the original construction was ultimately covered by texture.
Youve done a pretty great job with this. There are a few things I want to mention, but by and large youre demonstrating a solid grasp of 3D space and construction as a whole, and are manipulating your forms with a confidence and flexibility that demonstrates an well developing understanding of how they can be used to achieve virtually any result.
Here are the few points I wanted to raise:
With your leaves, youre generally doing a good job, though there are times where your edge detail breaks away a little too far from the initial, simpler leaf shape, and that simpler shape no longer serves as an effective scaffolding the support this new, more complex form. In such cases, it may be necessary to work in more phases, with some sort of intermediary shape/form in between, rather than jumping directly from A to C, so to speak.
Also, you mentioned in regards to one of your leaves, subtractive bad? - generally yes. If at all possible, and it generally is possible, always work additively. That is, think of each and every form you put in space to be a solid form that actually exists there. Dont think of it as a hypothetical element that has to be committed - once drawn, its present. You can cut away from it, but youre going to end up with a greater sense of structural stability and tangibility if you keep building up from that more basic form.
Also worth mentioning, especially avoid having your edge detail zigzag over your simpler edge from the previous constructional phase, as demonstrated here. You didnt do this often but I did see a couple places (like that maple leaf looking thing). It also tends to go hand in hand with zigzagging a continuous stroke. Instead, use individual strokes and lift your pen whenever the driving direction of the stroke changes. If you attempt to draw everything without lifting your pen, it ends up getting a little muddy and indistinct.
I did notice a great deal of generic use of hatching lines here and there. Its not inherently bad (and can be useful to push certain elements back and out of focus) but I do think youre perhaps using it a little too easily at times. Actively avoiding the use of hatching lines often forces one to think more about alternative approaches that are better suited to the task at hand, and can further develop ones use of texture, line weight, and so on. So its best to leave it aside for now.
Also worth noting - remember that line weight isnt something to be applied to the entirety of a silhouette or even a whole line all at once. Its really just about clarifying overlaps, which often means applying it to local sections of a given line, rather than the whole thing. I did see a number of places where you perhaps went overboard with line weight, and it somewhat diminished the effectiveness of having that line weight actually make it clearer as to which form was in front and which was behind. Just as with any tool, overuse can result in its effectiveness decreasing.
Im pretty glad you included the lay-in for that bonsai tree, largely because while the result actually came out quite well, there are underlying issues that are much harder to identify with the final product that are a bit glaring when looking at the naked lay-in. The lay-in is actually quite flat. Theres a lot of complexity there already, in your layering of limbs and such, and a lot of contour lines that feel a little shallow (they dont quite hook around enough as they reach the edge to give the impression of a rounded surface continuing along the other side), that the forms themselves dont feel entirely solid. I think you bit off a pretty complex challenge here, and perhaps let the intricacy of it get the better of you rather than properly breaking it down into its simplest components, but all things considered you still did manage to pull it off with a fair degree of success. Once you notice those problems in the lay-in, they do stand out more in the final result, but by and large I would say you did as good a job of saving it as you could have. On the topic of the final result however, I do want to point out that theres a great tendency here and there to be a bit sketchy and rely more on drawing textual elements on auto-pilot rather than with the kind of clear consideration and observation of your reference. In direct contradiction of my previous point, that is probably one area where it could have been improved as well.
Also, unfortunately I dont have any demos lying around for those particular plants - Id do one for you right now, but unfortunately Im out of town for a funeral and dont really have the means. Message me next weekend if youd still like to see one, and Ill do one up for you.
Anyway, youre doing a pretty great job as it is. Keep these points in mind and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
This is a pretty healthy mixed bag of successes and areas where we can definitely adjust things to see some improvement. Before I get into my critique, I want you to take a look at these common pitfalls. Theyre things I see somewhat frequently from students moving into lesson 3.
Overall, I think the biggest issue that Im seeing is that your linework is notably scratchy and timid. Theres not a lot of confidence there, youre hesitant to really push forward and commit to your marks. Frequently I see marks doubling up (where youve attempted to reinforce a shaky line), or places where youve attempted to replace an existing stroke entirely.
By and large, youre actually doing a pretty good job of employing constructional techniques, but none of it feels particularly solid because your marks have no confidence behind them. The very foundation of a solid construction is the smooth, confident strokes and evenly shaped ellipses that hold it up. This is an issue were going to have to address before we move forwards, and thats going to largely mean getting you to employ the ghosting method a lot more fervently throughout.
Remember, the ghosting method is a matter of planning out each individual stroke, identifying where you want it to start and end, then preparing by repeatedly going through the motion of drawing without actually having the pen touch the page. Thisis where all of our time is invested - once we finally touch the page to execute the mark, we do so with a single, confident, persistent motion. We accept that at this point any mistake that may occur, in terms of accuracy, is inevitable and unavoidable. All we can do here is ensure that the mark comes out as a single, smooth, confident stroke.
Theres still much that can be done with a confident stroke, even if it doesnt quite hit the mark. A wobbly, uncertain, or scratchy stroke however doesnt have much to offer, and theres not much to be done with it. Any construction built upon it will be flimsy and insolid.
One issue more specific to your leaves is that I noticed when you were adding more complex edge detail to them, you had a tendency to dip above and below the earlier, simpler edge. Instead of doing that, I want you to build directly off that underlying edge, as demonstrated here.
This means not only ensuring that we work additively, building directly off this simpler leaf construction, but it also means drawing a series of distinct lines rather than a single continuous stroke zigzagging back and forth. Each line should have a clear, concise trajectory. Once that trajectory changes, we lift our pen and begin another dinstinct line. This ensures that the overall line does not become muddy, and also allows us to design that edge detail more carefully without falling into the trap of working from autopilot.
When it comes to your use of the branch technique when actually constructing your plants, I noticed that you tend to put contour ellipses down wherever and whenever, without any real rhyme or reason. Theyre not immediately associated with the individual segments youre combining to create the larger, more complex branch (as covered as part of the branch exercise), and theyre certainly not present all to reinforce the illusion of form. Instead, youve just.. drawn a lot for no real reason. Its a frequent thing I see from students who arent necessarily thinking about what purpose those contour ellipses are meant to serve, and instead try working from rote memory of this is how you do it in the hopes that itll make sense later.
Whenever you put a mark down as part of a drawing, I want you to stop and think about what its meant to contribute. Is it going to help communicate some integral aspect of what youre depicting to the viewer? Or is it going to help you better grasp how the forms youre constructing sit in 3D space or relate to one another? If so, they draw that mark with a consistent, confident stroke - no attempt to make it particularly faint, or to allow it tobe hidden later on. Just draw it in ane qual manner to everything else, using the ghosting method to achieve a confident, even stroke. If it does not fall into either of those categories however, or if its purpose is already being achieved by another stroke, or if it COULD be achieved better by another potential stroke altogether, then simply dont draw it.
So in this case, many of those contour ellipses dont actual serve a purpose - a couple of those would be more than enough to convey the illusion that the tube is solid and three dimensional, and based on where you placed your edge segments, again a couple would have been more than enough for you.
Now, despite what Ive mentioned here, for the most part your use of constructional methods to create these objects is pretty solid. You just need to solidify your approach to the underlying techniques.
So, Id like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings, after reading over this critique, rewatching the videos in the lesson and reading over the notes about common pitfalls I shared at the beginning of this critique.
I need to continue practicing putting my ellipses at perpendicular angles to the line they're showcasing. This was something I struggled on last lesson with on the organic contours. I tried to push the degree shifts more than I did last time so that lines have both small degrees and large degrees as they recede in space but I'm not sure it's all the way there yet.
In the few areas I put surface details (such as the small strawberry and mushrooms) I tried to be better about making transitions with the amount of surface detail. I also tried to play with line weight in specific lines, not always to great success but it's the thought that counts :)
By and large you're doing a pretty good job, though there are a few areas where you're straying from the core principles of construction - that is, never add complexity that cannot be supported by the scaffolding that already exists.
This comes up in a few places. First off, in your leaves - notice how you've got all those wavy edges? At the core of it, construction focuses on keeping us from making too many critical decisions all at once. So we'll draw the simplest leaf shape first, with basic arcing edges, to make the decision of how this leaf overall is going to flow through space, then we'll build the wavier edge detail on top of that underlying structure. That way we can focus on our edges without having to worry about how the whole shape is meant to flow through space. You can see this demonstrated in this demo.
Also, don't draw waves by zigzagging a stroke back and forth without lifting your pen. Always rise off the line from the previous stage of construction, then come back down to it and lift your pen. Wherever the trajectory breaks, lift your pen. If the edges are particularly spiky rather than wavy, lift your pen off at the end of the spike, then draw the stroke coming back down separately.
I can also see that you had a lot of experimentation on the second page wit how exactly to build on top of that simpler form, working both additively and subtractively. Wherever possible, I recommend that you avoid cutting back into a form you've constructed. It's generally better to work in a manner that allows you to continually build up onto forms - to treat what you've drawn as being solidly present within the world.
Now, remember that this means additive construction in 3D space. If you look at the demo I linked previously, you'll see that along the bottom edge, I've got waves that cut back into the silhouette of the form - but in 3D space, these are not actually cutting away, they're edges that have been raised up.
Throughout your work you do use construction pretty well in a lot of other places, but there are a few key points where the concept of "simple -> complex" can be employed more effectively. For instance, on this page, the big bulbous thing towards the upper right. Personally, I'd have constructed a ball, ensured that it felt solid and three dimensional, then built up around it, like this.
Same goes for the peas - you should be making sure those aren't just loose circles, but rather solid, concrete ball forms.
The last thing I wanted to mention was that you'll want to continue paying attention to your branches exercises - right now they're pretty shaky:
Make sure they're not getting pinched, keep their widths consistent even if this means putting a couple more ellipses along the way
Draw through your ellipses
Extend your line segments more past a given ellipse, but continue practicing getting them to aim towards the next ellipse. Remember that the goal is to get your next segment to flow directly on top of the previous one so they merge seamlessly together. Aiming them correctly tends to be difficult when they're too short, and what you don't want to see is a bunch of little stray ends of these segments sticking out.
When I drew the pumpkin I was thinking about it in cross-section forms, which would have (had I done it properly) represented the volume so drawing the silhouette afterwards should have been correct.
Having said that, as soon as I drew it I knew I dun goofed, but I figured it'd be worse to try and correct the mistake by trying to draw it as a sphere again on top of the mess I had already created.
Same with the pea pods, when I drew the left one I realized I dun goofed by not following the volume close enough, I think the right one is better.
This was difficult. I had to let go of perfectionism here more than any time before. Crippling at times.
Notes:
I like doing leaves.
I also switched over to Cottonwood Arts sketchbooks 3/4 into the lesson, which accentuated my mistakes, removing all room for error. That hurt too. A solid beating this month so far.
By and large you are doing a pretty good job, and you're definitely showing improvement on the front of those struggles with perfectionism. There is still plenty of room to grow, but I can see you applying construction a fair bit, and clear examples that you understand the concepts involved.
There are a couple things that I want to draw your attention to:
You've got what looks somewhat like a fern leaf among your leaves, where you've drawn the overall leaf shape of the whole arrangement, but draw each smaller sub-leaf as simple spikes coming out from the center. For this, you should be applying the same leaf construction method to each individual sub-leaf, as demonstrated here.
Your branches are coming along, though you do need to keep working on getting each segment to aim towards the next ellipse. Right now you've got a lot of segments that veer off course, and as a result, the following segment doesn't overlap it properly. The result we want to achieve is having all of the segments blend in perfectly, following the same trajectory. It does appear that you're striving for this, which is good, but I did feel that it was necessary to point it out just in case.
Your constructions are coming along well, but I am noticing a certain timidity to your linework in general. Part of it is that your lines have a tendency to come out a little bit faint - not necessarily just in the way a dying pen would produce a mark, but in their a slight stiffness that is present there. Make sure that you put every single mark down with the same kind of confident, persistent pace. If you make a mistake, that's fine - you'll deal with it - but hesitation out of fear of making a mistake is always going to hold you back. Once you decide a mark is going to contribute to your construction or to the drawing as a whole, make sure it goes down with the same confident execution you'd add to something integral to the final result.
Always remember the importance of the flow that drives each leaf or flower petal. I see in some of your constructions that you're not quite applying this principle across the board. Every single flat form needs that kind of strong, gestural flow that really drives how it moves through 3D space. That initial line is incredibly important towards making the petals and leaves look alive and avoid stiffness. Think as though this line is an arrow representing all of the forces of wind and air currents that guide and control the leaf or petal in question, and try to imbue your stroke with that kind of energy.
Aside from that, you're doing well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
I've noticed that I tend to rush the branches, I don't like my branches, I still need to fight myself on this and slow down.
Some places I actually ruined stuff by applying too much contour line, so now I'm just scared to use it.
I'm still struggling to visualize really complex petal/leaves that curl around (like roses) and to "render" petal/leaves borders. I'm disappointed because my petal don't feel soft and curly :( I tried to add some texture but not really a success.
I thought cacti would be the easier, but actually there were the harder for me, always look horrible in the end.
But I definitively felt, that toward the end, I was starting to getting it compared to the beginning.
You're doing pretty well. There are some things I want to bring to your attention, but by and large you're demonstrating a decent grasp of the material, and are developing your understanding of the use of constructional techniques.
Here are the few things I want you to keep an eye on:
With your leaves, keep pushing the idea of how these things flow through space. That initial flow line is critical, and you're doing a decent job of capturing how the leaves flow through space, but try and always remind yourself that this represents the forces that impact the leaf. Try not to think of the flow line as being something that starts and stops, something that is static in space. While the leaf itself may in fact have a beginning and an end, the forces it represents do not - they are the air currents and wind that flow beyond it. I frequently will add little arrow-heads at the end of my flow lines to kind of reinforce this idea in my mind, that the flow continues on.
Also for the leaves, when drawing your initial enclosing of the leaf shape, leave out any additional wobbles. Construction is all about starting from something dead simple and gradually building up from there, never adding visual information that cannot be supported by the supports and structure that are already present. So in this case, I'm referring to leaves like the center of the second page, where the edges are quite wavy.
Last thing about leaves - in this page you tackled a leaf with many branching arms. You got the right start, but didn't quite followthrough all the way. Here's how it should be approached.
For your branches, while here and there you do still need to work on how your line segments overlap and keep them flowing continuously, you're actually doing quite well, and are getting it pretty close to correct most of the time. It's just a matter of continuing to keep on top of that last mile.
Your constructions here are looking pretty solid, but watch out for how you're building subtractively from that stem. Instead, wherever possible, work additively - that is, rather than cutting away from a form you've added to your scene, build on top of it. In this case it'd mean adding a little extra mass to the joints along that branch, perhaps by adding balls along its length.
In the cactus on this page, you've done pretty well with the construction, but when dealing with detail, keep an eye on how the visual elements are actually spread out over a surface. Here it does seem like you went a bit heavy on those little pods, and that they wouldn't normally be laid out quite in that fashion. Always look back to your reference and avoid working from memory at all costs (which happens even when looking away from our reference for a few minutes - draw only a couple marks before looking back).
I am noticing that when tackling flower petals (hibiscus and other flowers), you have a tendency to ignore the necessity of the flow line, or you try and spread its job over several flow lines/contour lines. Using a single one even when the petal seems broad rather than pointy is still important, because you're capturing the essence of how it moves through space. Always draw these lines confidently and think of it like the arrows from lesson 2, which are driven with a strong sense of force and energy.
Anyway, you're doing a pretty good job, so keep it up. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Thanks for the detailed review ! I completely forgot to think about gravity, that's true, that would have been helpful indeed to think about my flow lines....everything else is on point, I'll keep these in my mind.
Hey Uncomfortable , here's my submission for the 3rd lesson; I did a couple extra plant pics since I wasn't satisfied with some of them. The fifth plant picture is a bit weird because I tried to readjust my line pressure to stop destroying my micron tips, so everything came out a bit off. Also its duplicated with a camera pic due to the scanner messing it up too much.
I'm still not a 100% sure about my progress so far. I'm having a lot of trouble applying the crinkled effect to leaves, especially with the pumpkin pic. I also feel a lot of my linework for highly overlapping leaves/petals keeps coming out really cluttered with the overlapping leaves and contour lines. I also haven't done a lot of texture work, but I have been practicing a bit with the solid black fills to try to reduce the clutter.
Overall it's a pretty good start. There's definitely areas to improve, but you're making solid efforts to employ constructional techniques and that's really what I'm focusing on right now.
So on the point about the crinkly edges of your leaves, one thing that helps is to always work additively and really adhere to the lines you've put down in your previous stage of construction. As shown here, each "wrinkle" is drawn separately, rising off the original edge and falling back to it. Don't zig-zag or go in and out of your leaf shape. In general, if you can help it, don't cut back into the form and lean towards building onto it or treating it as though you're taking that surface and lifting it up or down.
Your branches are moving in the right direction, but keep pushing the flow of your line segments. Right now they're a bit stiff, and you'll need more practice to get them to overlap one another more. You can still see those little bits sticking out at the end of each segment.
In some of your flower petals, I can see places where you've either neglected to draw the flow line altogether, or haven't quite captured the sort of driving force that should be pushing behind them. Try and keep in mind that the flow line really represents the forces and energy that pushes the leaf or petal - usually airflow and wind. Give it a lot of confidence - often i'll draw a little arrow head at the end of it to remind myself that this flow line is symbolic of a moving force with no clear start or end, so I can then carry that into the enclosing shape I draw next.
On that same page, it is worth mentioning that the strawberries also tend to be a little less solid because of how you've cut back into them. Cutting and working subtractively isn't inherently bad, but it's a lot easier to do it while thinking in 2D, rather than how you're solving those same problems in three dimensions. Cutting back without thinking of how this cut exists itself as a form in relation to the larger form you're cutting from is going to really undermine the illusion you're trying to create.
I think overall you are demonstrating construction well, there's just plenty of room for growth, and room to continue pushing yourself in terms of the confidence of your linework. I am going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, as you can tackle this stuff just as well in the next lesson. So feel free to move on.
Thanks for the advice, especially with the tip on 3D additive over subtractive detailing; that's something I haven't thought of. I'll continue practicing the plant stuff in parallel with the next lesson.
Hi Uncomfortable, I spent around 22 hours on this lesson. Such beautiful flowers like dahlia and rose were really tempting to draw, but those were too hard for me now. Drawing on the structure was really fun though! It really improved my 3d vision. A friend of mine saw my sunflower drawing and said that the flower looks flat. I checked with my reference flower which was a bit tilted, then I noticed "Oh I gotta focus on not only the structure but everything I learned XD" Like always, LOL. Thanks a lot always :)
You've got some good stuff here, but there are a number of things I think I can say that should help in a few areas.
In your leaves section, they're generally pretty well done, but there are a couple adjustments I'd make to your approach:
Your linework stiffens up at times with hesitation - it's really important, especially when nailing that flow line, that you draw it with the confidence of the energy the line represents. It captures the forces that drive this leaf - air currents, wind, etc - and serves as a representation of them on the page. As such, you need to really push that stroke out and maintain a smooth, consistent trajectory.
When adding edge detail, wherever possible, work additively rather than subtractively. As shown here, don't zigzag your lines (draw individual strokes with singular trajectories, don't change the trajectory mid-stroke to create a hard corner) and don't cut back into your leaf shape. Think of it more as though you're either building onto it (with separate lines coming off that edge and returning to it) or like you're lifting sections of that shape up to create a ripple. Neither of these cut into the shape, even if the result ends up sitting a little inside the original silhouette.
For multi-armed leaves like the maple leaf you drew, construct each arm with the leaf construction method, as shown here, then merge them together. Think more critically about what the method allows you to accomplish and don't fall into the trap of thinking "it's the leaf method, so we apply this to all leaves no matter how complex they are". It's a technique used to convey a more gestural, flatter form that flows through space - sometimes leaves are made up of several of these.
Your branches are coming along well, and you're doing a pretty good job of getting your segments to blend together into a single continuous stroke. There are some hiccups here and there but that's entirely normal and expected. You'll continue to improve with this the more you use the technique.
In that first sunflower attempt, you've got some nice, confident flow to those petals. One thing I am noticing though is that you're going beyond the initial bounding ellipse you drew, treating it more like a loose suggestion. When applying the constructional method, I want you to treat every single phase of construction like a decision being made - in this case, how far out you want your petals to go. Once made, you should not contradict that decision if you can help it. Yes, the leaves don't actually go out to a single radius, but construction itself is an exercise in building up your spatial reasoning, and so our goal isn't to create a 100% faithful reproduction of the image. If you go on to contradict that initial decision, you'll end up with many conflicting answers to individual questions, which in turn will weaken the overall illusion of solidity. One question, one answer.
On your second stage of the sunflower, you definitely dived hard into attacking the texture of its central area. Experimentation is great, but there are a couple things I want to mention about how you went about it:
You saw something seemingly chaotic, so you attacked it by applying similarly chaotic techniques. Cross-hatching, semi-random strokes, etc. Keep this in mind: no texture is ever going to be random. There are always rhythms, patterns and such that govern each texture, and it is a matter of taking more time to observe what kind of visual elements and microforms are present that give that texture a particular kind of appearance, and how they're arranged, and the flows they follow. In general, do not use hatching - it's a sort of "catch-all" shortcut that students will use when they don't take the time to identify what is actually present there.
Once you've identified the actual forms present within a texture, what you want to do is not actually draw each individual form as you might for an overall construction - instead we imply their presence by drawing the impact they have on what sits around them. Specifically, we draw their cast shadows. Cast shadows are flexible - they're not lines, they can expand into entire shapes, and these shapes can merge with one another to create large, solid areas of black that do not attract the eye any more than they need to. They can also be blasted away with direct light to create lost-and-found edges, allowing us to transition from a solid black area, to a middle ground of texture, to a blank rest area. We remain in full control of where we apply our texture, using it as a tool to communicate certain properties of what we're drawing, rather than being beholden to the idea of having to match the photograph. I'd recommend looking at the notes on the 25 texture challenge for more information on this, though on December 25th the release of the rebuilt drawabox website and all of the new lesson content will go over this in much greater detail as well.
The last point I want to make is that as you push on through your plant drawings, you have a tendency to lay down loose, sketchy lines before committing. This is fundamentally against the techniques and mentality that drawabox is trying to instill, and it's something you need to pull back on.
Every single mark you put down should be drawn with the ghosting method and with the full confidence of a mark you intend to be seen. Before making such a mark, consider what the purpose of the line you're about to put down is, and whether or not another line might accomplish this task more effectively, or if another one is already doing so. If it contributes in a meaningful way to your construction, your understanding of space or form or the relationships between forms, or if it communicates an integral piece of information to the viewer, then draw it. Otherwise, don't. Don't sketch roughly and think on the page.
Following these principles will help you develop your linework to be more confident and concise, and will improve your line economy as well. It's not a matter of being more precious with your lines - simply of thinking about what you're putting down before you do, being aware of what you're trying to achieve with each stroke, and ultimately executing that mark with full confidence and no hesitation.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings, applying what I've mentioned here.
Fantastic work! These are vastly better and appear to correct every point I raised in my critique. There isn't much else to say - you've done very well, and I'm happily marking this lesson as complete. It's always nice to see my critiques implemented so thoroughly.
You're doing a pretty good job overall, with reasonably solid forms and a good application of constructional techniques in most areas. There are a few things I want to address however.
Leaves:
Your leaves are pretty well done, and demonstrate a fair bit of attention being paid to how these leaves flow through space. The initial flow lines could be drawn with a little more confidence and energy (they do after all represent all the forces being applied to this flat, flowing form) but you're on the right track.
When constructing leaves with more complex edges, make sure that you adhere to the previous phase of construction (the simple edges that enclose your basic leaf shape). That means that the additional edge detail you're adding should come off that edge and return to it. Currently you have a tendency to zigzag back and forth over that line, which results in you losing the structure you'd set out originally. This explains this concept further.
Additionally, avoid working subtractively - that is, don't cut back into your forms and shapes if you can help it. Work additively, attaching new forms to your existing one to build up greater complexity.
When you have a leaf with multiple arms, don't blindly apply the leaf construction method without thinking about why this technique works in certain scenarios. Think about it and consider how it can be applied to each case. When you've got a leaf with a bunch of little arms, you've basically got a leaf made up of a bunch of smaller leaves - so apply the technique to each one and then merge them together, as shown here.
Branches
Honestly, you're doing pretty well. You've got a few hiccups here and there where your lines split apart, leaving these little tails sticking out where the edges failed to flow smoothly together, but that's normal and should go away with targeted practice of this skill.
I generally found your constructions to be pretty good, and your use of leaf shapes had a much better sense of confident flow here than they did in the leaves exercise. I did find that this thing felt a little flat, mostly because the forms felt a little loose. I am however mainly point it out because I have a little demo I'd done in the past about what I assume is the same kind of object, which you can see here: https://i.imgur.com/IfSg0wm.png
Your mushrooms were quite well done, though I think the contour curves along the stem of the bottom one were a case of quantity over quality. You drew quite a few, but also didn't spend a whole lot of time on each one, resulting in a lot of sub-par contour lines that didn't entirely do their job. One or two very well crafted ones are going to be vastly more effective. Same goes for the cap, where along the top you've loosely implied what ended up looking something like a grid. Don't go throwing these contour lines willy-nilly. Think about how they're being used and consider if it's actually of any value. Remember that we're not sketching here - we're drawing every single mark with planning and purpose behind it.
For the most part, you do a good job of drawing through your forms, though I did feel it necessary to call out the fact that in this page, you didn't. That is to say, where the leaf overlaps the base of your pitcher plant, you allow the form to stop suddenly. These drawings are all exercises to help us understand how these forms exist in space and how they relate to one another. By cutting that form off in this manner, you severely reduce the drawing's effectiveness as a spatial exercise.
Lastly, probably the biggest and only particularly significant issue is the fact that you have a lot of extraneous lines that serve no purpose. I understand that you've drawn them as a vague attempt at texture or detail, but they very clearly correspond to nothing concrete in your actual reference image, and are a sloppy attempt at implying something you've not studied closely. Don't do this. If you want to put texture on your drawing, take the time to study your reference carefully, identify the visual elements that are present and transfer them in an intentional manner, a couple marks at a time, constantly looking back at your reference so as to avoid working from memory.
Otherwise, just don't add them. Focus on construction and form, and put all your effort towards ensuring your constructions are solid and that you have done everything you need to in order to fully believe that the forms you are constructing are more than just drawings on a flat page - that they are real, solid forms that exist in this world you're creating. This is where your time and effort should be invested, not in making half-assed scratches to imply detail. Even if you were to put the additional time into properly conveying the texture of your plants and leaves, this would only come after construction has been given its due.
Anyway, while that last point was harsh, you've still done a fairly good job overall. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
I found myself dreading doing this lesson and even ended up avoiding doing them and only doing boxes and warm up some days. I know that there were complete failures, a lot of them. Working through those failures and not avoiding them has been a challenge that I need to deal with better.
I was able to follow and copy your demo to some success('page 0'). When it came to me deciding how to construct myself though, it fell apart more than once. As seen with the first drawing, the palm tree, I tried to develop a process of breaking the shapes into basic forms without getting bogged down with detail needs work. The last palm tree came out cartoon and too dark but I was happy that I made progress. I changed gears and thought maybe I could learn something with more focused plants. Pages 2-5 were better but still have troubles with line weight and their readability. Page 6 went ok at first, but aloe plant went wrong, really wrong. I tried breaking down why.
I think the pandanus tree on page 7 was my biggest failure, everything became a mess and it ended up just look terrible. I really didn't want to draw but kept going to finish the page for the day. I think it had negative impact when I was drawing the pandunus fruit.
For the last page I decided to face the problem head on with things similar to the potato plant. I had a degree of success. Also I decided against the black background since it takes away from the subject matter.
I look forward to your input of what I should work on and how to proceed.
Side note: I've also been drawing boxes after my warm ups in parallel with this challenge, I hope those are ok for re-submission. If not, let me know. Also should I be including my reference or would you rather I not do that from now on?
More often than not, the self-analysis that some students offer along with their submission does less good than some might think. Unless there are clear questions that need answering, it's generally better to just give me the floor and to discern what I need to know from looking at your work. The rest is just liable to confuse matters.
Now, looking over your work, while there are a number of issues that I will address, by and large you've shown a good deal of improvement over the set and have demonstrated yourself to be working through the challenges of construction and the spatial problems that lay therein. Despite the issues I'll mention, you are demonstrating a belief and understanding of the scene you're drawing as existing in three dimensions, and you appear to see that quality in your own drawings.
The first issue with your leaves is that the lines that denote the flow of the form through space - that is, the first line we draw in relation to any leaf - is generally drawn hesitantly, and as a result comes out looking a little stiff. Being that the line is the core, driving element of the flow of the entire form, it carries over into the rest of the construction. It's critical that you draw this line - and all your constructional lines - with a confident, persistent pace pushing forwards through the path you have plotted, planned and prepared for using the ghosting method. This line represents the energy and forces applied to this form - the flow of wind and air that causes it to move as it does. Don't see this line as being a static object with a beginning and an end. View it instead as a visual representation of something that extends far beyond its beginning and end. Sometimes it can help to draw it with a little arrowhead (I often do).
I've noticed that when adding additional detail to your leaves, you have a tendency to use the simpler edge enclosing the basic leaf shape as more of a suggestion than something solid that exists there in the scene. What I see is that your more complex line from the following phase of construction zigzags back and forth across the line. There are two things wrong with this. Firstly, don't zigzag your lines - it causes us to go into autopilot and creates repetitive patterns that do not actually exist. Instead, draw each line individually, lifting your pen when it comes to some kind of sharp corner or turn. This allows you to design those marks more deliberately. Secondly, these lines should always come off the simpler stroke from the previous phase of construction, and then return to it. Treat it like an object or mass that exists in the world, not as a sketch or something to be ignored. Being that it's solid, your only option is to build on top of it. If at all possible, and it generally should be when dealing with leaves, avoid building subtractively (cutting back into a form you've already produced), opting to work additively instead. This should demonstrate what I mean.
The last thing I noticed in your leaves was that the few places where you seem to have attempted detail (nothing wrong with not tackling detail just yet), you merely applied vague hatching lines. Try to stay away from hatching - it tends to encourage the student to think less about the actual texture present on an object, and just focuses on filling an area in, or attempting to shade (shading being something that we poignantly don't tackle in this course).
In your branches, there are a few things that I believe are contributing to the same problem. The issue is that your linework here is quite stiff, and as a result the segments that create each side don't flow smoothly into one another. Instead you end up with a lot of stray ends that stick out. The goal is, of course, to have them all flow from one to the next, overlapping their ends to create the illusion of a single line. I believe that this stiffness may be caused by you drawing more from your wrist than you should be, which in turn may be encouraged by how small the spaces between the ellipses are. I'd recommend spacing them out more and engaging your shoulder to achieve smoother, more confident and consistent strokes.
As for your plants, I have some general observations:
I mentioned this in regards to the first exercise, but it's worth mentioning again. You aren't approaching the initial flow line of leaves/flower petals/etc with much attention - they're largely either drawn as a passing thought or not drawn at all, despite being the most important, driving element of that form.
Whenever you think to put down a mark, consider what its purpose is. Think about what it's meant to achieve, and whether or not that can be achieved by another mark, or whether it is already being done by another stroke on the page. Think about the specific mark you want to put down. Then, if it contributes in a meaningful way to your construction, or communicates some important part of the drawing as a whole, then draw it confidently, using the ghosting method. Otherwise don't draw it. I'm noticing that you have a tendency of drawing a lot of contour lines, and when I see this from students it's usually because they're not really thinking about what each contour line is meant to achieve. Generally one or two that have been drawn confidently and properly is more than enough to achieve one's goal. More than that and you start weighing your drawing down with unnecessary linework.
You're frequently drawing ellipses and ellipsoids but not drawing through them. You should be drawing through each and every ellipse you draw two full times before lifting your pen, focusing on drawing it with a confident, persistent pace.
I also see places where you draw things lightly and then go back over them with a sort of 'clean up pass'. It was mentioned in the form intersections exercise from lesson 2, that this is not an approach I want you to use in these lessons. When adding line weight, you're not replacing existing lines or designating some lines as being part of the real drawing and others not. You're meant only to add weight to local sections of existing lines (never their entirety), specifically with the purpose of clarifying specific overlaps. If you try following along the entirety of an existing line, you're going to end up drawing slowly and carefully, and the result will be a wobbling, stiff line. Even line weight should be applied by using the ghosting method to ensure that it is done confidently and smoothly.
Minor axes are an important tool for drawing cylinders and cylinder-like objects, as all the ellipses must be aligned to one another. These are missing from your flower pots and such.
I'd recommend giving yourself a lot more room for each drawing - splitting each page into quadrants is forcing you to draw in a much more cramped space. Giving yourself room to work is pretty important, especially early on, when learning to deal with spatial problems. Working smaller causes us to stiffen up and make mistakes we may not have otherwise done.
Now, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, for the reasons I mentioned at the beginning of this critique. That said, you have a lot to work on here, and will be able to apply most of it in the next lesson. As for your question about boxes, in my previous reviews I gave you all the information you needed to self-assess, so there isn't going to be much gained from continuing to submit your boxes. Finally, about the reference, sure - if you've got it, go ahead and include it. If you don't, it's no big deal.
You'll find that on December 25th, the drawabox website is going to undergo a pretty significant change as I release the rebuild I've been working on for the past few months. This includes heavy revisions to the first two lessons' content, along with modifications through the others. I'd recommend reading through the first two lessons' material once that comes out, and before moving onto lesson 4.
Here is my submission for lesson 3. Definitely saw some growth as I worked through these and have been able to identify areas for improvement. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, and as usual, thank you in advance for sharing them.
In most cases, when a student goes this heavy on detail, my critique is usually going to involve telling them to take a step back and focus more on construction. For the most part, that's not really the case here. You're doing a pretty solid job on your construction, and clearly seem to be focusing on getting it down before pushing on into detail - this is great to see. As a result, your constructions both include a very pleasing smattering of balanced texture (it's not ever overwhelming or distracting), as well as solid forms that feel believable and tangible.
On the flipside, this is not the kind of work I'd ever show other students as examples - not because it's not well done, but rather because it would drive them to try too much, too soon.
I do have a few thoughts to offer though:
Your construction on this leaf is a little off - notice how the top edge is considerably longer than the bottom one? Due to the physical qualities of leaves, you're likely to ever find one that stretches on one side. This suggests to me that you may be fighting against a more natural fold for your leaf, as explained here.
When tackling leaves with multiple 'arms' (there's one such leaf near the bottom left of your leaves exercise), you can construct each arm as an independent leaf construction of its own, before merging them together, as described here. I also have another demonstration of this process here.
Your branches exercises definitely show a number of issues that don't seem to be present when applying the technique in your later drawings, which suggests to me that you've identified and learned from those mistakes. This includes getting your segments to flow more smoothly into one another (as explained here), keeping the width of your branch consistent through their length (if you want to add knots, try using this technique instead), and generally working on both the confident execution and control of your ellipses.
When adding wavy edges to your leaves like on the bottom right of this page and the leaves on this page, try and hold more solidly to the original, simpler leaf edge from the previous phase of construction. Don't zigzag over it, but have your lines rise up from it and return to it. Also, whenever possible, try to work additively - rather than cutting into that simpler leaf shape, try and envision that you're building onto it, or manipulating its edge to rise and fall. Cutting into things requires a lot more spatial awareness of both what is being cut away, and what it is being cut from, and is much easier to mess up. I explain both of these points further in these notes.
So! By and large you're doing a great job, but do have a few things to keep in mind as you move forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Thanks for the feedback, Uncomfortable. I think your points resonate well with mistakes I had noticed while working through the exercises myself, so Im glad my ability to self-critique seems at least fairly on point. Really enjoying the lessons, and feeling great about the progress Ive been able to make so far. Thanks for making that possible, and see you in lesson 4s thread.
You're making some good headway, but there are a number of things I want to address.
In your leaves exercises, I can see some definitely attempts to adhere to the simpler leaf shape from the previous phase of construction, when adding additional edge detail like waves or whatever else. There are some places however (like this leaf) where you're still showing some zigzagging (as described here). From the looks of it, you were making an attempt to be aware of it, but still had some zigzaggy tendencies. Also, when you've got those lines coming off the simpler construction line, try and have it come up a little more smoothly and naturally. In many places I can see where the line turns a pretty sharp corner as it rises off that simpler line, making it feel more sudden and less fluid.
Also, I'm seeing a lot of these arbitrary little contour/detail lines that seem to be accomplishing the task of neither in a lot of your leaf exercise drawings. If you want to put down detail, then take the time to observe your reference carefully and ensure that the marks you put down reflect the visual information present there. If you're trying to use them as contour lines, then focus on accomplishing the task they're meant for, and try and assess whether or not you need to add additional contour lines, or whether what you've got serves the purpose just fine. I noticed in your later plant constructions, you definitely went overboard with contour lines. Thinking about whether or not you really need to add another is important - consider what you want your mark to accomplish, whether it is the best mark for the job, or if another one might do it better (or if another mark is present that is already doing the job).
For your branches, one thing I noticed was that you weren't really maintaining consistent widths through those branches - that's pretty important.
In terms of getting the branches' edge segments to flow into one another, you've got a bit of a mixed bag. A lot of people struggle with this, but I can see places where you're actually getting them to flow together pretty nicely, so you're definitely making strides forward there.
Last thing about the branches - watch your ellipses' degrees. As explained in this video, the degree you choose to use implies the orientation of that cross-section relative to the viewer. If you've got a lot of huge degree shifts through the length of the branch, it's going to start breaking the illusion you're trying to produce.
Jumping into plant constructions, I did find that when you have a lot of petals around a flower, you tend to focus much less on how those petals flow through space (like this one). Try and think more about how those petals are going to flow through space, rather than just letting yourself draw shallow arcs over the 2D page. This demonstration goes over this.
I do very much like the fact that you build your flower pots as solid, compound cylinders, with clear minor axes to which to align the ellipses.
These constructions were definitely showing a well developing grasp of 3D space as a whole, and the surfaces conveyed a strong sense of how they were flowing through space.
Admittedly I think the last several pages of your homework came out looking quite a bit stronger than the first half, and conveyed much greater solidity and awareness of flow. As such, while that first half is kind of weak, I'm still going to mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Hey, don't forget that at your current patreon tier, you're only eligible for critiques of lesson 1 and 2, as well as the box and cylinder challenges. Lessons 3 and 4 require the $7 tier or higher.
You're moving in the right direction, though there are some issues I want to address.
To start with, your leaves exercises are a good start. You're handling construction fairly well (you're not zigzagging around your previous phase of construction and are abiding by those previous phases properly), though keep working on thinking about how those leaves are meant to flow through 3D space. Try to think about the initial flow lines as carrying all the energy of the wind that drives the leaf, and draw it with a confidence befitting of that smooth, flowing force.
Also, I noticed that towards the right side of the page, you've got a leaf that arcs in a way that is unnatural, which compresses one side and expands the other as explained here.
Your branches are also coming along well - you're working on getting those segments to flow smoothly into one another, which is great, though in doing so you do seem to stiffen up a little bit. This may also be partially caused by the fact that your branches here have a tendency to be quite small - I'm glad you're trying to pack a lot into each page, but make sure you're giving yourself ample room to work through these spatial problems. Drawing smaller when we practice can cause us to cramp up and cause our drawings to come out more stiffly than they otherwise might.
When we get into your actual plant constructions, one major point I notice is that the issue I raised in regards to the flow of your leaves becomes quite a bit worse. Here, because you're focused on these larger, more complex constructions, you don't end up putting the same kind of consideration into each leaf or petal, and as a result they come out feeling stiff and flat, rather than giving the impression that they're flowing through space confidently. I explain this a little further here.
The point about drawing larger comes into play as well - you're cramming a lot of different drawings into each page. The sentiment behind that is great, but it is causing you to draw much smaller than you should.
Here and there where you've got ellipses, you do have a tendency in most cases not to draw through them. Make sure you're going around the elliptical shapes with a confident stroke that goes around two full times before lifting your pen.
Also, when it comes to line weight, you do appear to be quite liberal in its use. There are a lot of places where you're covering the entirety of drawings with additional weight. There are a few issues with this:
First off, it often looks like you're drawing with different pens - I can't be certain of this, but the difference between your darker and lighter lines is significant enough to suggest that this is the case. Make sure you're working only with a single thickness of pen - the recommended ones for all these lessons is the 0.5mm. This will ensure that your lines don't have a jarring sense of separation with some lines that look vastly thicker than others. The changes in line weight should be subtle, only enough for one's subconscious to pick up on, rather than being so blatant that it's being shouted at the viewer.
In lesson 2's form intersection video, I discuss that one should not follow a process of doing an underdrawing, followed by a clean-up pass. What this really means is that I don't want you to replace the entirety of a line with a heavier stroke after the fact. This ensures that you respect the underlying construction lines as being part of the drawing, and also avoids situations where you slow down and stiffen up in trying to match an existing line perfectly. Every mark we put down - including those we add for line weight - must be drawn with confidence, using the ghosting method. Line weight instead should only be applied in key limited areas, on portions of existing lines in order to emphasize and clarify certain overlaps of forms. Additionally, the mark should taper towards its beginning and end in order to blend back into the original stroke. I do see some places where you haven't entirely replaced an existing mark, but there is always a very jarring shift from light to heavy.
In general, drawing your marks with a confident, persistent pace (using the ghosting method) should result in line work that is much more fluid - one thing I'm noticing here is that your linework tends to stiffen up in a way that suggests that you're either drawing slowly, or pressing too hard. I say this because the marks tend to come out quite uniformly, without any tell-tale tapering towards either end of your strokes. When we draw with confidence, the pen already starts moving before we achieve our intended level of pressure, causing the line to start out skinnier, tapered, and expand into its full width. It's an effect that gives our lines a sense of liveliness and energy that is missing in your drawings. When we draw slower, this shift will likely happen over too limited a space to actually be noticeable, and when we press too hard, we ramp up that pressure far too quickly. Additionally, pressing hard is a common issue that also results in students damaging their pen tips and causing them to perform poorly well before they're actually running out of ink.
All in all you are moving in the right direction, but before I mark this lesson as complete I'd like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings.
Try and stick to one drawing per page, give yourself all the room you can, draw with confident strokes and focus on how these forms flow through 3D space. Don't go to any lengths to make your construction lines faint or unnoticeable (I can see that somewhat especially in the last page) - any mark you put down should be weighed in terms of whether or not it contributes to your overall understanding of your construction, or communicating some key element to the viewer. If the stroke achieves one of these things, then it should be drawn with confidence. If it does not, or if another stroke would do it better (or another stroke already on the page accomplishes it), then it should not be drawn. Then when you back over, you can build up that sense of hierarchy with limited, strategic use of additional line weight.
I do have a confidence and perfectionist issue, I'm slowly chiseling at the later and I hope the former gets better with practice. I have yet to find the sweet spot when holding my pen. Something still feels off, I hold the pen in the tripod position which is something i'm new to but that will hopefully come with time.
I'm definitely heavy handed and had issues with my pens ink flow, which caused me going over a few things, I'll be more mindful of that. I didn't know you can damage the felt tip until It was recently mentioned in a video I saw.
I will work on my flow lines, I agree, they are lifeless for the most part. Thanks for your time and patience, learning something new can be daunting.
I have already pledged $10 for the 1st of February. I would have done it sooner but I was broke until the 2nd of this month. I've been an inactive patron for most of last year and I aim to change that. I'm super serious, you know?
For this one I had a hard time coming up with construction solutions for the plants I chose. Once I got to the full plant construction drawings I started using a lot of ink and found that I was focusing too much on the details (to the point where I discarded some of my earlier attempts). I decided to focus more on the construction process, which you do stress, but I just wanted to let you know that the inked pieces came before the solely construction ones. Hope I'm making good progress. I'm here to learn and I look forward to your critique.
Your work here is quite well done. There certainly is room for improvement, but you've already shown considerable growth and a good deal of understanding in regards to the subjects covered in the lesson. I'm also very pleased with the decision you made in regards to switching from more detailed drawings (which I will still address) to more construction-focused ones.
To start with, your leaves convey a well developing sense of how these flat, simple shapes flow through fully three dimensional space, and they carry that sense of flow on from the arrows. I don't get any sense of movement that feels unnatural, it all seems to match how these leaves would flow in response to currents of air and other external forces.
You're also making good headway with the branches - I can see you still struggling at times to get the individual segments that make up each edge to flow directly from one to the other, but I can also see improvement on this front. It really is a matter of practice, matching how these strokes flow and ensuring that they overlap smoothly. Keep at it, and you'll soon find that the'll become quite seamless.
One other thing worth mentioning here is that I want you to continue trying your best to maintain a consistent width for these branches - in a few places I can see where they get a little tapered through their midsection, mostly where you're trying to navigate curves and bends. I can see that this is not intentional, so it's par for the course as you learn to tackle this kind of construction, but it is something to keep in mind - that kind of pinching or tapering will undermine the underlying solidity of the form, so keep working to avoid it.
Now when you get into your plant constructions, you generally do apply the constructional method with a great deal of forethought. That said, I can see some hesitation in your linework, and signs that you're definitely stiffening up in the face of this additional challenge. No matter how daunting the task before you, once you've decided on a mark that you're going to add, focus on applying the ghosting method so as to ensure that you can invest all your time in the preparation of it, before executing with that smooth, confident stroke. That way you can separate yourself from the overall challenge and focus on what you know you can do well.
On this page, two things come to mind. Firstly, make sure you're not leaving any forms open ended, like you did on the bottom. It'll cause them to flatten out. Secondly, always try to adhere to your underlying construction as closely as possible. So when you put down the ellipses to flesh out the size of the top parts, you want to make sure that the forms you construct on top of that use it as a solid base, rather than treating it like a loose "suggestion". It's very similar to the concept covered for leaves here, where you're having your lines come off that underlying form and returning to it wherever possible.
Jumping ahead, I really like how you approached the base of this page, though I do feel it important to point out that the things coming off the top definitely felt very stiff in a way that really undermined their general sense of solidity. It seems that you got very cramped, and tried to make up for the insolidity with contour lines, but your contour lines were not drawn with a sense of confidence and instead exacerbated the problem.
Lastly, on the topic of detail, those drawings you did initially with all the heavy ink and texture, what's worth mentioning here is that your texture didn't actually convey what was present in your reference image. The marks I'm seeing instead tell me that you're working mostly from memory. That doesn't mean you haven't been looking at reference, but it does mean that you're allowing enough time to pass between glances that what you actually observed has been lost. Unfortunately "enough time" can be a matter of seconds.
When you're trying to capture detail, or really when you're drawing from reference in general, get in the habit of looking at your reference and identifying some specific mark or feature that you want to transfer onto your drawing. Once you've found it, you can draw one or two marks in attempting to capture it - ones that reflect exactly what you saw - before returning to your reference to refresh your memory. Don't attempt to loosely imply detail unless you're fully aware of what that detail is actually made up of. You can read about more of this in the new lesson 2 texture analysis exercise.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're making great headway, though I do think you need to continue focusing on loosening up on your execution (allowing yourself to draw more confidently) once you've put in all the necessary preparation beforehand.
So there are a couple major issues that I'm seeing:
First off, you're not paying the same kind of attention to the simple forms that are involved in some of these constructions. For example, the box in the first drawing is completely misaligned from the plant, and you haven't gone to any lengths to draw through it. You can't be treating any part of your drawing as an afterthought - every form is important. Similarly, the cylindrical flower pot on the third page is really sloppy. You're not drawing through your ellipses, you're not drawing it around a minor axis, and so on. I also guarantee that the flower pot was not just a simple cylinder, that there was much more to it than that.
Secondly, I can see that you have a tendency to draw things with a faint line, and then follow them up with a thicker line. For example, as we can see on this page, you draw each leaf in its entirety with a very faint, timid mark, and then outline each leaf fully where it would logically be "visible". Don't do this. I don't want you to be worrying about which lines should be drawn lightly or hidden, and I don't want you applying line weight in such a way that the marks are so long that you're drawing slowly and carefully and making everything stiff. When you go to put a mark down, you must consider whether or not it contributes to your understanding of the forms you're constructing, or if it communicates some key element of what you're drawing to the viewer. If the answer to this is yes, then you consider whether the mark you want to put down will accomplish this job well, or if another mark may do so better (or if an existing mark already does). If you determine that this mark should be added to your drawing, then you draw it confidently. You do not worry about what level of priority it has, whether it should be faint or bold, or anything like that. EVERY mark you put down must be drawn with that same confidence in order to ensure that it flows smoothly. Smooth lines are the cornerstone of solid construction.
Looking over this work, it is clear to me that you can do much better, but you're investing your time in the wrong areas. I want you to try these four extra pages again. Before you do however, I'd like you to go back to lesson 2 and reread the lesson in its entirety. It has been rewritten and reorganized (as of December 25th), so what you see there will likely be quite different from what you remember from a month ago. The first page, about "thinking in 3D" is especially important.
When you do the 4 pages, focus on drawing every mark confidently, from the shoulder, and don't neglect any part of your constructions. Just because we are focusing on form and construction does not mean that we're blocking things in vaguely - everything we see is made up of form. Texture and detail is really just the last little bit - everything is still entirely discernible and recognizable without it.
Thanks for the assessment. I'm not drawing lightly on purpose, thats how the ink flows from the pen. I'm using the ones you recommended. If I hold the tip down, more ink flows but then im pressing to hard. I think im going to go back to my rotring pen, it doesn't seem to have that issue with me. I'm sure its user error.
I'll go back to lesson2 and find away to get in more practice, I deal with annoying health issues that zap my energy, which is frustrating because I know I can do much better too. I'm going to slow my roll and accept I will get there a bit slower. I appreciate the honest feedback.
I went through lesson 3 and did some homework along the way. I've posted 9 plants. I thought it would be good to include an extra one cause I wasn't sure if I didn't focus too much on detail. If you wish for references I've used I have them "ready-to-post" so if you wish to compare please let me know.
I used pocket brush pen you recommended to fill some shadows, still mastering using it so I apologize for excessive ink.
Though you mentioned that the album's order is not chronological, I definitely can see considerable improvement from the beginning to the end. By and large you're doing fairly well, though there are some issues that I want to address.
To start with, in your leaves I can see that you have a tendency to work subtractively when adding detail - that is, you cut back into your leaves. This is technically a valid approach, but one that is much more difficult to do successfully, and is something I avoid whenever possible (and in most cases it is entirely possible). Instead, strive to work additively - building off an existing form you've placed in space rather than trying to cut pieces of it away.
Your branches are steadily getting better as you continue to practice them, though keep working on getting those segments to come out smooth and consistent - there's some wavering there that undermines the solidity of the resulting form. I'm not sure if you're applying additional line weight or if the process of overlapping segments is just accomplishing the same effect, but if you are doing the former then make sure you draw those marks with the same kind of confidence as you would with any mark you put down. Don't draw them slowly in favour of maintaining control, because this will cause you will end up making a wobblier line that will undermine your form's solidity. In general, line weight can and should be applied more to key areas that require clarification of overlaps, so usually you don't need to add weight to longer sections where drawing confidently becomes a problem. Aaaand if you do, then you can always apply the same overlapping segment technique, as long as you take care to ensure that they flow seamlessly into one another.
A minor note about this drawing - don't be afraid to draw the internal parts of your flower pots (or whatever objects). In this case, you really would have benefitted from actually drawing the full ellipse that defines the soil inside the pot. In general, this flower pot construction was missing a number of additional ellipses that would have made the form much more solid. Also, draw all your lines with the ghosting method - including the line you used for your minor axis there, which was something of an after thought from the look of it.
For your cactus, don't neglect to define where the forms intersect with each other. In this case, I specifically mean where the cactus intersects with the soil inside of the pot. Leaving these edges open and uncapped causes the form as a whole to flatten out. You do seem to have a habit here of neglecting to draw your flower pots with the same kind of focus or interest as you would for the rest of your objects. Everything you draw should be constructed in full.
As we hit the mushroom you drew along with the newer demo, you definitely start to show a much better understanding of form and construction, and capture the flowing nature of your leaves and petals more fluidly. There is still room for improvement, but you're showing marked growth through this set because of these later pages.
The last thing I want to mention is in regards to how you've approached the detail on this flower's petals. When you add detail or texture, don't just loosely put marks down. If you want to put detail down, take the time to observe your reference carefully and actually identify what is going on with the surface of that object. Put down only a mark or two to transfer very specific elements and features that you see in your reference before looking back at the image and refreshing your memory. Do not attempt to hold a great deal of information in your memory, because the moment you look away your brain will go to work simplifying it and throwing away critical information. If we look at the details you've drawn here, there's actually nothing there that really communicates any qualities of the flower petal you were working from - by and large they're just arbitrary lines that don't contribute anything.
Anyway! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I do strongly recommend that you give all the new material on lesson 2 a read, as there are concepts there that weren't being communicated quite as well in the previous version of the lesson. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, but keep what I've mentioned here in mind as you do so.
Howdy! I finally finished up lesson 3. I believe this is in chronological order. The first plant (not the demos) was indeed done before I looked at the demos and realized "Wow! This is terrible!".. so I figured I'd throw that in with my other plants for the homework. The arrows I threw in after I finished my plants since the site had changed the requirements in that time. I'm ready to get roasted. Thanks!
Edit: I'm now a fan of mushrooms. Also while I have you, I'm still seriously struggling with any sort of rendering/detail work. I was afraid to do too much with the leafy flower kind of plants, but I went to town with the mushrooms. Any insight into that would be appreciated.
Very nice work! You're doing quite well throughout, and are applying the concepts covered in the lesson to great effect. There are a few little hiccups here and there that I'll address, but you're overall capturing the illusion of flow for your leaves quite well, and are leveraging contour lines to convey the volumes of forms nicely.
I'm assuming that since this was early on and you seem to have been doing it correctly after this point, this was something you noticed on your own but I'll address it anyway. The leaf on the left-middle of this page shows detail being added subtractively (you're cutting back into the leaf). While this is a valid approach, it's also generally more difficult to make it look good and should be avoided whenever possible. It's not that difficult things should always be avoided, it's more that there are better solutions, the main one being working additively, building out from those forms you've already put down. Like I said though, you are showing an understanding of this through much of the lesson.
Your branches are definitely coming along well, but keep working on getting those edge segments to flow smoothly into one another. Letting your lines run further (rather than stopping them very soon after the last ellipse), even halfway towards the next ellipse can certainly help, as it gives you more opportunity to align them correctly. The way they are now, we can see a pretty stiff transition from ellipse to ellipse and segment to segment.
In this daisy, I'm loving the fact that you've drawn the flow lines with little arrow heads. Don't forget to strive to have your petals actually touch the end of that line though. It's not always easy to achieve this, but upon looking at your results here it does look like you may have been intentionally trying to leave that gap between the end of the flow line and the end of the petal.
You are definitely cutting back/working subtractively here, so as mentioned above, try to focus more on building on top of established forms instead).
Great forms and intersections on this cactus. Two things though - firstly, while I'm not looking at the reference right now, the arrangement of each little bud/protrusion seems a little too even. It may actually be that way, but this is probably a good time to point out the importance of studying even how things are spread out across a surface in your reference. Secondly, you definitely missed a great opportunity to focus on the shadows these forms were casting onto the cactus itself.
I can definitely see why you've grown so fond of mushrooms - I think they're one of the best subject matter to get one's first introduction into really solid form-based constructions, and they're a blast to apply texture to. Ultimately however, when it comes to any kind of texture or detail, the key is taking the time to really look at your reference up close and study the arrangement of the forms that are present, the little details and to get in the habit of taking only a moment to transfer one or two specific marks that relate to particular features you're observing before looking back at your reference to refresh your memory. Memory is really faulty and will strive to oversimplify everything we see, making it very difficult to work for long periods of time without looking back at it. This is especially problematic with leaves because they have so much going on, but our brains insist to us, "no you just need to put down a couple marks".
Awesome! Thank you so much! I probably will look back at the new lesson 2 stuff since I definitely remember the texture exercise being pretty difficult for me to work out. I think going through the texture challenge later would really help with that too. Anyway, thanks again! I'm super excited for lesson 4 and the creepy crawlies ^^
It's have been 2 months since I started my final subject (that took almost my time T__T), now I'm feelin guilty for this late submit >"<
btw, I have problem with the sugar cane leave shape, cactus shape, and the palm shape... I can't control the direction and make them look dynamic. Here is my lession 3 \^o\^
Overall your work here is actually pretty good. There are a few little issues I noticed, but by and large you're employing the methodologies covered in the lesson to great effect, and are demonstrating a good grasp of how to establish the fluid motion of your leaves.
The first issue I noticed wasn't always there. It has to do with how you handle your more complex leaf detail. Towards the bottom left of this page, you're doing it well - you're adhering every little bit of extra detail to the underlying phase of construction. On the leaves on this page however, you're zigzagging back and forth more freely, sometimes sticking close to that underlying construction line, but not always, and it seems like you're drawing with a single stroke, back and forth. As described here, each little ripple should be drawn independently.
Also, on the bottom right of the leaves page, you do appear to be trying to follow the multi-step construction process for more complex leaves like this, but again you're drawing that final edge with a continuous line, and you're jumping gaps that are simply too big. This kind of thing must be done while adhering as closely as you can to the underlying phases of construction, as shown here as well as in this extra demo.
In your branches exercise, you're generally doing a good job of practicing getting your segments to flow smoothly into one another, but keep pushing yourself to draw these segments as confidently as you can. Some of them do tend to look a little stiff, especially the ones where you've made the segments longer than usual. As a result of the increased length, you slow down (which causes the stiffness).
When you're drawing your plant constructions, I'm noticing a tendency to put down lighter construction lines before committing with darker strokes to replace the ones put down previously. This was actually discussed in the form intersections video from lesson 2 - I don't want you to employ this process. Reason being, it has a tendency to cause us to draw more slowly and carefully as we follow up with that "clean up pass", which results in much stiffer linework. Instead, every line you put down must be drawn with the same confidence, without attempting to go out of your way to hide it. We then go over them afterwards to add line weight to certain key areas - generally not the entire length of existing lines, but parts of it instead, and we do so employing the ghosting method as before. Every mark you put down is a part of your drawing, line weight just becomes a matter of bringing some of them forward, or clarifying how certain forms overlap one another.
On this page, I can see where you've covered the branch/stalk below the petals with some really erratic contour lines. Remember that when you're working through these exercises, every mark you put down must be planned and considered. Don't draw mindlessly in this manner, as it results in lines that do not reflect clear intent, while also putting down marks that serve no real purpose. When we go to put a line on the page, we consider whether or not this mark will help us to further understand the construction and forms of the object, or whether it will communicate some key aspect of what we're drawing to the viewer. If it does either of these things, we then consider if its purpose can be accomplished by another mark, or if it is already being accomplished by a mark that is present in the drawing. We only draw marks whose purposes are clear to us, and whose purpose is not already being taken care of. This is the inherent difference between rough sketching and what we're doing here - not to say sketching roughly is bad, just that it is not what we are practicing in these lessons.
You asked about controlling the direction and dynamism of your sugar cane leaves, your cactus and your palms. To be honest, I'm uncertain of what you're referring to in regards to the sugar cane and palms, as I felt both of these had a great sense of flow, and that they moved through space in a believable manner.
For the cacti however, I think I might see what you mean. They do feel somewhat stiff, especially in this one. This isn't necessarily wrong, but this is actually something that comes up in the next lesson (specifically in these notes about how we handle the construction of legs with sausage forms). The trick is that when you draw forms that are essentially stretched ellipses - like you've done for your cacti - those shapes are naturally stiff and have no sense of flowing direction. This is because they are, through the first half of their length, constantly getting wider along both sides, and then through the second half, they are constantly getting narrower. This even roundedness makes it very difficult to portray them as bending, because either side is always getting farther away, or closer together.
When I want to portray a similar kind of form, but one with a greater sense of directional flow, I'd sooner use a sausage form - which is essentially two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Because the width along the length of this sausage is consistent, we can bend and twist it as we wish, conveying a gestural quality.
On the topic of that cactus, I do want to mention two other things:
Make sure that whenever you have forms that interpenetrate each others' volumes in this manner, that you actually define where they intersect by drawing a contour line right where they touch each other.
You definitely overused contour lines here without really thinking about each contour line's purpose. You could have achieved a similar result with just one or two contour lines, and didn't need to create a full wireframe here. The wireframe appearance however actually increased the general stiffness of the drawing as well. That's another great thing about sausages - we don't place contour lines along their lengths, we only reinforce where they intersect with one another, as this is usually enough to convey the illusion of solidity and 3D form. By leaving the lengths clear, we can focus on their gestural fluidity instead.
Anyway, I've had a lot to say here, but your work was still done quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Pretty nice work! You're generally doing a good job, and show a considerable amount of improvement over the set. There are a couple things I'm going to point out, but by and large this submission is quite well done.
Your arrows are looking quite nice, and I can see their sense of flow carrying over into your leaves. I'm also pleased to see how you've applied the leaf construction method quite well - that is to say, the layers of complexity are built one on top of the other, and at no point do you tackle more than one challenge at a time. First you establish the flow, then you build out the basic shape as it moves through space, and finally you add additional spatial information. Keep this in mind, because I'm going to point out later in your lesson where you don't quite adhere to this quite as closely.
Your branches are equally well done - you're developing the ability to construct longer, more complex lines with a series of segments that flow smoothly into one another. There still are visible points where those segments connect if you look for them, but at a glance they're hard to pick up. This will continue to improve with practice, but as it stands they're done very well. I'm also pleased with the spacing of your ellipses - there's not so many that things feel cramped and stiff, but not so few that your individual segments are too ambitious.
Your first few plant drawings are definitely somewhat weaker as you're getting used to the techniques as applied to more complex objects - we can see where the stems, for instance, don't show nearly the same level of control as you demonstrated in the previous exercise. Your leaf constructions are also somewhat stiffer, and you seem to be jumping in a little too complex on your first one.
As you continue to move through these drawings however, you quickly start to get more comfortable and demonstrate your underlying grasp of 3D space and form. The constructions with more tangible forms (like the cherries, the pepper, the mushrooms) show a good sense of volume (though the linework is just a little stiff so try and loosen up, always draw from the shoulder and make sure you're drawing these marks with a confident, persistent pace).
One thing I am noticing however is that you have a bit of a tendency to use line weight a little too liberally. It's getting to the point that there's a visible difference between the underlying construction and the lines of your "final" drawing. Get used to the idea that all of these lines are an equally valid part of the resulting drawing, and that when you add line weight, it is to build a smooth hierarchy, pushing some lines back and some forward, but only to clarify overlaps between forms and strengthen silhouettes. This line weight should always be drawn with the same confidence of the original strokes, so as to avoid stiffening those lines up by drawing too slowly and carefully.
Another point, on the hibiscus (plant 8), I can see you adding some waviness to some of the petals using a continuous line that zigzags back and forth. As explained here, this should be avoided in favour of separate segments that come back to the original, simpler shape's edge.
The last point I want to raise is something I see in a few places, but most prominently in number 9. Notice how your leaves have somewhat wavy edges to them, but don't follow any underlying, previous phase of construction? Here you've jumped ahead too quickly, and have attempted to solve two spatial problems (the overall movement of the leaf through space, and the more local movement of the edges themselves) at the same time. When we tackle multiple problems together, we tend to afford each one less of our focus, and the result tends to feel less believable. Always break things down into individual problems, and solve them separately. First establish how the leaf as a whole flows through space, then add some wavy deviation to those simpler edges.
Anyway! As I said, you're doing quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Nicely done! I had to go back and dig through the homework and feedback that called for this additional drawing, but I can definitely see vast improvement from then to now. Your leaves are considerably more fluid in how they move through 3D space, you've clearly put a great deal of patience and care into drawing each one individually rather than trying to rush through them, and the underlying trunk and branches feel solid and believable. This is looking vastly better than your previous attempt.
So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete! Feel free to move onto the next lesson, and keep up the great work.
Unfortunately I couldn't reply to the old post anymore because it was already archived. I only have time for drawing during the holidays unfortunately. Sorry for the inconvenience it caused.
Thanks for the feedback. Can't wait to get going with the insects.
I also wanted to say, the site overhaul is fantastic! It's what motivated me to finish Lesson 3, after a half-year long period of procrastinating on it.
I didn't realize that you were still pledged to the $5 tier (and therefore not eligible for the lesson 3 critique) until after I finished writing it out. Since it's written and all, I'm not going to go and delete it, so here it is - I hope you'll go and adjust your pledge to the correct amount (and I hope you're able to in the next few hours, since it's the last day of the month). That said, you've been a patron for quite some time so it's not a big deal either way.
I'm glad you liked the overhaul - it was a lot of work, but the response has been well worth it.
You've done a pretty great job with this lesson! I can clearly see through the first two exercises (the arrows and the leaves) that you're approaching the material with a strong sense of how these forms flow through 3D space, and a really solid grasp of how the constructional method involves working through problems one at a time, rather than trying to tackle many different challenges simultaneously.
One very tiny point I noticed in your leaves was that while you were doing a great job of keeping the edge detail very close to the simpler outline from the previous phase of construction, there are places where you opt for working subtractively (cutting the more complex detail back from the edge) rather than working additively (building onto the edge). I discuss this a little in these notes. Admittedly both are valid approaches, but I do generally recommend that one work subtractively only when doing so additively is no longer an option.
Your branches exercise is coming along fairly well. Your ellipses are a touch stiff at times, but you are doing a good job of working with separate segments and getting them to flow smoothly into one another.
I can see a few places where you've tried adding some variation to the width of your branches (like to add knots and such). When doing so, I strongly recommend building the branch with a consistent width, then adding additional forms afterwards as explained here.
Your plant construction drawings are generally done quite well. You're very mindful of how your leaves need to flow through space, and you pay a good deal of attention to the non-plant forms (flower pots and such), taking the time to construct them fully with inset ellipses, minor axes, etc. This is great to see.
I especially loved this drawing, as it captures everything about leaves in all the right ways. Each one flows independently, each one's been constructed separately from its neighbours (rather than trying to avoid the overlaps), the edge detail has been added right onto the previous phase of construction, helping to maintain its solidity and believability, and your use of line weight has helped to organize the drawing overall without being overbearing.
Admittedly, you did try your hand at some particularly complex, challenging subject matter (the winding branches of this one definitely got to be rather overwhelming, and I feel that in certain places it may have caused you to get tired, resulting in somewhat sloppier linework), but you've clearly demonstrated a solid grasp of the material throughout this set.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
I didn't realize that you were still pledged to the $5 tier (and therefore not eligible for the lesson 3 critique) until after I finished writing it out. Since it's written and all, I'm not going to go and delete it, so here it is - I hope you'll go and adjust your pledge to the correct amount (and I hope you're able to in the next few hours, since it's the last day of the month).
I've upgraded my pledge tier, hopefully in time. I'm terribly sorry about that, I'd somehow misunderstood your announcement about the new tiers and thought I had until the end of February before needing to upgrade. Hope I didn't cause you too much trouble.
As always, thank you for your critique! I'm pretty excited about Lesson 4. :)
Oh no, you weren't wrong about that part. It was that prior to this recent update, lessons 3 and 4 were reserved for the $7 tier. Thanks for fixing it so quickly though!
To start with, your arrows are looking good, so that lays down a solid foundation being able to establish a sense of flow amongst your leaves.
This does carry over into your leaves, although we see it more significantly in the ones that have just a little more wiggle to them. It's clear that you're slowly breaking out of your shell here, pushing yourself to be a little more bold in how you lay them out, so that's good to see.
One recommendation I have is that as explained in the second half of this section, try to work additively whenever possible. We can see here that when you want to add edge detail to your leaves, you have a tendency to cut back from your edges (working subtractively). This isn't wrong by any means, but when we start getting into more complex objects and forms with more thickness and volume to them, it can become much more difficult. There are places even in these flat leaf shapes where adding to the original leaf shape rather than cutting into it would have yielded a stronger, more believable result.
The trick is that once you're doing this at a bigger scale of complexity, you have to be able to convey an understanding of how the form you're cutting into, as well as the piece you're cutting away, all exist in 3D space. We do this by actually defining these pieces, using contour lines (similarly to how we use them in the form intersections). Of course, none of this is necessary here because everything is a flat shape moving through 3D space, but they are deeply related concepts. Getting in the habit of thinking additively will serve you well in the future.
Your branches are starting okay, but they do need work. What stands out to me most is that you're not necessarily always thinking through the degrees of your ellipses before you draw them. There are some cases that look very well done (top right of your first page of branches), but you've got many others on that page that look rushed and inconsistent. Don't forget to apply the ghosting method here, and try to keep the width of your branches fairly consistent throughout.
Admittedly when you sent me that email asking about what I mean by filled pages, I thought you were asking about the plant drawings themselves (in which case devoting one page to a plant is totally fine). When it comes to these exercises, similarly to those in the previous lessons (which all have example pages which show how I fill in all the space I can), it generally is best to maximize the use of the space. There's a lot more room to squeeze branches in here. Sorry for not clarifying that previously.
I do think there's definitely lots of room for improvement here, so we'll want to delve into this exercise a little further.
Looking at your dandelion, your overall construction is actually quite well done. You've drawn each petal, you've been quite thorough in ensuring that every component is drawn individually on the page, and you've stuck to each stage of construction rather than contradicting yourself with new "answers" to the problems your construction has already solved.
I am noticing that your flow lines definitely do feel a little more hesitant and uncertain than they have previously, so your petals do end up coming out a little more stiffly. Always remember that as soon as your pen touches the page, you have to draw confidently and boldly. The ghosting method prior to that will ensure that you're in the best position to avoid mistakes, but the execution phase should involve no consideration to that end.
In your prickly pear, there are two things that stand out to me most:
You're overdoing the contour lines a bit - a lot of these serve no real purpose. When adding contour lines, always think about what they're meant to achieve before actually putting them down. This goes for any mark you draw - you should think about what the purpose of that mark is going to be, whether it is the best mark for that job, and whether another job might do it better (or whether another mark is already accomplishing that task).
You need to be bolder when it comes to letting these forms overlap initially - let them intersect, and then draw the actual contour lines that define their intersections. That is, the line that runs along the surface of both forms, establishing where they merge together into a single object. Right now those intersections are missing, which is unfortunate because they tend to be a much more effective use of contour lines to convey the illusion of volume and solidity.
Jumping ahead, your work on this page is technically moving in the right direction, but your linework is really hesitant again. If you look along the edges, we can even see where you're starting to chicken scratch a little - there's visible disjointedness between the strokes, and they're drawn slowly enough to result in some stiffness and wobbling.
You've approached the cylinder well, but your lack of confidence in drawing your ellipses is what causes it to fall a little more flat. Additionally, watch that bottom ellipse - its degree should be larger (as explained in these notes).
This mushroom you drew from the demo actually came out pretty well. The one point that I feel is missing is that the silhouette feels a little loose and unrefined, and would benefit from a touch of extra line weight here and there to sure up the solidity of the overall form. Right now because the internal details carry much more weight, the form as a whole doesn't feel quite as cohesive. Adding a bit of weight to certain sections of the silhouette (and doing so with a confident, smooth stroke driven with the ghosting method - don't draw these slowly and carefully, otherwise you'll stiffen it up) would do it some good.
Here's what I want you to do:
1 page of organic intersections from lesson 2.
2 pages of branches. Make sure you're making full use of the space on the page.
4 plant drawings, a mixture of those with more leaves, and those with larger masses (like mushrooms).
Above all else, focus on applying the ghosting method across the board - that means thinking and planning before you draw, considering the purpose of the mark you want to put down, and then executing it with smooth confidence. No hesitation.
This is a submission of a reassignment you gave me back then.
I wanna say a few things and ask a few questions.
First of all I tried line weight and I tried to draw the line confidently with my shoulder and not with my wrist though sometimes I was off so should I draw the line weight slowly or confidently?
Secondly I drew the lines using the ghosting method which is why there are so many dots but is that okay?
Thirdly yes I still rush sometimes for many reasons and I hope I can start focusing better with how much I'm trying to empty my mind and focus on drawing so forgive me if you find that I rushed a bit.
Fourthly there's this plant with a weird yellow organic shape on a stem and it has little yellow leafs I think or whatever. I drew one of them with the leafs and that made it look like its not organic so how should I tackle this? Do you want to see the reference? I drew the rest as organic shapes though.
Fifthly I finished my drawings like you said I should even though I messed up sometimes I still finished it. I thought you might not like some of them so I drew an extra plant as sorry.
Don't draw your line weight slowly, otherwise it will cause your drawing to appear stiff. Always draw it confidently, applying the ghosting method. Yes, this may result in you missing the mark at times, so generally we try and limit our line weight to small, key areas to clarify how specific forms overlap, but regardless, it's better to slip up on one line than to make everything stiff and hesitant.
Definitely use the ghosting method whenever and wherever you need to (which is generally everywhere), but usually you'd put your points where they'd get engulfed by the line you draw, ultimately making them less noticeable in the end. It's not a big deal right now if they do end up being visible, but I'm not sure why they'd be floating all over (unless you decided not to commit to a specific line, leaving its point floating there - in which case that's fine for now, though you should work towards reducing that).
Not a question! :P
Yeah, I can't really give an answer to this without the reference image.
Good on you!
You actually did a pretty good job overall. The quality of the results varied from drawing to drawing, but I could see you applying the principles of construction throughout.
Your first drawing was a good start, though I think it suffered from being drawn a little small. I'm glad that you drew each sprout/leaf individually, not trying to hide them where they were overlapped by a neighbour. The base of your flower pot definitely should have had a wider degree though, for the reasons explained here.
The sprouting leaves are a little stiff, but not bad by any measure.
Your second drawing demonstrated a pretty decent use of the branch technique. It's definitely tricky to work with ellipses that are quite so small, but you did pretty well. I agree that the leaves are a little stiff, but aside from that, they're still well constructed. The only thing that stands out as a mistake here is that you didn't give your flower pot a rim, so it appears to be paper-thin (which wouldn't be the case). Forms like this should always be given some thickness.
The leaves were very well done in your third drawing - they flow very fluidly and naturally. The flower pot was off, but I can see that you tried to construct it around your minor axis, and that things just went awry. One thing you may want to consider when handling these flower pots is that there are often more ellipses involved than you'd think. If we look at a pot like this one, you can see that this flower pot has two sections. It's got the top cylinder which establishes its rim, and then the bottom, tapering cylinder which starts near the rim and comes down to the base. Thinking about these as separate forms, you'd have two ellipses for the bottom section (one for the base, and one where it connects with the rim), and then another two ellipses for the top section. On top of that, you'd have one last ellipse on the inside of the top, to give the rim a bit of thickness. I demonstrate this here, where you can see the five distinct ellipses.
Jumping ahead to the last drawing, I think you're demonstrating better flower pot construction, along with excellent management of your branch forms, nice flow of your leaves and great use of line weight/blacks to separate out your forms.
Overall I think you do have room for improvement, but it's all of the sort that will come with further practice over time. You're doing pretty well as it stands, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Also, it's worth mentioning - I understand that you struggle with a lack of confidence, but at the end of the day, you're not in any position to judge the quality of your own work. You will get better at that as you continue to work at this stuff, but right now you shouldn't be trusting yourself to assess whether something is "good enough to submit". Your only job is to complete the work to the best of your ability, to follow the instructions as closely as you can, and to submit what you've finished at the end of that. I will handle the rest.
[deleted]
2019-02-08 00:07
Hi, long time no see! That is to say that this exercise took me waaay too long to finish, and i got actually disappointed a bit as a result.
Nonetheless, i pushed through whenever i could and managed to finish in slightly less than two months, just in time for the tiers to raise! Just kidding, i think your work is great and i would support with more if i could :)
Anyway, since i stretched this lesson in a long timespan, you might find some inconsistence in my learning.
I would also like to point out that the plant drawings that you see in the album are not sorted by temporal order - the right one being 5,6,2,1,7,8,3,4 - in case you wanted to notice some progress (as per your instructions, numbers 1-4 are pure constructional and the rest include some level of detail). Why didn't i draw them in order, you ask? I honestly do not know.
Whew, looks like I have a lot of critiques to do today. Better get started!
You've got a good spread of work here, with some parts coming out quite well, and others showing a few areas that could use some work. There are also a few things that show a bit of a misunderstanding as to the concepts and approaches covered in the lesson, so I'll focus on those issues above all else.
There is a tendency here to jump into forms and shapes that are complicated without first putting down enough structure to support that level of complexity. To put it simply, you're doing too much, too quickly. Construction (as explained here) focuses on the idea that we build up our drawings gradually, starting from the most fundamental, simple shapes and forms, maintaining their solidity and the illusion that we're drawing something three dimensional (there's a good breakdown of this concept in the new lesson 2 material which you should read) rather than a series of lines on a flat page.
For example, some of your leaves across the top of this page, specifically the top left and the one to the right of it, show considerable deviation from the basic constructional process outlined here. We start out with these simple leaf shapes because they allow us to focus on how these elements flow through 3D space first, before worrying about any further detail like frayed or wavy edges. As shown here, we even approach leaves with many different 'arms' in this same fashion, constructing each arm independently before merging them together.
There are definitely drawings where you're approaching it a little more correctly, putting down a simpler form and then adding edge detail, but you do have a tendency to zigzag that detail and treat the previous phase of construction as more of a suggestion than a hard bound - something I address in these notes.
In your branches, you're moving in the right direction but are definitely still struggling to get your segments to flow smoothly into one another. Each segment has a pretty visible tail where it sticks out from the one that proceeds it - you want to make sure that this flows directly into the next one instead. One area where you may be making things more difficult for yourself is that you're drawing these branches to be quite small on the page. Try drawing them bigger, giving yourself more room to engage your shoulder and giving your brain more room to think through spatial problems.
As for your plants,
In this one you're approaching things in a meaningfully constructional manner, aside from the leaves which I touched upon above.
Definitely liking the solidity of your mushroom constructions. Watch how you're applying that line weight though - you tend to go over it with a slower, more careful stroke, rather than executing your marks with a confident, persistent pace as you ought to. This is causing your linework to stiffen up.
I'm loving the flow of these leaves and the tenacity with which you approached drawing each and every little component. Nice work.
In this one you definitely got caught up in detail over construction, and moved forward with forms that didn't feel particularly solid. The linework is quite chicken-scratchy and stiff, which suggests that you may have slipped off the ghosting train here.
Just a couple points about this one. If you've got a box, draw through it so you can fully grasp how it sits in 3D space. Also, the pot itself has a little bit of thickness to it. Leaving the flower pots or vases paper-thin is a common mistake I see from students, and simply requires a slightly inset edge to be added to give the impression of thickness.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do two pages of leaves and two pages of branches. Your overall plant constructions are quite well done, but I think hammering this out will be particularly useful. Make sure you go back and read the updated lesson content for lesson 2 as well, as the notes will be quite helpful as you move forwards.
[deleted]
2019-02-08 23:54
Thank you for your critique! You have actually pointed out many things i felt "wrong" in the first place.
I would like more insight on how to do a more confident weighting. When making a second pass, i noticed i struggle a lot to stay on track and the result is the overall stiffness you noticed in my mushrooms. How can i tackle this?
Anyway, i'll dive into the extra homework first thing in the morning. Thanks again!
It comes down to the principle that once your pen touches the page, there is nothing you can do to avoid a mistake. All of that is handled beforehand, through planning, preparing and ghosting through the mark you intend to make. Your execution of the stroke should be confident and persistent, without hesitation.
In most cases, line weight is used to clarify very specific overlaps, and is only needed to be applied in limited areas, making it fairly easy to execute. In the few areas where you do need to add weight to a longer line, you can apply something similar to what was explored in lesson 3's branches exercise - getting individual segments to flow smoothly into one another. It is tricky though, and when done wrong, will look chicken-scratchy.
Your leaves are definitely showing a better grasp of how to apply construction in phases, gradually building up that detail. Your branches however suggest that you may have understood what I meant - I probably should have been clearer.
What I said in my critique was,
ne area where you may be making things more difficult for yourself is that you're drawing these branches to be quite small on the page. Try drawing them bigger, giving yourself more room to engage your shoulder and giving your brain more room to think through spatial problems.
When I talked about drawing them bigger, I meant wider rather than longer. Making the ellipses themselves larger on the page, more proportionally similar to what I've drawn in my various demonstrations.
I think it would be in your best interest to do one more page of branches. Try and mimic the one I've drawn on the page above, with four or five ellipses drawn confidently to be smooth and even, and spaced comfortably apart so as to give each edge segment the room to flow smoothly from one to the next. When those ellipses are so close together that each segment ends up being quite short, it ends up being rather easy to stiffen up.
[deleted]
2019-02-09 20:29
I tried again many times, and i have to say it got a little frustrating. These branches keep looking stiff to me. While i get your point, i am not entirely sure i can apply it successfully, maybe i have to practice more. Please have a look and let me know if you see some improvement now.
Definitely an improvement, they're flowing more fluidly, but there is still room for improvement. Here's some redlining to highlight the issues. Your ellipses are still pretty small and cramped, and you should try and extend your segments halfway to the next ellipse, rather than just a little bit past the previous one.
Another little reminder - don't forget that you can, and should, rotate your page as you do this. Always find a comfortable angle of approach while applying the ghosting method to these strokes.
I am going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but be sure to continue practicing this as part of your warmups.
[deleted]
2019-02-10 19:48
Ok, thank you for your patience! I'll definitely practice more in my warmups. See you next lesson!
Hi, here is my homework with plant drawings. I am taking it slower now, drawing more between doing drawbox assignment and practicing lines, elypsis and boxes in between. I haven't improved much at drawing plants yet but at least my lines are getting a little more confident and straighter. It helped me a lot to switch to a larger paper size I try to draw more on A3 instead of A4 whenever I can.
I struggle with adding texture to plants, especially leaves. I know it was not the main purpose of this class but I don't really know what to draw it1 especially if the photo doesn't have much detail or there is not much contrast between light and dark areas. Also some leaves are quite smooth and I have no idea how to draw them using only pen. Which is why my homework includes quite a few attempts at drawing leaves.
Nice work! There's definitely a fine sense of fluidity to your linework and it imbues your drawings with a strong sense of flow. Throughout this set, I can also see your understanding of 3D form and construction as whole developing, though there are a few places where your approach can be adjusted in order to yield better results.
What stands out quite a bit to me is how you're approaching your leaves. You put down the flow line for your leaf, and you construct your simplified leaf shape around it - but when it comes time to put down any sort of further complexity or edge detail like on the right side of this page, you treat that underlying construction as more of a suggestion. You'll adhere to them loosely, but you'll zigzag around them as needed. This undermines the kind of solidity we're trying to carry through every pass of construction. Back in lesson 2 I talk about the concept of drawing being similar to lying, and how when you tell a lie you need to keep your story straight. You can't contradict yourself, otherwise you'll undermine the illusion you're creating.
In order to follow that principle, construction is all about building directly on top of the previous phase. We can add forms to what we've already constructed, or carve back into it, but we can't outright ignore it. I explain this further in the context of this exercise in these notes.
If you have more complex leaves that break away from the standard single-flow-line pattern, then you may want to combine that process as shown here.
Another thing I noticed was that you sometimes have a tendency to draw lines a bit too loosely. The biggest example of this is this page. Here, I'm not getting the impression that each line is planned and prepared for beforehand (using the ghosting method), or that each mark is drawn with confidence. Instead, it looks specifically as though you're going out of your way to leave as little of a footprint on the page early on, so as to leave it cleaner for when you add detail and texture.
If you want to go into detail and texture, you're absolutely welcome to - but the way in which you approach the earlier phases of drawing and construction should not change. You should be ghosting through each and every line, and drawing every stroke with the same kind of confidence.
Now when it comes to texture, you certainly did have some struggles, but you also had some decent successes. On this page, we can clearly see where you relied very much on hatching on that larger leaf. This didn't go well because it doesn't really suit the medium we're using to draw. It works great with graphite, or even with ballpoint pen, but when we're working with fineliners that put down a strong, bold mark the moment it touches the page, we need to find alternate strategies to communicate with our viewer.
Always remember that - you're not here to reproduce the texture you see in your photograph perfectly. You're meant to learn how to process the information that is there, and find some way to communicate it to the viewer. This means you don't necessarily have to put every little piece of information down - implying it more carefully through use of shadow as explained back in lesson 2 and controlling the density of your details puts you in control. You are not a slave to the photograph you're working from - it just gives you the tools that you may choose to use.
Now the drawing across the top there on the set of smaller leaves is VASTLY more successful. We can see where details transition from being sparse to dense, and where they get dense we don't get the kind of scratchy, unintentional white/black noise we see in the bigger leaf. Instead you're not afraid to merge those shadow shapes into large swathes of solid black.
The problem with creating "noisy" effects with hatching is that it becomes very distracting to the eye. You lose control of where the viewer is looking, and it generally results in an unpleasant drawing. Making the decision to go full black, or to control how dense your texture is at a specific point allows you to determine exactly how the viewer is going to interact with your drawing. It also leans into how these tools work - as I said before, we're working with a specific medium that behaves in a particular fashion, and we need to work within those limitations, not try and turn our pens into pencils.
For this reason, try to stay away from any kind of hatching lines. Hatching is generally used as a sort of generic texture or sort of marks that people will use when they want to convey light and shadow. I explain in this section from lesson 2 why we avoid shading in this manner altogether. When we do decide to add form shadows like that, it is always as a means to some different end. The shading itself is not the goal, it's just a tool.
When it comes to smooth surfaces, as you mentioned, how I handle them depends. If it's smooth and metallic, I'll probably add a few strong streaks of solid black along the surface of the object, to kind of create a sense of reflectivity. If it's smooth but not particularly metallic or reflective, then I'm more likely just to leave it blank in most areas, being very careful with any detail I choose to add.
Now, rounding back to your construction, I did notice that you were sometimes a little sloppy with your contour lines (like on the flower bulbs on the far left of this page). Always remember that whenever you put a mark down, you've got to think about what its purpose is meant to be, and how that mark can best serve that purpose.
Lastly, your branches are coming along, though keep working on getting those segments to flow smoothly into one another. Ghosting through your lines, drawing from the shoulder, and rotating your page as needed will continue to help eliminate those little visible tails. That said, it is a difficult skill to develop, so keep at it and don't feel that you need to be able to do it perfectly right off the bat.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
Uncomfortable
2018-08-26 20:46
Old thread got locked, those of you eligible for private critiques can post your homework here.
Uncomfortable
2018-08-26 21:20
Responding to /u/phoenixboatshoes's homework submssion:
Overall you've done a really good job. Most of your constructions are looking very solid, and you've managed to achieve a good sense of flow with your leaf constructions. For the most part, you're really bold and eager to delve into construction, and are doing exactly what you need to do - weighing each and every mark you put down, figuring out what it contributes to the overall construction. If it adds something meaningful to either communicating the elements of your subject matter, or conveying aspects of how its forms sit in space, then you draw it. If not, you don't. You're showing a great deal of efficiency.
The only place where you neglected to do this was in your india red moon cactus. As I show here, the big bulb reads as being quite flat, due to how you delved too quickly into detail, and didn't spend enough time properly reinforcing the forms that were present. I didn't actually realize that there were ridges on this object until I went and looked at an actual photograph.
So what I would have done here (which I did on the top left), is to draw a sphere and reinforce it in two ways. A single contour curve around its midsection, but most importantly, a contour ellipse near its top, kind of like the "pole" of a globe. This marks the top point from which all these ridges would radiate. I then draw contour curves coming down like how one would slice an orange, and then built out my ridges using those. Lastly, I added a few contour lines showing how those ridges come off the surface. It is a lot of additional line work, but as this is a rather complex form, they're an important part of first convincing yourself that what you've drawn is 3D, so you'll be well equipped to convey that to your viewer. Ultimately we're doing these exercises to help convince ourselves that what we're drawing is 3D.
The other point I wanted to mention is shown on the right side of my redlinig there - when you've placed a ball into a scene, and you want to place some additional silhouette edge detail along it, you need to remember that the ball form is solid. You can build on top of it, but your subsequent lines should not slip into the established silhouette, as this will severely undermine the solidity of the overall construction.
Anyway, I definitely nitpicked on that one drawing as it stood out from the rest of the set's general high level of quality. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.
phoenixboatshoes
2018-08-27 04:40
Oh wow, thanks very much for taking the time to break that cactus down, it was a puzzle I couldnt crack!
Uncomfortable
2018-08-26 21:23
Responding to /u/0700u's homework revisions:
Much better. Your drawings look considerably more conscientious and solid, and you're clearly slowing down and putting more thought into each mark you put down. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
LinezzzUp
2018-09-02 17:29
Hi there :)
Just finished L3 and will glad to hear your feedback :)
really appreciate your work and help! thanks a ton :)
https://imgur.com/a/m2AwHhY
have a good week!
Uncomfortable
2018-09-02 20:31
Overall you're doing decently, but there are a couple things that I want to mention.
Your leaves exercises and branches are coming along fairly well. In the leaves, there is a slight issue that I will explain a little later, because it occurs to a greater extent in some of your actual plant drawings, but overall they're still pretty solid.
On this page, one major issue comes to light - you're not drawing each petal/form/element to completion. You're only drawing them in so far as they are visible and not occluded by something else. When it comes to construction, it's very important that we draw everything in its entirety, so we can fully understand how they exist in 3D space, and how they relate to the forms around them. Especially in the context of leaves/petals, being able to establish the entire flow from start to end is important when it comes to making them flow in a natural, organic fashion.
This page shows that you do have a ways to go in terms of applying observation effectively to your approach. You need to get used to looking at your reference not only a lot, but frequently - that means studying your reference, drawing a couple lines that reflect specific things you saw, then looking back to refresh your memory. Our memory escapes us very quickly and we need to continually remind ourselves of what we're attempting to draw, so as to fight against our brain's constant campaign to oversimplify things. This particular page does show the major components that would have been present in your reference, but the relationships between those components aren't reflected - that's where observing more carefully and more frequently comes into play.
In this page, I'm seeing that issue I referred to in regards to your leaves exercise to a much greater extent. That is, they tend to be much stiffer than they ought to be. When we draw our leaves, we start out with those central flow lines to define just how they move through space. It's easy to see those lines as having a start and end point, and occupying a specific static space. As a result, when drawing them as part of a plant, we tend to focus too much on that idea, rather than thinking about what that flow line really represents. The flow line is meant to be fluid, capturing basically the movement of the wind and air around the leaf - it's not something that inherently starts and ends, it flows continuously, and the line itself just reflects that motion. So when drawing this initial line, try and think about all the forces that influence the leaf itself. Sometimes I'll draw it with a little arrowhead to remind myself that there's a specific directional motion, and that this line does not necessarily end where my own line has stopped. Then, the leaf we draw around it echoes this fluidity, resulting in a more organic, flowing construction.
Lastly, here it looks like you did your underdrawing in pencil, or something equally faint. Obviously that's contrary to the instructions, so I don't want to see that in future work. More than that though, this does show an approach that some people apply when working in regular pen. That is, drawing the underlying construction faintly, and then going back over it to "clean things up" with a darker, richer line. This is something I addressed in the video for the form intersections in lesson 2, and is also something I am firmly against. A 'clean-up' pass replaces linework with a more carefully drawn stroke, which generally results in things stiffening up, losing the confidence of the original mark. This is not what I mean when I refer to adding line weight to a drawing. Mentioned in that same video, line weight should only be applied to specific localities - parts of existing lines where you want to clarify an overlap of some sort. Never the entire line, and certainly ever around a whole ellipse. The weight should be added with the same kind of confidence with which we would have drawn the original strokes.
It's worth mentioning that some of the mistakes I've outlined above reflect a desire to create a nicer, cleaner drawing as a final result. Only drawing lines where they're not hidden by other forms, clean-up passes, etc all align with this sort of a goal. That is not the purpose of these exercises. Lessons 3-7 explore two things. First, how to apply the constructional method to a variety of different kinds of objects (each lesson tackling a different one), and secondly to improve and develop your understanding of how to draw solid forms and manipulate them in 3D space. Each drawing is an exercise that teaches you how forms relate to one another, and how to not only sell the illusion that they are all three dimensional, but rather to really convince YOURSELF that it is all 3D, and that you're not simply drawing flat lines on a flat page. After all, the best way to convince someone else of something is to believe in the lie yourself. So don't approach any of this as though you want to have something you can show off for being pretty and clean at the end - you can do that for other drawings, but that is not what we're after here. So, for example, your rose is definitely out.
Now you've shown enough here to move onto the next lesson, but it's very important that you keep in mind the points that I've outlined here, and that you work to apply them to the next lesson. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
LinezzzUp
2018-09-03 03:32
thank you very much,
will continue with the leaves a bit more as I think I need to train and get the feeling of what you said a bit more.
in some cases I think my reference pictures were not so good, resulting in me wanting to get how the picture looked, rather then how to sell the 3D feel and fluid motion of things.
about the under drawing, I used a lighter pen, as you wrote in the HW description, but apparently got it to a bad point, where I used it to make cleaner/ pretty drawing rather then understanding the form and 3D feel of the object.
when resubmitting, should I put a separate topic?
thank you
Uncomfortable
2018-09-03 03:34
You can post it as a new comment on this thread or as a reply, as long as it's a reply to one of my messages so I get notified. As for the lighter pen thing, can you point me to where I wrote that in the homework description?
LinezzzUp
2018-09-03 05:46
it seems as tough its a 2 pigmented pens
but I got your point and will not do that on the next works
https://imgur.com/a/CHH7mew
Uncomfortable
2018-09-03 05:49
I think you're misunderstanding what's written there. If you're referring to the images of the faber castell and staedtler pens, those are two different examples of fineliners from different brands. You should be doing all of the work for drawabox using black pens, all of the same weight/thickness.
OrdinaryMushroom
2018-09-06 08:32
Hi Uncomfortable. Here is my lesson 3 homework: https://imgur.com/a/tuXxKke . Thank you for your time :)
Uncomfortable
2018-09-06 20:15
Great stuff! You're definitely demonstrating a really strong grasp of form and 3D space, and are applying it wonderfully to the concept of construction. There are a few very specific things that stand out to me as being particularly characteristic of this understanding, and it brings me great pleasure to see them:
When you add detail to a basic leaf construction (for example the serrated edges on the venus fly trap), you're very clearly building off an already defined, simpler edge, ensuring that your detail is grounded on this simpler, established flow (so you don't have to figure out over again).
You are not afraid to draw through all of your forms, and draw them each to completion regardless of whether or not they are obscured or occluded by other objects. You draw everything, and then sort them out afterwards with line weight.
When it comes to really small elements (like the top of the waratah flower), you still do what you can to regard them as forms - at least in your mind (since the scale isn't always that conducive to it). You don't get overwhelmed and regress to thinking of your drawing as being a bunch of flat lines and shapes on a two dimensional page.
That's really where the focus of the constructional method as a whole, and drawabox's overall goal, comes in - to get people to truly believe that what they are drawing is not just a series of flat marks, but rather that we are constructing solid, tangible forms in a boundless three dimensional space to which our piece of paper is simply a window. And you're nailing that.
I do have a couple suggestions moving forward, but they're minor things:
When you have two branches connecting to one another, at the moment the actual connection point does need work. You're drawing the end of the "branch" mostly considering how it would flow with the branch, resulting it feeling disjointed from the "trunk". Instead, place an actual ellipse on the trunk's surface, and have your branch connect to it. Alternatively and perhaps more realistically, you can try creating a ball there that serves as the sort of knot that is often seen at these kinds of connections (though this isn't always present).
When you've got a form that you won't be drawing in its entirety for whatever reason (like the flower pot of the venus fly trap), it's better to actually cap it off (like you've physically cut the object resulting in a clear face and end to the form) than leaving the lines to stop suddenly. This capping-off will help reinforce the illusion of form and three dimensionality, whereas leaving it undefined risks flattening things out.
You're definitely making pretty considerable use of your contour lines at the moment - for the most part you're using them well, but there are some areas where you're perhaps taking their density and number a little too far. Always remember what the purpose of each contour line is, and what it contributes to the overall drawing. If you find that this job (establishing how the surface itself deforms through 3D space) is already handled by the contour lines present, then there's no need to add another one. It's pretty easy to get carried away with these, so sometimes it's necessary to rein one's self in.
Anyway, you're doing a great job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson!
OrdinaryMushroom
2018-09-07 01:09
Hi Uncomfortable,
Thank you very much for your encouragement and criticism :) . On the topic of connecting branches, I was wondering how the connecting ellipse should behave (when there is no ball). I was attempting to connect branches to the trunk using an ellipse that followed the principles of the rest of the branch but I know this was not effective. I suspect that what I should have done, and what you are suggesting that I do, is to draw an the ellipse that wraps around the form of the trunk.
Uncomfortable
2018-09-07 02:27
Yeah, that's correct - you want the connecting ellipse to conform to the surface of the trunk, so the base of the branch is properly grounded and connected to it.
LinezzzUp
2018-09-06 17:34
hi there :)
here are my revisited plants for L3
would be glad if you could check it :)
https://imgur.com/a/qk4EAu5
Uncomfortable
2018-09-06 20:17
Much better! Your linework is a lot more confident here, and your leaf constructions flow a lot better because of it. You definitely seem to be following the spirit of the leaf construction method much more closely.
I have one very minor thing to mention that isn't actually related to the plants, but rather to the dirt itself. When you're drawing those little pebbles and particles, rather than trying to enclose each one, it's a lot more effective to focus on capturing the shadows they cast instead. Because of how cast shadows work (and how they can be grouped together to form larger shadow shapes depending on the lighting conditions), it can be vastly more effective to convey this kind of minor detail in this way, as it keeps you from adding a lot of distracting detail and visual noise.
Similarly, rather than using hatching as you had there to transition from dark to light, you'd be using a texture/pattern made up of these "cast shadows" from the little particles instead. Hatching lines of course don't correspond to any feature or detail present in that surface, so it wouldn't be an appropriate transition. I expand on this in the texture challenge notes.
LinezzzUp
2018-09-07 05:15
thank you a lot :)
I tried not to focus on the ground and dirt, because I really wanted to understand the leaves and how they flow, I felt I could do a better job with it, because it made my drawing a bit noisy indeed
I'll watch it more closely and took your notes to better the drawing in future works
OrdinaryMushroom
2018-09-07 03:12
Great. Thank you :)
ageofaurum
2018-09-15 16:36
Hi Uncomfortable! Here's my lesson 3 I really have to work on drawing every day....I kind of get overwhelmed because I can't finish fast enough (I know I know, it's not a race), so I end up taking week long breaks because of frustration, shame on me.....anyways!!!!!! Hope I did a good work, I'm not as happy with it as the last lesson though.
As always, thanks for your time!
Uncomfortable
2018-09-16 21:43
Overall, your work is fantastic. You're demonstrating a well developed understanding of 3D space and construction. Your forms feel solid, tangible and entirely believable. I honestly don't have a lot to elaborate on, you're more than ready to move onto the next lesson. I have only one piece of advice to offer, and for that I've drawn a quick demo.
As shown here, when you're drawing your leaves (or really following any kind of construction where you've laid down an earlier), it's important that you don't treat the previous stage as being something loose and approximate. You need to treat it like a scaffolding - something you have to adhere to as the structure that supports any further forms or details.
So if you draw a basic leaf shape, use it as the foundation for the wavier edge details, having them rise from and fall back to that initial shape. If you've got a flower with petals that radiate outwards and you establish that range with an ellipse, use the ellipse as the absolute bounds, the furthest those petals will extend.
Oh, also, with leaves that have many major arms or sections (like the top left leaf on the first page), it's best to break that down into many sub-leaves and then merge them together afterwards.
Side from that, you're really doing great. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.
ageofaurum
2018-09-17 14:46
Oh! sorry about the range part, I guess I forgot, I'll keep it in mind from now on though, thanks for the demo and the feedback! I'll practice that a bit on the side to drill it in my head :D
thehamco
2018-09-18 11:10
Hi Uncomfortable,
Here is my submission for lesson 3: https://imgur.com/a/HQ8gTyo
Some notes:
I'm not sure if I did the stem exercise correctly... For the first half of the page, I followed your technique of connecting the cross-section ellipses piece-by-piece, but I ended up with a messy look. In the bottom half, I tried connecting them with one fluid continuous motion. I think it was less chicken-scratchy but a bit more wobbly.
I went a bit overboard with the rendering for the first group of mushrooms, so I included the "before" pic of only the underlying construction.
Thank you.
Uncomfortable
2018-09-19 16:19
Overall you're doing okay - there's definitely a lot of room for improvement, but at this point it's expected due to how you're approaching things in a rushed manner, so I'll try not to touch on that aspect of things. I do however recommend that overall, if you're dead set on this kind of approach, that you strongly prioritize construction over detail and texture, so you at least come away with a good grasp of the main focus of the drawabox lessons.
So for example, in the leaves exercise, don't worry about the veins and such, or the texture of the surfaces - put all your attention towards capturing the flow of these flat forms. Right now I think you're getting a little distracted from the idea that each leaf is meant to capture and convey how outside forces (mostly wind and air currents) influence this simple form. Because you're more preoccupied with the detail of each piece, your leaves tend to come out a little bit more stiff.
Here are some thoughts on your leaves.
For your branches, one of the main focuses of the exercise is to learn how to create a longer line out of segments without it looking chicken-scratchy. So the issues you were running into were normal, but drawing the entire line with a single stroke isn't really a valid solution because you're inevitably going to run into a line that you won't be able to cover in that manner. You need to be able to get your strokes to flow together smoothly, and practicing this approach is how you're going to get there. You essentially have to ensure that when your previous stroke ends, it is aiming towards the next target - so the following stroke (which will start a little earlier and overlap the end of the previous one) will actually run directly on top of it and continue on as an extension of it. So the fact that you went with trying to pull things off with a single stroke through the whole length is something that does impact your later drawings a fair bit.
Your initial construction of those mushrooms is decent, and I'm pleased to see that you're minding how the different forms connect to one another. You do however have a bunch of lines along the caps that seem to be caught between serving as contour lines and texture. At this phase, you shouldn't be worrying about texture and detail at all, and if they are contour lines then you are definitely doing them too sloppily and compensating by drawing more of them. Always go for fewer contour lines that have been drawn more carefully, rather than a bunch that are poorly planned.
When you get to texturing them, I strongly recommend that you stay away from any cross hatching altogether. Cross-hatching is basically a lazy stand-in for actually observing your reference carefully to identify the textures that are present, and if you catch yourself using it, there's an extremely high chance that you're selling yourself short.
Jumping ahead, this page raises an important issue. You've drawn the leaves, for the most part, so that when one leaf overlaps another, the second is drawn only partially. It's very important that you get used to drawing each and every form present to completion. Similar to the form intersections, you need to understand how each and every form exists in space before worrying about how it's interacting with the forms around it. We're not here to create a pretty, clean result - each and every drawing is an exercise to further develop your understanding of 3D space as well as your own belief that what you're drawing actually consists of solid forms.
In this cactus, it ended up coming out quite flat - as though the cactus itself were just simple cardboard cutouts. This is because you didn't go to any steps to actually give the cactus any illusion of volume or being three dimensional. That said, if it was actually intentional, then you did a pretty good job - because it really does look like a cardboard cactus in a three dimensional pot.
For the bumps along the outside of the cactus, two things:
Draw each bump individually, rather than with a single zigzagging line going back and forth. The continual, unbroken flow undermines the impression that these bumps are created by different elements, and as a whole helps further flatten out the form, kind of like when you want to cut a wavy edge out of construction paper, and you do so by continually going back and forth with your scissors. It feels more like construction paper pasted onto the page.
Your flower pot is decent, and I like that you drew the inset ellipse to give it some thickness. Don't forget to draw through all your ellipses, and most importantly, to draw the whole thing around a minor axis line. Generally you've done a better job with this on this page, though in that one your the end of the cylinders facing the viewer should have a narrower degree than the end facing away - you did this backwards.
I'd like you to do one more page of leaves, two more pages of branches (done correctly with segments) and two more pages of plant drawings with construction only and no detail or texture.
droopyjowls
2018-09-19 14:48
hi hi, here is lesson 3: https://imgur.com/a/FEluaKE
thanks again, looking forward to your feedback--
Uncomfortable
2018-09-19 16:46
Your leaves and branches exercises are frankly looking really good, so congrats on that. Just one point on those: when you're adding more complex edge detail, you're doing a good job of keeping the individual bumps and waves separate (rather than zigzagging back and forth the whole length), and I'm glad that you're adhering to the previous step of construction's edge. In some cases however you'll add the complexity as an addition to the original leaf shape, and sometimes you add it inside in a sort of subtractive fashion. While it's not always clear which one you should use, generally I'd lean towards being additive rather than subtractive. For example, you've got one towards the bottom right of this page which was drawn subtractively and should have really been done additively. In general with construction, if you can at all help it, avoid cutting back into your forms.
On this page towards the middle at the top, you've got a great example where what seems to be subtractive is appropriate. Towards the right side there, you've got the waves going back into the silhouette you'd established - this isn't actually subtractive though. Because we understand this exists in 3D space, those ripples are actually still additive, but they happen to overlap back over the original silhouette. There are still places were proper subtraction is necessary, but it's virtually never in the context of leaves, and in most other cases should still be avoided altogether.
Now, you clearly know what you're doing in regards to these simpler exercises, but when it comes to actually drawing things you can see, you lose your grip on the core principles of construction a fair bit. You get a LOT more haphazard with your linework, a lot sketchier and tend to think a lot more on the page than in your head. You're exhibiting here a lot of bad habits that I want you to break sooner rather than later.
Remember that you are not sketching and exploring as you draw - you have to think through each and every mark you're about to put down and weigh what it's meant to contribute to the drawing and how it's going to help you develop it further. Some lines contribute to the underlying construction, others to communicate a specific aspect of texture. If however a line does not contribute anything, or if its purpose is already being served by another line, then you should not be drawing it at all. Following through the ghosting method for each and every mark is a big part of this, because it gives you the time to think and consider these important questions.
Constructionally you're generally doing okay, but a lot of it is getting lost in just how messy these drawings get. There are a few additional things I want you to keep your eye on however:
When drawing flower pots, always remember that they are compound cylinders and must therefore be built around a central minor axis line.
Always adhere to your previous levels of construction as though they're a scaffolding that helps support detail. For example, the petals/leaves/whatever of this plant have complex edge detail that strays a great deal from your simplified levels. This suggests that you're either not adhering to your construction enough, or that you should be placing some kind of an intermediary level of construction in there.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I definitely want to get this sketchy behaviour under control. I'd like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings, focusing entirely on construction with no texture or detail. Approach them exactly as you did with the leaf and branch exercises. You are definitely capable of doing it, I believe you just got overwhelmed by the prospect of actually drawing concrete objects you could see.
droopyjowls
2018-09-20 04:18
this was incredibly valuable feedback and i really appreciate the time you took. i do have a lot of bad sketching habits.
i definitely need to go back to practicing ellipses!
https://imgur.com/a/Iz6SVoC
Uncomfortable
2018-09-20 16:59
These are definitely better, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. One thing I want you to keep an eye on is largely on the first page there, that your leaves still feel kind of stiff. Always remember how important the initial flow line is, and how it's meant to capture and convey the flow of air and wind that governs each leaf. I often draw it with a little arrow head at the end to remind myself that it's not really something with a concrete start and end point - that it's a force that is merely being represented by this line that doubles as the spine of the leaf.
Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Xybb
2018-09-19 17:28
Heya Uncomfortable,
here is my submission for the homework for lesson 3: https://imgur.com/a/K43IKDB
For the first page I forgot that it had to be without any details, so I did the 4 pages after that without any details (except for the cactus I guess, sometimes I just can't seem to stop). On the first page I went overboard on the ink, so I also tried to reduce that for the subsequent drawings.
Overall I noticed that I tend to mess up proportions somewhat, for example the stems usually were to big. All in all not my most favorite subject and I think it kind of shows in some places (e.g. page 4 right side). The mushrooms were a lot of fun however.
As always, thanks a lot for your work.
Uncomfortable
2018-09-20 16:46
Honestly you've done a pretty solid job. Your initial leaves are a little bit more focused on detail than construction, though it's really only an issue in certain more complex ones which I'll touch on more directly. Overall though, your actual plant constructions are looking really good. You've got a great balance of solid construction and a subtle, light-touch with detail that doesn't overwhelm or contradict the underlying structure.
There's only a couple things worth mentioning. Firstly, when you've got leaves that are made up of many smaller leaf-like forms (if they're actually leaves, or even just individual arms), they should be approached with the same individual leaf approach, then merged together where appropriate. So for example, the maple leaf you've got towards the upper right of your first page, it should have been constructed as several separate leaves, then fused together. The dead center of that same page also would have been a good candidate for this kind of process, since you ended up deviating a great deal from the original shape, enough that it wasn't quite enough structure to support what you ended up drawing.
Additionally, if you look at the big leaf with the serrated edges on the last page, just a minor thing - instead of cutting into your initial leaf construction, build the serrations/spikes out from it. Construct additively rather than subtractively wherever possible. There are cases where it's not always possible, but in most cases (and especially in leaves) it is.
I really liked your mushrooms, especially on the second last page, towards the left side. You used the stem/branch technique really well, and the texture was subtle but communicated exactly what you needed to get across.
Overall you're doing great. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.
cosmic_heart
2018-09-27 23:38
Hello Uncomfortable,
Here's my homework for lesson 3: https://imgur.com/a/ZTk75uJ
Thank you!
Uncomfortable
2018-09-28 18:09
Overall you're doing a pretty good job. You're demonstrating a well developing grasp of construction, and you're pretty fastidious in following through all of the steps, rather than rushing forward. There are a few little hiccups here and there - all of which are entirely normal of course.
The first thing that caught my eye was that when drawing your leaves, you're always rather careful about adhering to your previous step of construction. This is excellent, and I'm very pleased to see it. For example, when your leaves have serrated edges, or other kinds of complex edge detail, you always ensure that the edges return to the bounds of the previous stage of construction. The only issue I noticed was that you tend to construct in a subtractive manner - that is, you do your simple leaf, then when you want to add extra edge detail, you cut away from it. Instead, I find that wherever possible, try to work additively, attaching new components to an existing construction.
This quick demo was actually done for students who tend to ignore the bounds altogether, or treat them more as a suggestion or sketch - but if you look at the drawing on the right side, you'll see that I'm building out from that leaf's simpler edge. Even along its right side, it may look like i'm cutting back into it, but I'm actually just lifting the edge up (rather than actively carving back in). There will always be situations where you've no choice but to cut into a form, but I've found that in most cases it can be avoided and the results tend to come out better. It's merely a matter of getting used to starting smaller and building out, rather than starting bigger and digging back in.
I'm glad that in your branches, you really stuck to the concept of trying to construct the longer edges in components. It is definitely an area that you're going to want to continue practicing, as you are still ending up with the ends of previous sections flicking out slightly from under the next segment - but you're absolutely on the right track. Focus on drawing confidently (it's easy to stiffen up, and I see signs of this in your branches) and applying the ghosting method, and as you draw a segment and it passes the second ellipse, try and aim it towards the third as though you were going to draw all the way (but lifted your pen early). The goal is always to have lines that flow directly on top of one another, merging into one.
When it comes to your main plant drawings, you've got a lot of strengths, but the biggest thing that jumps out at me is that you tend to really dig into detail and texture, and as a result I feel that it distracts you somewhat during the earlier constructional phases. It's something I see pretty often - knowing that you're going to go into detail often causes one to change how they draw during the earlier phases, even though you're not yet tackling that problem. Looking ahead can often be distracting.
It's important that whenever you set out a task for yourself (like drawing a single leaf or branch or even a single line) that you focus on what you need to do in order to draw that line as it needs to be drawn. First we identify the parameters of this mark, based on the context in which it'll exist - but once those parameters have been defined, we focus entirely on ghosting through the motion to build up muscle memory, and then executing the mark with a confident, persistent stroke, fully committed rather than hesitating and worrying.
I definitely see stiffness across your work where I feel that knowing you're going to tackle detail, and perhaps getting a little caught up in the goal of creating something pretty at the end causes you to lose the confidence that is needed to draw lines that are as smooth as they ought to be.
So, I'd like you to do 3 more pages of plant drawings, but this time I want you to stick only to construction. Take that construction as far as you can, but don't delve into any extraneous detail, texture or rendering. Focus on keeping your strokes smooth and confident, and always push yourself to draw from your shoulder using the ghosting method.
cosmic_heart
2018-10-02 03:40
Thank you for the constructive feedback! Along with the extra plant drawings, I drew another page of stems as well. Here's the link: https://imgur.com/a/ednFUFn
Uncomfortable
2018-10-02 18:54
Later in your new set you definitely show improvement, especially on this page. There are a couple things that jump out at me though:
In my previous critique I mentioned how you were, when constructing leaves, generally adhering to the simpler construction more closely, which was good. My only adjustment there was that you had been cutting back into it in order to add more complex edge detail, rather than building out from it. In these new pages (like this one), you continue to cut back into it, but you also stop adhering to it at all and end up treating it more like a loose suggestion. Look at the demo I linked previously. The middle example is what you're doing now, the right side is what you should be doing.
With constructions like the prickly pear, don't be afraid to allow your forms to overlap and intersect with one another. In that drawing it definitely seemed that each form was just barely touching the others, which resulted in a weaker connection between them. As shown here, letting your forms overlap and intersect can be a very good thing - just make sure that you establish how they're actually intersecting by placing a contour line to help define it.
Aside from the first point I raised about your leaf construction, on this page there's a couple issues that stand out to me. Firstly, your linework feels rather stiff. This is likely in part because you're zigzagging back and forth, so you need the added control that comes from drawing slower (instead of zigzagging, construct each stroke separately, each one applying the ghosting method). The contour curves there are also very stiff. I think it may be likely that you are drawing things too small on the page, as it's a common cause for students' linework coming out stiffly in this manner. The other thing I noticed was that you added your complex edge detail with a considerably heavier stroke. I strongly recommend drawing everything without consideration for being overly dark or overly faint - just focus on drawing the marks confidently. Once everything is down, you can come back to add further line weight to key areas to clarify overlaps. In this case, your results end up feeling very disjointed, because the back edge of each leaf (which is much simpler and smoother) is very faint in comparison, and so it doesn't feel like they're all part of a single object.
Not to any specific point, but I think taking a look at these common pitfalls may help as well.
I'd like you to try another 3 pages. You're getting there, but the issues I've outlined here are very important, so try to focus on them in particular.
cosmic_heart
2018-10-02 19:09
Thank you for the feedback, again. Would it be okay if I attempted some of the same plants/references again.. Like the ones you just pointed out?
Uncomfortable
2018-10-02 19:13
Yup, that'd be fine.
TheWitchOfTheRock
2018-10-01 09:30
Hey there! Heres my lesson three homework.
https://imgur.com/a/lA3aqnG
Uncomfortable
2018-10-01 23:35
You're largely doing a pretty good job, but there are a couple things I want to point out to you. Before that however, I do want to mention that overall you're demonstrating a good understanding of 3D space and construction - you're being quite mindful about combining simple forms and I don't really see you skipping a lot of steps through the constructional process.
The issues I'm noticing are as follows:
What jumps out at me the most is just how thick and bold your lines tend to be. This can be caused by a number of things - the most obvious one is that your pen may simply be thicker than the recommended 0.5mm tip. Alternatively, you may be applying a great deal of pressure to your average strokes. Or, lastly, you may be drawing things quite small on the page (so the relative thickness of your lines ends up looking larger). If any of these things describe
you or someone you know, please callyour situation, then try to adjust those parts of your approach.Overall your linework does feel a little stiff in a lot of cases. Not always - your branches were quite fluid and your leaves weren't too bad on this front, but your actual plant constructions definitely had lines that wavered a lot more and showed a great deal more hesitation. It suggested to me that you were drawing slower, and (as mentioned in the previous point) perhaps applying too much pressure by default. This is a very common issue, and it's a problem for a couple reasons. There's the stiffness, but there's also the fact that it'll damage the tips of your pens and their flow of ink, which in turn will force you to press even harder. A new fineliner really only needs enough pressure to contact the page in order to make a rich mark, so try and hold yourself back a bit.
For your leaves, I did notice in a few places that when you add further edge detail to the simple leaf shape you've constructed, you do it with a bit of a zigzag, back-and-forth stroke that doesn't quite adhere to the simple edge. Instead, I want you to actually build right off that first edge, drawing individual strokes that come off that edge and return to it. I demonstrate this concept here.
A last point, not that important since it's not related to construction, but it's about how you tackled the texture at the center of your sunflower. You drew little circles, with each little bud or whatever they are enclosed individually. The lines you're drawing to enclose them don't actually exist in real life. Instead of attempting to draw each bud, we generally try to draw the impact they have on their surroundings. A form's most apparent impact in this situation is the shadow it casts by occluding a light source - ie: its cast shadow. The great thing about cast shadows is that they're incredibly dynamic. They're not limited to a single thin line, and they're not forced to enclose the entirety of a form. They can be thick, they can create "shadow shapes", and these shapes can merge with the shadows cast by other forms to create large swathes of solid black whose contents are merely implied by the way the edges of this massive composite shape behave. Furthermore, the opposite can happen - if a light source were to bare right down on a surface, it'd blast away all the shadows creating a swath of solid white. It's a bit of a complicated thing, but I want you to think on that a bit. I explain it further on the texture challenge page's notes.
Anyway, there's a lot to digest here, but overall you're doing a good job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but I definitely want you to work on applying less pressure, and generally reducing the stiffness of your linework.
TheWitchOfTheRock
2018-10-01 23:39
I think I know what the exact problem is with the line thickness...when my nice pen died I might have cheaped out and got the nicest pen I could get from the nearest drugstore >.> oops. Wont do that again
[deleted]
2018-10-04 18:01
Lesson 3 Homework completed: https://imgur.com/a/PaHACQO
i did spend much less time than 8 hours so i hope it doesn't look rushed.
also i didn't pay attention to detail or textures cuz i thought there is no need to do that until i finish Dynamic sketching then maybe i'll learn texturing.
Uncomfortable
2018-10-04 22:59
You're definitely achieving a nice sense of fluidity, but it's true - your work does appear rushed in a lot of ways, and as such there's far less solidity to support your fluid, gestural lines than there ought to be. As a whole, it seems like when you're drawing these objects, that you set your focus to a specific part, and then fail to take any other aspect of what you're drawing seriously.
For example, on this page
you've done a fantastic job with the leaves, especially those towards the center. Further out to the side (especially the cluster on the right side) you're putting less effort into planning and preparing with the ghosting method before executing your mark. The cylinder underneath is actually pretty well drawn (I'm very pleased to see that you're capturing the thickness of the pot's rim, for example), but the lines throughout are extremely faint and light, which contrasts heavily with the leaves. You also drew through the ellipse of the base there way too much - you should only draw through an ellipse two to three times, but I'm sure that one was an outlier.
On this one, you really got the flow of the leaves down quite well, and I can see you trying to apply the segment-by-segment method of constructing branches to the the stem (which I'm very pleased to see, though you need to continue working on getting the lines to overlap smoothly rather than having the end of each segment stick out). The bit at the top was notably more haphazard, however.
Now that's not really that bad in this case, as it's a complicated sort of construction to tackle with a lot of smaller details, but it is very clear that you've approached it in a way that involves less thinking and more drawing by instinct. That's the sort of thing we're trying to work against - we don't want to draw from our gut, just putting marks down where they 'feel' right. We want to think through each and every line we put down. Everything should be thought out.
Lastly, on this page the individual leaves on each larger cluster were definitely drawn quite sloppily. In this case, it's best to view each smaller element as a leaf of its own - and so you apply the same leaf construction method (starting with the flow line and then building around it).
So overall, there's definitely a reason it didn't take as long as you expected it to. You've got a lot of strengths with how you draw fluid, flowing lines, but you need to think more before each mark you put down, and you need to make sure every form you put down feels solid. Don't make your drawings disjointed, where one part is extremely faint, and another is much darker, and don't purposely try to make certain lines especially light. Draw each and every line with the same kind of confidence, and then come back later to organize things with a little additional line weight here and there to clarify specific overlaps.
Also, you mentioned that you didn't pay attention to detail or texture - that's perfectly fine, and I can see that reflected in many of your drawings.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do another four pages of plant drawings, taking into consideration what I've said here and generally putting more time and planning into each mark and each individual form you construct.
[deleted]
2018-10-05 12:41
[deleted]
pranavjitvirdi
2018-10-15 10:13
Ohh man, i have really mixed feelings about this one.
https://imgur.com/a/scXDV74
Uncomfortable
2018-10-16 14:33
Mixed is pretty accurate. There are a number of things you're doing quite well, but I one thing that really jumps out at me is the fact that you're somewhat preoccupied with getting more detailed than you need to, but without working your way up to it and devoting enough time to observation and mindfully drawing your marks with consideration for what each stroke is meant to represent or help capture.
For example, your leaves flow quite nicely through space in the first exercise, but for the most part you approached most of the texture/detail on autopilot ("there's lines here so I'm going to draw a bunch of lines") rather than taking the time to consider how each individual line should be drawn in order to have the greatest impact. Also in other areas, you leveraged hatching purely for the sake of rendering (adding light/shadow), which is something I'd like to discourage. When you shade for shading's sake, you end up missing out on a lot of the finer surface detail that could be communicated through more careful use of your linework. All in all, try and stay away from hatching (I don't mean any and all lines, just the ones that don't actually relate directly to a texture present on the surface). So the second from the top right on this page is fine, and fairly well done, but the bottom left on this page is not.
All in all, texture and detail is a distant second to construction, so it's usually best to push it out of your mind until your construction is really solid. And when it comes to construction, don't rely on any kind of shading. The techniques we've covered in lessons 1 and 2 (contour lines, drawing through forms, etc.) are going to be more than enough to capture the illusion of 3D form, and if you're not confident in your ability to do that just yet (which you should be, that's actually coming along fine), the answer is not to lean on shading as a crutch.
Your branches are coming along, but you certainly do need to be more mindful of how each segment ends, putting more effort into steering them towards the next ellipse so your next segment runs directly on top of the previous one.
Jumping into your actual plant construction, there's some good and some less so. One of the biggest issues I'm seeing across the board is that you're often times skipping steps. We're getting into constructional drawing here and the very core of it is that you never add detail or information that the existing structure and scaffolding cannot yet support. A good example of this important rule not being heeded are the berries here. You drew the outer enclosure, which is correct, but then you drew a bunch of cloud-like bubbly blobs rather than a series of balls all clumped together. That bubbly blob is WAY more complex than individual spheres, and there simply isn't enough structure there to support such a complex form.
Keep in mind that the goal here is not to produce a bunch of visually pleasing images. Each drawing is an exercise in construction and spatial reasoning. The end result doesn't matter, it's all about what you learn about navigating and working in 3D space, and manipulating simple forms to create more complex objects. You've got to make sure each and every form you construct feels solid and three dimensional, and work on developing your own understanding of how they itneract with one another.
Another issue is that on your cabbage page, you've got a lot of different leaves, but you did not draw each leaf in its entirety. Where it gets overlapped by another leaf, you stopped. We want to draw everything completely in order to fully understand how each leaf sits in and flows through space. It comes back again to this being an exercise. We're not going out of our way to create cluttered, messy drawings, as we still want to think before each mark we put down to consider what it contributes to the construction and drawing, but if a line has an important role to play to this end, then it should be drawn fully and confidently.
All that said, you are showing a developing grasp of construction - you're just not all the way there in terms of the habits and focus I want you to exhibit.
I'd like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings.
pranavjitvirdi
2018-10-16 15:06
yeah, i was deliberately not drawing through because i wanted at least somewhat of a readable drawing, along with construction lines i was worried it would end up being a huge unreadable mess of lines, but that's the challenge i guess. i think i am just going to re-do the ones that suck rather than searching for new plants.
pranavjitvirdi
2018-10-19 11:37
here's 4 more,
https://imgur.com/a/cP7RGyT
Uncomfortable
2018-10-19 17:53
This is vastly better. I'll go ahead and mark the lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.
pranavjitvirdi
2018-10-19 18:33
YAAAY!, see you next month, hopefully twice.
sonic260
2018-10-17 04:46
Here is my submission for lesson 3. Thank you in advance.
That took...much longer than I would have liked, and after seeing the submissions in this thread, I worried I strayed a bit or didn't do enough...
Uncomfortable
2018-10-17 19:37
When it comes to judging the quality of your work, there's little to be gained from comparing yourself to others. There's no standard you're meant to reach here, and there's no real way for you to fully grasp just what route one has taken to reach this point. Some have been at this a lot longer, some have spent their time more efficiently, some have simply been exposed to more along the way. None of that matters, nor has any bearing on you.
Furthermore, comparing yourself to some personal standard of achievement - for example, a rate of completion that you might personally like - is equally unhelpful. There's no way for you to know or grasp how long you're supposed to take to complete any of this, and thinking about that is only going to draw you away from your singular job: providing me with what I've asked for.
All I ask for is relatively simple: I want to see the best you can currently do, with your skills as they are now. I want you to follow my instructions to the letter and to invest as much time as is needed to come back with the best you can currently manage.
Anyway, overall you're not doing particularly poorly. There are some issues I want to address, but nothing stands out as being uniquely bad.
Your leaves flow quite nicely through space, and I think you've done a pretty good job with the basic construction of those forms. When you get into greater edge detail however, I am seeing a pretty common issue students have. Firstly, the way you're adding the extra edge detail doesn't build directly off your simpler, previous phase of construction - it merely treats it like a suggestion, especially in the way that your more complex edges tend to cut in and out of that line. Instead, if at all possible (and it almost always is), build directly off that edge. Your lines should come off the edge, and then return to it - and generally work additively, as though you're adding onto the initial simple form, rather than subtracting from it. Secondly, don't draw a continuous zigzagging stroke back and forth through the entire length of the edge. Build up individual strokes, one by one. I demonstrate this further in this demo.
Also worth mentioning, when your leaf contains sub-sections which themselves can be characterized as themselves being smaller leaves, apply the method to them as well. Don't think of these techniques as being very specific things we do in specific cases - they are general techniques that, whenever you see the opportunity to use them, you should.
Your branches exercises are coming along well, but keep working on getting your segments to aim towards the next ellipse when they stop, so the following segment runs directly on top. Right now you have a tendency for those segments to stop pointing slightly away, resulting in loose ends sticking out along the edge. Remember that the final goal is to have all your segments blend together fluidly into a single perceived stroke.
Your plant constructions, especially towards the beginning, are fairly well done, but one issue I see is in regards to how you handle line weight. You are treating it largely as though you're replacing your "final lines" with a clean-up pass of fresh, darker strokes. Instead, line weight should only be used to clarify the overlaps at specific local sections of existing lines. They should be drawn with the same confidence you'd apply when drawing the initial line (meaning, leverage the ghosting method so as to achieve a smooth, fluid stroke rather than drawing slowly and carefully, which results in a noticeably stiffer mark).
A few pages into your plant drawings, you start to think a lot more about detail and texture, and I think this is where you get hit the most. I'm seeing something that again is common to students at this stage - when you know you're going to get into detail, you allow it to distract you before you even get to that stage. The way you do your construction changes - you make efforts to use less linework, you skip some steps here and there, all because you're focused on the end result. A good example of this is this page, where you jump ahead to all kinds of crazy wavy edge detail on those leaves without the proper underlying, constructed structure to support that kind of complexity. Your actual texture and detail also fails to flow along with the leaf, to the point where you have what appears to be the stem of the leaf represented as texture, and completely misaligned.
Always remember - texture and detail doesn't really matter that much. Construction is everything, and while you are going through the process of constructing your object, you should not be thinking or leaving room for texture or detail. Detail should be left as an afterthought, to be added only to that which already feels solid and well constructed. Our drawings here are not meant to be focused on the end result - they are each and every one of them exercises, meant to train us in our spatial reasoning and construction.
This page was admittedly much better - the texture wasn't great (it was largely quite erratic rather than carefully planned and directly observed, so you'll want to work on pushing yourself to look at your reference more frequently to ensure that you're not working from memory, or trying to auto-pilot your way through a texture), but the underlying construction was much stronger and you took the time to draw each leaf in its entirety. It's not perfect, but it's much better because you were focusing more or less in the right places.
All in all, there's plenty of room for growth, but you're headed in the right direction. Just remember to always focus on construction above all things, and to ensure that when you want to add more complexity, make sure there is enough structure and scaffolding there to support it - otherwise you're probably skipping a step.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson, and be sure to keep what I've mentioned here in mind.
sonic260
2018-10-18 23:20
Sorry for the late response, but thank you for the feedback.
To clarify for the leaf construction, in general, if the leaf is... nonstandard to the construction, it would be better off to break it up into smaller constructions, correct? For example, the leaf in the far-left center, and the second from the top-left: https://media.mnn.com/assets/images/2017/09/Claudio%20Divizia%20Shutterstock.jpg.653x0_q80_crop-smart.jpg
Here's another attempt: https://preview.redd.it/y0xpzbdr11t11.jpg?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=184c15bdf655aa0fc1466b77420b2ffff6df6662 (Sorry if there's another example below in the thread. My job doesn't allow imgur...)
Uncomfortable
2018-10-19 00:24
You did the second from the top left correctly (although you added edge detail subtractively instead of additively), but not the far left center. Take a look at this: https://i.imgur.com/n2QRSG7.png
sonic260
2018-10-19 03:43
Last attempt. Glad we're not graded on accuracy.... These are the same plants from before, but flipped in the second half of the references.
I think I got it this time and I'm starting to re-assess how I approached construction initially, but that far center leaf is just so wide.
Uncomfortable
2018-10-19 03:59
Definitely better. Left one has plenty of room for improvement, but you're going in the right direction.
[deleted]
2018-10-19 18:10
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2018-10-20 18:52
Your results here are a bit mixed, but overall you do demonstrate a considerable improvement over the set. There are a number of things that I want to point out however.
To start with, when you go through your leaves exercise, you only really seem to be thinking about the steps outlined in the lesson in the simplest of terms. You've got to think of them as being a tool you're stowing away in your toolbox. IKEA furniture is a good example: the techniques I impart are not the full set of instructions, specific to any one piece of furniture. They're the little hex key you're given to tighten all your screws and bolts. When you're done, you put it in your toolkit for later, and pull it out whenever anything that could ostensibly fit on its end needs to be tightened.
Similarly, anything that shares the qualities with leaves - anything relatively flat that has a strong sense of directionality and flow - can be used to this end. Even elements that exist as part of a larger leaf - like maple leaves, which have many arms to them - can use this concept. You've done many of these on your one page of leaf exercises, and you explored with a few different approaches, but here's how you really should be tackling it: https://i.imgur.com/BbC3qYv.png
There are two other major issues:
You are very preoccupied with detail, but you're working largely from memory when it comes to adding such elements, resulting in the texture you add looking rather cartoony and overly simplified. Detail is time consuming, and cannot be rushed - you need to get into the habit of observing your reference not only carefully, but also frequently. Ensure that every mark you put down relates directly to some specific feature or element you're trying to capture, and don't let yourself draw for more than a few moments without looking back at that reference. Always remember that human memory, especially as a beginner, is not designed for this kind of task.
You're drawing all of your leaves quite small, which has a number of negative repercussions. Firstly, we think through spatial problems a lot more easily when we give our brains a good deal of room to work. Secondly, when your lines are much thicker relative to the overall size of the drawing, we lose any real sense of nuance or delicacy - all your details end up merging together unintentionally, making it look messy. It's common for students to end up drawing smaller out of a lack of confidence, because they feel like it'll help them hide their mistakes, but in truth it just causes them to make more mistakes.
Moving onto the branches exercise, you're moving in the right direction, though your lines are definitely a little stiff. Apply the ghosting method, and ensure that when you actually put a mark down, you do so with a confident, persistent stroke. When you're putting a mark down and your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake is gone - all you can do is push through without hesitation, and try and invest more time into the preparation and planning phases of the ghosting method.
Now moving forward into your constructions, you do continue to show that general stiffness but there is considerable growth and demonstrating of a stronger grasp of the constructional method. For example, this construction was actually done quite well. You do not skip steps, you draw through your forms, and you're quite conscientious about putting everything down. Your leaves could definitely stand to flow a little better (always remember that the leaf is driven by external forces - similar to the arrows in lesson 2 - don't think of them as being a single static object with a start and an end point - think of them as being something that reaches and extends itself, attempting to go further than its own physical bounds will allow). Again, it comes down heavily to the confidence of your execution.
This one was also quite well done, though don't have your leaves end as you've done where they enter the soil of the pot. Each leaf tapers down to a stem, even if it's not visible in the drawing - it's important to draw each form in its entirety (which you're mostly doing), so as to best grasp how it exists as a concrete entity in 3D space. Having them stop like this and leaving them as an open-ended thing undermines both the illusion of their solidity and your own understanding of them in space.
The rest are a bit of a mixed bag, with others that are quite successful, and others (like this one, this one and this one) falling very flat due to issues already mentioned.
You are absolutely on the right track though, and while there is plenty of room for growth, I still feel fairly confident in marking this lesson as complete. I've said a lot here however so make sure you take the time to read through it all and apply it to the material in the next lesson.
amberjune8
2018-10-23 17:00
Hi Uncomfortable! I tried to take note of with you said and be more careful with my linework, hope that my work shows improvement. And while drawing plants, sometimes I got confused with the direction of contour line, please let me know if I got wrong.
https://imgur.com/a/cjwngjJ
Uncomfortable
2018-10-24 17:51
Your submission is a bit of a mixed bag. Largely your drawings are quite nice, but in a number of ways they stray from the focus of this lesson.
The biggest issue is that you're extremely focused on the end result. Your attention is primarily on detail, texture, etc. and by and large you're approaching things in a somewhat sketchier manner than what is espoused here. Along with this, while you are being mindful of construction, you're treating previous phases of construction more like suggestions and explorations rather than solid, concrete scaffolding meant to support further forms and detail. Every phase of construction serves to answer a question - for example, how far out do a set of leaves go. If in the next phase you push your leaves further out, then you're wasting focus and energy on answering a question that has already been resolved. Not only does this steal attention away from those that haven't yet been answered, but it also leads to contradictory information in your drawing - where two simultaneous answers exist to the same question, undermining the cohesion of the overall result.
Lastly, you're largely overusing contour lines. I see this a lot in students who aren't really thinking about what purpose that technique is meant to serve. A contour line is meant to help describe the deformation of the surface of an object - two is certainly more effective than one, but you quickly end up with diminishing returns. One or two well placed, well planned and well executed contour lines are vastly more valuable than a dozen that have been done quickly. Usually when I see this issue, the given student has a bunch of sloppy ones all jammed in there - yours are actually done fairly well, you're just adding so many for no real reason.
In your page of leaves, you've got a number of these that don't actually follow the steps for the exercise. You're visibly skipping steps on those towards the bottom left of the page, and jumping into more complex edge detail without the appropriate scaffolding to support it. In others you are applying the steps, though you're actively drawing construction lines to be might lighter and fainter, in order to hide them. Don't - I want you to draw each and every mark with the ghosting method, focusing entirely on putting them down confidently rather than wasting effort on hiding certain marks, or even thinking about which ones should be hidden. Before you put a mark down, think about what it's going to contribute to the drawing. If it serves a constructional purpose, or adds some other value to the drawing, then draw it with that same confidence. If however it fails to serve any concrete purpose or its contribution is already being covered by another stroke, then leave it out. Later on you can come back to add line weight to key local areas in order to help organize and create a hierarchy of your linework, but that should not be considered at this point.
Here are a couple leaf-related demos that you should take a look at:
https://i.imgur.com/8dRSkVY.png
https://i.imgur.com/8gGun9h.png
The last thing I wanted to mention was in regards to your branch exercises. You're doing a good job, though you do still need to continue to work on ensuring that your segments aim towards the next ellipse as you lift your pen up, so the next segment goes directly on top of it. The end result (ideally, though this is difficult) is that all your segments will blend together into a single visible stroke. Right now you've got a lot of fly-aways that fall out of line.
I'd like you to take another shot at this lesson. Take your time, and focus on following the instructions directly. A lot of students come in with familiarity with sketching and other approaches to drawing. Remember that we're following a very specific approach here, with a specific goal. We're not really concerned with texture or the end result - each drawing is an exercise that teaches you about how to manipulate form within 3D space, and the real value there is not a pretty picture we can pin to our fridge door, but rather what the process of each drawing teaches us about construction.
I'm not sure if you're currently using a fineliner or a ballpoint pen, since you're currently showing a lot of purposely faint lines that are a lot more difficult to achieve with the former. Lessons 3 onwards must be completed with a fineliner, so be sure to pick some up if you haven't been using them thus far. For the redo, I don't want you to worry about texture or detail - focus entirely on the construction of the plants, and take that as far as you can before moving onto the next drawing. No hatching, no texture, etc.
Lastly, you generally seem to be completing this work rather quickly (for better or for worse), but as a result you've had a lot of submissions this month. As such, I ask that you hold onto your work until November.
amberjune8
2018-11-05 15:26
Please take a look of my second attempt. https://imgur.com/a/q0Y3f67
P.S I have been using a Staedtler 0.3 mm fineliner since Lesson 1.
Uncomfortable
2018-11-06 21:57
Ah, that explains it. In the homework section, I recommend a 0.5mm, as the 0.3's tend to be a bit too narrow. Not horrible or anything, but they definitely make it easier to scratch away on the page rather than making bolder, more confident marks.
So the first thing I do want to point out is that in a number of pages, you fell back into your habit of using hatching in your drawings - something I mentioned at the end of my critique that you should not be doing for any of these drawings. It's really important that you take the time to read and note all of my instructions - both in the lesson and in my critiques. Hatching in general isn't something you should be doing in any of these lessons. Hatching is usually used as a form of shading, which you'll notice we don't cover at all in these lessons. The reason for that is that unlike most drawing courses, I find that most students will rely on shading in order to convey the illusion of form, and as a result, it ends up being a crutch that never quite does it. Adding more shading to a drawing isn't going to fix it if it feels flat - instead, we focus purely on constructional methods, like drawing through forms, well thought out contour lines, etc. We leave hatching and shading out altogether to keep students from attempting to rely on it.
Another issue is that while you're perhaps a bit more intentional in working through more of the steps of construction (though not always - I can see places where your leaves don't have any clear sort of deliberate flow line as a starting point), you're generally very vague and loose in how you employ those steps.
Construction is a process that focuses on the idea of answering questions, or solving problems. A drawing is essentially a series of answers. How far out do these leaves reach, in what direction does it flow, how many leaves are there, how big is this stem, and so on. We start with the most basic questions, and work our way towards the more complex in successive phases.
Once a question is answered however, we have to hold true to that answer - we can't treat it like a loose suggestion and approximate around it. That answer has been given, so even if it's wrong, we cannot replace it with a new one - at least, not in this drawing. We keep moving forward, accumulating answers.
What happens when you draw more loosely is that you end up with several different answers to the same question. Often they're subtle things, but they lead to subtle contradictions in the drawing which the subconscious picks up on, damaging its suspension of disbelief. That is ultimately all we're trying to achieve - we're trying to lie to the viewer, tell them that what they're looking at is not a drawing of a plant, but rather an actual plant in a three dimensional world.
You'll notice that in demonstrations like these, I'm very deliberate with every mark I put down. Each flow line is a representation of the forces driving that leaf. Each leaf shape is built directly around it, and I'm striving to limit the number of gaps. I'm not expecting perfection or anything, but it's really about what one is trying to achieve, and that comes through in one's drawing.
With that in mind, I'd like you to do just three more pages of plant drawings. Before you do however, reread the lesson, rewatch the intro and demo videos, and reread my critiques. Don't get ahead of yourself - take your time applying the ghosting method for each and every mark you put down, planning out your strokes, and so on. Remember that we're not sketching here. We're constructing.
ElectricSquiggaloo
2018-10-26 12:57
Stems, Leaves and Garbage
Lesson 3
I did mean to go and do some sketching from life but I couldn't get close enough to any interesting plants.
I feel like I'm still struggling to balance construction which kinda feels rigid, and the fluidity of organic forms, particularly leaves and petals. I did a lot of grinding on leaves. I very much struggled with the leaves that have multiple arms (like maple leaves) and I tried the method you did a demo of but I still couldn't get it to work. Leaves that fold around like this were also a problem.
The only things I'm reasonably happy with are my textures (where I've applied them) and line weight.
Uncomfortable
2018-10-27 20:03
All in all you're doing a really great job. You're demonstrating a well developing understanding of construction and are working towards fully grasping how each of the forms you draw exist in 3D space. All in all, your understanding of 3D space has come along really well and in a relatively short period of time.
There is of course room for improvement and there always will be, and I am seeing a few bad habits here and there (which I've written out on this page of redlining instead of typing it all out, which my sore hand now regrets). That said, keep in mind that overall you're absolutely trouncing down the right path with considerable haste and gusto. Just keep those things in mind as you continue to move forwards - especially when it comes to your tendency to be sketchy before committing to your lines, as that goes against the core principles of drawabox. Sketchy drawing and that general approach is totally fine outside of drawabox - but we're stressing this particular methodology of one mark per line, ghosting through everything and making sure every mark we put down is confidently drawn, because it infuses students with good habits that will then allow them to be more economical and deliberate even when being a little looser in the future.
You'll notice that even when I do my demos, I pick a specific brush that allows for no opacity variation, only size. It's pretty unforgiving (even moreso than a regular fineliner), but I use it because it embodies the general approach I want my students to follow.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
Edit: Oh shit, I forgot that I meant to do a quick demo of a maple leaf for you. That will be coming in a moment, I'll edit it in soon.
Edit 2: Here's your maple leaf. I made it more generic so it'd apply to other students struggling with leaves as well.
ElectricSquiggaloo
2018-10-27 21:11
Thank you for the demo. I'll have to try it later. I think the enclosing shape is probably the step I needed.
A couple of things on the redline I realised I probably should've mentioned.
Most of the extra little bits where I'm figuring out leaf shapes, etc are my attempts at figuring things out in the more observational way I'm used to and usually these studies came after trying to apply the constructional way in my main drawing. As a result, they're sloppy and very much "thinking on the paper" but they did help in a few cases and I was able to pick out forms to start with by laying out shapes first. I don't really care about ruining the page I'm working on so it made sense to put them on the same page as my plants.
I also think you've picked up on an unfortunate tendency of my pen. When I use a lighter touch, it tends not to put down as much ink and when I'm laying in initial forms, I'm not pressing as hard. As a result, I get these really light thin lines that don't really show up well on a scanner, so I tend to go back over them so they'll show up. It's not that I'm not happy with the initial line, it's just that it hasn't gone down on my paper dark enough to begin with. That probably means I need to replace the nib in my pen again, which is fair enough since I did half my box challenge, all of my lesson 2 + garbage and this with it.
The bit you noted of the texture where I noted I did shittily, that was an early experiment, was my use of texture okay where I applied it later?
Uncomfortable
2018-10-27 21:14
Yup, you actually had some pretty good textures on your actual plant drawings. As for the nib, yes - you'll want to ensure that your pen makes confident, rich marks regardless of how much pressure you're applying. Otherwise it's too easy to fall into the bad habit of taking advantage of the lighter, fainter marks, and generally getting sketchier.
PBStairmaster
2018-10-26 15:18
Hi Uncomfortable, here's my Lesson 3 submission: https://imgur.com/a/WFR8tJs (Apologies for the image quality. I could go and take some better photos if you need me to.)
I didn't finish adding detail to some of my drawings because I wanted to focus more on the constructions rather than on doing lots of laborious work finishing loads of leaves. Not that I mind doing that, I just didn't feel it was the point here.
I feel like I did improve over the set at least a little at being able to see single forms in 3D and knowing how to place them. I think I sucked at organising lots of forms together though, e.g. the leaves of the potato plant in places look like they are not really related in 3 dimensions because of my weak initial construction and then losing track of it as I struggled to make sense of tons of overlapping forms.
Uncomfortable
2018-10-27 21:12
All in all you're doing a pretty good job, though at times you are notably... a little rushed. Not terribly, but there's definitely signs that you may be pushing through a little more quickly than you ought to, and as a result there are places where you could certainly be doing better. For example, in your olive branch, the leaves aren't bad, but you've got a lot of gaps where lines should be meeting that undermine the solidity of what you've drawn.
In your cactus, you've gone to great lengths to reinforce all of your lines with darker marks, effectively replacing the underlying linework with a "clean-up" pass. This is not how lineweight works - you are never to outright replace lines, or apply a consistent weight to the entirety of a single stroke. It is only meant to clarify certain overlaps with the addition of weight to specific localities. In that sense, the initial lines put down as part of your construction are always to be treated as though they're a part of the final drawing. You also need to ensure that your weight is drawn with the same kind of confident execution (and use of the ghosting method) that all your linework uses, so as to avoid the kind of stiffness that arises when we try to match an existing line too closely.
Also, for the same cactus, you should have constructed the cylindrical flower pot around a central minor axis, as it is a cylinder after all.
Jumping back to the right side of this page, you've definitely rushed through the smaller fern-leaf things along each smaller arm, and have fallen into the trap of drawing them in a more auto-pilot sort of fashion, resulting in a very repetitive, automatic pattern that doesn't do much good for the end result. Also, you should ensure that the smaller arms extend all the way to the edge of the enclosing shape. That's what that earlier step of construction defines - how far out these arms reach.
All in all I think you're moving in the right direction, but I am going to ask you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings, this time taking your time with each drawing. My ability to offer you directed, relevant and helpful advice is definitely stunted when students don't invest all the time they can and submit work that is not representative of their current skill level.
Here are a few other demos that should help:
I noticed you were drawing a morel mushroom, here's a demo for that.
https://i.imgur.com/xAvcrkT.png
https://i.imgur.com/i1R2SGs.jpg
PBStairmaster
2018-10-28 11:07
Thanks very much for the feedback. I'll do the extra pages and get back to you after the 1st of the month.
PBStairmaster
2018-11-16 21:45
Just realised I replied to the wrong post above. Here's my 4 more pages: https://imgur.com/a/stI28iG
Thanks!
Uncomfortable
2018-11-17 00:14
These are excellent! Very solid construction, and you've clearly taken your time with every aspect of it. Keep up the fantastic work and consider this lesson complete. You're welcome to move onto the next one.
PBStairmaster
2018-11-14 21:35
Here's my 4 more pages: https://imgur.com/a/stI28iG
I used a scanner this time so image quality is much better.
Thanks in advance!
drawABoxStudent
2018-11-10 12:03
Hey Uncomfortable,
Here's my lesson three homework, tried to really take my time on this one. Was actually planning on doing one or two more this weekend but after a pretty unproductive morning, I think the 'well' is empty for now if you know what I mean.
Spent quite a bit of time split up with the cylinder challenge on this one. Pretty happy with the cherry blossoms but had a really rough go the last two weeks trying unsuccessfully to alternately draw orchids and calla lilys. Don't suppose you had any demos for those lying around?
For the bonsai tree I included a picture of the initial lay-in in case that's helpful as much of the original construction was ultimately covered by texture.
Thanks again!
https://imgur.com/a/C2JqtQX
Uncomfortable
2018-11-11 21:29
Youve done a pretty great job with this. There are a few things I want to mention, but by and large youre demonstrating a solid grasp of 3D space and construction as a whole, and are manipulating your forms with a confidence and flexibility that demonstrates an well developing understanding of how they can be used to achieve virtually any result.
Here are the few points I wanted to raise:
With your leaves, youre generally doing a good job, though there are times where your edge detail breaks away a little too far from the initial, simpler leaf shape, and that simpler shape no longer serves as an effective scaffolding the support this new, more complex form. In such cases, it may be necessary to work in more phases, with some sort of intermediary shape/form in between, rather than jumping directly from A to C, so to speak.
Also, you mentioned in regards to one of your leaves, subtractive bad? - generally yes. If at all possible, and it generally is possible, always work additively. That is, think of each and every form you put in space to be a solid form that actually exists there. Dont think of it as a hypothetical element that has to be committed - once drawn, its present. You can cut away from it, but youre going to end up with a greater sense of structural stability and tangibility if you keep building up from that more basic form.
Also worth mentioning, especially avoid having your edge detail zigzag over your simpler edge from the previous constructional phase, as demonstrated here. You didnt do this often but I did see a couple places (like that maple leaf looking thing). It also tends to go hand in hand with zigzagging a continuous stroke. Instead, use individual strokes and lift your pen whenever the driving direction of the stroke changes. If you attempt to draw everything without lifting your pen, it ends up getting a little muddy and indistinct.
I did notice a great deal of generic use of hatching lines here and there. Its not inherently bad (and can be useful to push certain elements back and out of focus) but I do think youre perhaps using it a little too easily at times. Actively avoiding the use of hatching lines often forces one to think more about alternative approaches that are better suited to the task at hand, and can further develop ones use of texture, line weight, and so on. So its best to leave it aside for now.
Also worth noting - remember that line weight isnt something to be applied to the entirety of a silhouette or even a whole line all at once. Its really just about clarifying overlaps, which often means applying it to local sections of a given line, rather than the whole thing. I did see a number of places where you perhaps went overboard with line weight, and it somewhat diminished the effectiveness of having that line weight actually make it clearer as to which form was in front and which was behind. Just as with any tool, overuse can result in its effectiveness decreasing.
Im pretty glad you included the lay-in for that bonsai tree, largely because while the result actually came out quite well, there are underlying issues that are much harder to identify with the final product that are a bit glaring when looking at the naked lay-in. The lay-in is actually quite flat. Theres a lot of complexity there already, in your layering of limbs and such, and a lot of contour lines that feel a little shallow (they dont quite hook around enough as they reach the edge to give the impression of a rounded surface continuing along the other side), that the forms themselves dont feel entirely solid. I think you bit off a pretty complex challenge here, and perhaps let the intricacy of it get the better of you rather than properly breaking it down into its simplest components, but all things considered you still did manage to pull it off with a fair degree of success. Once you notice those problems in the lay-in, they do stand out more in the final result, but by and large I would say you did as good a job of saving it as you could have. On the topic of the final result however, I do want to point out that theres a great tendency here and there to be a bit sketchy and rely more on drawing textual elements on auto-pilot rather than with the kind of clear consideration and observation of your reference. In direct contradiction of my previous point, that is probably one area where it could have been improved as well.
Also, unfortunately I dont have any demos lying around for those particular plants - Id do one for you right now, but unfortunately Im out of town for a funeral and dont really have the means. Message me next weekend if youd still like to see one, and Ill do one up for you.
Anyway, youre doing a pretty great job as it is. Keep these points in mind and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
drawABoxStudent
2018-11-12 20:47
Condolences for your loss, thanks so much for taking the time to still do a critique, your consistency and hard work is really inspiring.
ctrz7
2018-11-11 12:26
Hello Uncomfortable,
Here's my homework for lesson 3: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1SybFyqo6tmvykmYcmEmj7_-7d8E1CDi9
I mostly focused on the construction part and not about details.
I struggled the most with the plant number 4. I had a really hard time constructing the small leafs.
I'm also not sure about the construction of the tomato "balls". I tried various attempts and stayed at the end with this.
Really looking forward for your critic.
Greetings,
Adrian
Uncomfortable
2018-11-11 22:28
This is a pretty healthy mixed bag of successes and areas where we can definitely adjust things to see some improvement. Before I get into my critique, I want you to take a look at these common pitfalls. Theyre things I see somewhat frequently from students moving into lesson 3.
Overall, I think the biggest issue that Im seeing is that your linework is notably scratchy and timid. Theres not a lot of confidence there, youre hesitant to really push forward and commit to your marks. Frequently I see marks doubling up (where youve attempted to reinforce a shaky line), or places where youve attempted to replace an existing stroke entirely.
By and large, youre actually doing a pretty good job of employing constructional techniques, but none of it feels particularly solid because your marks have no confidence behind them. The very foundation of a solid construction is the smooth, confident strokes and evenly shaped ellipses that hold it up. This is an issue were going to have to address before we move forwards, and thats going to largely mean getting you to employ the ghosting method a lot more fervently throughout.
Remember, the ghosting method is a matter of planning out each individual stroke, identifying where you want it to start and end, then preparing by repeatedly going through the motion of drawing without actually having the pen touch the page. Thisis where all of our time is invested - once we finally touch the page to execute the mark, we do so with a single, confident, persistent motion. We accept that at this point any mistake that may occur, in terms of accuracy, is inevitable and unavoidable. All we can do here is ensure that the mark comes out as a single, smooth, confident stroke.
Theres still much that can be done with a confident stroke, even if it doesnt quite hit the mark. A wobbly, uncertain, or scratchy stroke however doesnt have much to offer, and theres not much to be done with it. Any construction built upon it will be flimsy and insolid.
One issue more specific to your leaves is that I noticed when you were adding more complex edge detail to them, you had a tendency to dip above and below the earlier, simpler edge. Instead of doing that, I want you to build directly off that underlying edge, as demonstrated here.
This means not only ensuring that we work additively, building directly off this simpler leaf construction, but it also means drawing a series of distinct lines rather than a single continuous stroke zigzagging back and forth. Each line should have a clear, concise trajectory. Once that trajectory changes, we lift our pen and begin another dinstinct line. This ensures that the overall line does not become muddy, and also allows us to design that edge detail more carefully without falling into the trap of working from autopilot.
When it comes to your use of the branch technique when actually constructing your plants, I noticed that you tend to put contour ellipses down wherever and whenever, without any real rhyme or reason. Theyre not immediately associated with the individual segments youre combining to create the larger, more complex branch (as covered as part of the branch exercise), and theyre certainly not present all to reinforce the illusion of form. Instead, youve just.. drawn a lot for no real reason. Its a frequent thing I see from students who arent necessarily thinking about what purpose those contour ellipses are meant to serve, and instead try working from rote memory of this is how you do it in the hopes that itll make sense later.
Whenever you put a mark down as part of a drawing, I want you to stop and think about what its meant to contribute. Is it going to help communicate some integral aspect of what youre depicting to the viewer? Or is it going to help you better grasp how the forms youre constructing sit in 3D space or relate to one another? If so, they draw that mark with a consistent, confident stroke - no attempt to make it particularly faint, or to allow it tobe hidden later on. Just draw it in ane qual manner to everything else, using the ghosting method to achieve a confident, even stroke. If it does not fall into either of those categories however, or if its purpose is already being achieved by another stroke, or if it COULD be achieved better by another potential stroke altogether, then simply dont draw it.
So in this case, many of those contour ellipses dont actual serve a purpose - a couple of those would be more than enough to convey the illusion that the tube is solid and three dimensional, and based on where you placed your edge segments, again a couple would have been more than enough for you.
Now, despite what Ive mentioned here, for the most part your use of constructional methods to create these objects is pretty solid. You just need to solidify your approach to the underlying techniques.
So, Id like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings, after reading over this critique, rewatching the videos in the lesson and reading over the notes about common pitfalls I shared at the beginning of this critique.
LordNed
2018-11-18 05:40
I need to continue practicing putting my ellipses at perpendicular angles to the line they're showcasing. This was something I struggled on last lesson with on the organic contours. I tried to push the degree shifts more than I did last time so that lines have both small degrees and large degrees as they recede in space but I'm not sure it's all the way there yet.
In the few areas I put surface details (such as the small strawberry and mushrooms) I tried to be better about making transitions with the amount of surface detail. I also tried to play with line weight in specific lines, not always to great success but it's the thought that counts :)
https://imgur.com/a/Vo9jVJV
Uncomfortable
2018-11-18 20:10
By and large you're doing a pretty good job, though there are a few areas where you're straying from the core principles of construction - that is, never add complexity that cannot be supported by the scaffolding that already exists.
This comes up in a few places. First off, in your leaves - notice how you've got all those wavy edges? At the core of it, construction focuses on keeping us from making too many critical decisions all at once. So we'll draw the simplest leaf shape first, with basic arcing edges, to make the decision of how this leaf overall is going to flow through space, then we'll build the wavier edge detail on top of that underlying structure. That way we can focus on our edges without having to worry about how the whole shape is meant to flow through space. You can see this demonstrated in this demo.
Also, don't draw waves by zigzagging a stroke back and forth without lifting your pen. Always rise off the line from the previous stage of construction, then come back down to it and lift your pen. Wherever the trajectory breaks, lift your pen. If the edges are particularly spiky rather than wavy, lift your pen off at the end of the spike, then draw the stroke coming back down separately.
I can also see that you had a lot of experimentation on the second page wit how exactly to build on top of that simpler form, working both additively and subtractively. Wherever possible, I recommend that you avoid cutting back into a form you've constructed. It's generally better to work in a manner that allows you to continually build up onto forms - to treat what you've drawn as being solidly present within the world.
Now, remember that this means additive construction in 3D space. If you look at the demo I linked previously, you'll see that along the bottom edge, I've got waves that cut back into the silhouette of the form - but in 3D space, these are not actually cutting away, they're edges that have been raised up.
Throughout your work you do use construction pretty well in a lot of other places, but there are a few key points where the concept of "simple -> complex" can be employed more effectively. For instance, on this page, the big bulbous thing towards the upper right. Personally, I'd have constructed a ball, ensured that it felt solid and three dimensional, then built up around it, like this.
Same goes for the peas - you should be making sure those aren't just loose circles, but rather solid, concrete ball forms.
The last thing I wanted to mention was that you'll want to continue paying attention to your branches exercises - right now they're pretty shaky:
Make sure they're not getting pinched, keep their widths consistent even if this means putting a couple more ellipses along the way
Draw through your ellipses
Extend your line segments more past a given ellipse, but continue practicing getting them to aim towards the next ellipse. Remember that the goal is to get your next segment to flow directly on top of the previous one so they merge seamlessly together. Aiming them correctly tends to be difficult when they're too short, and what you don't want to see is a bunch of little stray ends of these segments sticking out.
And here are some extra demos for the road:
Noticed you did a morel mushroom, I had a demo for that tucked away.
I didn't see any leaves that required this technique in your set, but it's good to know anyway: https://i.imgur.com/xAvcrkT.png
Some general pitfalls I see from students around this stage.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so you may move onto the next one - but be sure to continue working on the points I've raised here.
LordNed
2018-11-18 21:19
When I drew the pumpkin I was thinking about it in cross-section forms, which would have (had I done it properly) represented the volume so drawing the silhouette afterwards should have been correct.
Having said that, as soon as I drew it I knew I dun goofed, but I figured it'd be worse to try and correct the mistake by trying to draw it as a sphere again on top of the mess I had already created.
Same with the pea pods, when I drew the left one I realized I dun goofed by not following the volume close enough, I think the right one is better.
Thanks!
AvPBN
2018-12-09 17:26
This was difficult. I had to let go of perfectionism here more than any time before. Crippling at times.
Notes:
I like doing leaves.
I also switched over to Cottonwood Arts sketchbooks 3/4 into the lesson, which accentuated my mistakes, removing all room for error. That hurt too. A solid beating this month so far.
Lesson 3
Uncomfortable
2018-12-10 03:47
By and large you are doing a pretty good job, and you're definitely showing improvement on the front of those struggles with perfectionism. There is still plenty of room to grow, but I can see you applying construction a fair bit, and clear examples that you understand the concepts involved.
There are a couple things that I want to draw your attention to:
You've got what looks somewhat like a fern leaf among your leaves, where you've drawn the overall leaf shape of the whole arrangement, but draw each smaller sub-leaf as simple spikes coming out from the center. For this, you should be applying the same leaf construction method to each individual sub-leaf, as demonstrated here.
Your branches are coming along, though you do need to keep working on getting each segment to aim towards the next ellipse. Right now you've got a lot of segments that veer off course, and as a result, the following segment doesn't overlap it properly. The result we want to achieve is having all of the segments blend in perfectly, following the same trajectory. It does appear that you're striving for this, which is good, but I did feel that it was necessary to point it out just in case.
Your constructions are coming along well, but I am noticing a certain timidity to your linework in general. Part of it is that your lines have a tendency to come out a little bit faint - not necessarily just in the way a dying pen would produce a mark, but in their a slight stiffness that is present there. Make sure that you put every single mark down with the same kind of confident, persistent pace. If you make a mistake, that's fine - you'll deal with it - but hesitation out of fear of making a mistake is always going to hold you back. Once you decide a mark is going to contribute to your construction or to the drawing as a whole, make sure it goes down with the same confident execution you'd add to something integral to the final result.
Always remember the importance of the flow that drives each leaf or flower petal. I see in some of your constructions that you're not quite applying this principle across the board. Every single flat form needs that kind of strong, gestural flow that really drives how it moves through 3D space. That initial line is incredibly important towards making the petals and leaves look alive and avoid stiffness. Think as though this line is an arrow representing all of the forces of wind and air currents that guide and control the leaf or petal in question, and try to imbue your stroke with that kind of energy.
Aside from that, you're doing well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
sigomatix
2018-12-10 22:49
Hi Uncomfortable,
I've finished lesson 3 here: https://imgur.com/gallery/wBCEBZ2
I've noticed that I tend to rush the branches, I don't like my branches, I still need to fight myself on this and slow down.
Some places I actually ruined stuff by applying too much contour line, so now I'm just scared to use it.
I'm still struggling to visualize really complex petal/leaves that curl around (like roses) and to "render" petal/leaves borders. I'm disappointed because my petal don't feel soft and curly :( I tried to add some texture but not really a success.
I thought cacti would be the easier, but actually there were the harder for me, always look horrible in the end.
But I definitively felt, that toward the end, I was starting to getting it compared to the beginning.
Thanks for reviewing my work,
Cheers
Uncomfortable
2018-12-11 19:54
You're doing pretty well. There are some things I want to bring to your attention, but by and large you're demonstrating a decent grasp of the material, and are developing your understanding of the use of constructional techniques.
Here are the few things I want you to keep an eye on:
With your leaves, keep pushing the idea of how these things flow through space. That initial flow line is critical, and you're doing a decent job of capturing how the leaves flow through space, but try and always remind yourself that this represents the forces that impact the leaf. Try not to think of the flow line as being something that starts and stops, something that is static in space. While the leaf itself may in fact have a beginning and an end, the forces it represents do not - they are the air currents and wind that flow beyond it. I frequently will add little arrow-heads at the end of my flow lines to kind of reinforce this idea in my mind, that the flow continues on.
Also for the leaves, when drawing your initial enclosing of the leaf shape, leave out any additional wobbles. Construction is all about starting from something dead simple and gradually building up from there, never adding visual information that cannot be supported by the supports and structure that are already present. So in this case, I'm referring to leaves like the center of the second page, where the edges are quite wavy.
Last thing about leaves - in this page you tackled a leaf with many branching arms. You got the right start, but didn't quite followthrough all the way. Here's how it should be approached.
For your branches, while here and there you do still need to work on how your line segments overlap and keep them flowing continuously, you're actually doing quite well, and are getting it pretty close to correct most of the time. It's just a matter of continuing to keep on top of that last mile.
Your constructions here are looking pretty solid, but watch out for how you're building subtractively from that stem. Instead, wherever possible, work additively - that is, rather than cutting away from a form you've added to your scene, build on top of it. In this case it'd mean adding a little extra mass to the joints along that branch, perhaps by adding balls along its length.
In the cactus on this page, you've done pretty well with the construction, but when dealing with detail, keep an eye on how the visual elements are actually spread out over a surface. Here it does seem like you went a bit heavy on those little pods, and that they wouldn't normally be laid out quite in that fashion. Always look back to your reference and avoid working from memory at all costs (which happens even when looking away from our reference for a few minutes - draw only a couple marks before looking back).
I am noticing that when tackling flower petals (hibiscus and other flowers), you have a tendency to ignore the necessity of the flow line, or you try and spread its job over several flow lines/contour lines. Using a single one even when the petal seems broad rather than pointy is still important, because you're capturing the essence of how it moves through space. Always draw these lines confidently and think of it like the arrows from lesson 2, which are driven with a strong sense of force and energy.
Anyway, you're doing a pretty good job, so keep it up. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.
sigomatix
2018-12-12 09:47
Thanks for the detailed review ! I completely forgot to think about gravity, that's true, that would have been helpful indeed to think about my flow lines....everything else is on point, I'll keep these in my mind.
Cheers !
Ciac32
2018-12-12 03:52
Hey Uncomfortable , here's my submission for the 3rd lesson; I did a couple extra plant pics since I wasn't satisfied with some of them. The fifth plant picture is a bit weird because I tried to readjust my line pressure to stop destroying my micron tips, so everything came out a bit off. Also its duplicated with a camera pic due to the scanner messing it up too much.
https://imgur.com/a/EYeKnVT
I'm still not a 100% sure about my progress so far. I'm having a lot of trouble applying the crinkled effect to leaves, especially with the pumpkin pic. I also feel a lot of my linework for highly overlapping leaves/petals keeps coming out really cluttered with the overlapping leaves and contour lines. I also haven't done a lot of texture work, but I have been practicing a bit with the solid black fills to try to reduce the clutter.
Uncomfortable
2018-12-12 21:35
Overall it's a pretty good start. There's definitely areas to improve, but you're making solid efforts to employ constructional techniques and that's really what I'm focusing on right now.
So on the point about the crinkly edges of your leaves, one thing that helps is to always work additively and really adhere to the lines you've put down in your previous stage of construction. As shown here, each "wrinkle" is drawn separately, rising off the original edge and falling back to it. Don't zig-zag or go in and out of your leaf shape. In general, if you can help it, don't cut back into the form and lean towards building onto it or treating it as though you're taking that surface and lifting it up or down.
Your branches are moving in the right direction, but keep pushing the flow of your line segments. Right now they're a bit stiff, and you'll need more practice to get them to overlap one another more. You can still see those little bits sticking out at the end of each segment.
In some of your flower petals, I can see places where you've either neglected to draw the flow line altogether, or haven't quite captured the sort of driving force that should be pushing behind them. Try and keep in mind that the flow line really represents the forces and energy that pushes the leaf or petal - usually airflow and wind. Give it a lot of confidence - often i'll draw a little arrow head at the end of it to remind myself that this flow line is symbolic of a moving force with no clear start or end, so I can then carry that into the enclosing shape I draw next.
This page definitely has a lot of subtractive stuff on the leaf edges, and a great deal of zigzagging. Just pointing it out to make the previous point about it a little more strongly. Here's another demo of how I add some spikier leaf edge detail.
On that same page, it is worth mentioning that the strawberries also tend to be a little less solid because of how you've cut back into them. Cutting and working subtractively isn't inherently bad, but it's a lot easier to do it while thinking in 2D, rather than how you're solving those same problems in three dimensions. Cutting back without thinking of how this cut exists itself as a form in relation to the larger form you're cutting from is going to really undermine the illusion you're trying to create.
I think overall you are demonstrating construction well, there's just plenty of room for growth, and room to continue pushing yourself in terms of the confidence of your linework. I am going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, as you can tackle this stuff just as well in the next lesson. So feel free to move on.
Ciac32
2018-12-13 15:28
Thanks for the advice, especially with the tip on 3D additive over subtractive detailing; that's something I haven't thought of. I'll continue practicing the plant stuff in parallel with the next lesson.
EHLART
2018-12-14 03:02
Hi Uncomfortable, I spent around 22 hours on this lesson. Such beautiful flowers like dahlia and rose were really tempting to draw, but those were too hard for me now. Drawing on the structure was really fun though! It really improved my 3d vision. A friend of mine saw my sunflower drawing and said that the flower looks flat. I checked with my reference flower which was a bit tilted, then I noticed "Oh I gotta focus on not only the structure but everything I learned XD" Like always, LOL. Thanks a lot always :)
https://imgur.com/gallery/yIcn5uJ
Uncomfortable
2018-12-14 18:16
You've got some good stuff here, but there are a number of things I think I can say that should help in a few areas.
In your leaves section, they're generally pretty well done, but there are a couple adjustments I'd make to your approach:
Your linework stiffens up at times with hesitation - it's really important, especially when nailing that flow line, that you draw it with the confidence of the energy the line represents. It captures the forces that drive this leaf - air currents, wind, etc - and serves as a representation of them on the page. As such, you need to really push that stroke out and maintain a smooth, consistent trajectory.
When adding edge detail, wherever possible, work additively rather than subtractively. As shown here, don't zigzag your lines (draw individual strokes with singular trajectories, don't change the trajectory mid-stroke to create a hard corner) and don't cut back into your leaf shape. Think of it more as though you're either building onto it (with separate lines coming off that edge and returning to it) or like you're lifting sections of that shape up to create a ripple. Neither of these cut into the shape, even if the result ends up sitting a little inside the original silhouette.
For multi-armed leaves like the maple leaf you drew, construct each arm with the leaf construction method, as shown here, then merge them together. Think more critically about what the method allows you to accomplish and don't fall into the trap of thinking "it's the leaf method, so we apply this to all leaves no matter how complex they are". It's a technique used to convey a more gestural, flatter form that flows through space - sometimes leaves are made up of several of these.
Your branches are coming along well, and you're doing a pretty good job of getting your segments to blend together into a single continuous stroke. There are some hiccups here and there but that's entirely normal and expected. You'll continue to improve with this the more you use the technique.
In that first sunflower attempt, you've got some nice, confident flow to those petals. One thing I am noticing though is that you're going beyond the initial bounding ellipse you drew, treating it more like a loose suggestion. When applying the constructional method, I want you to treat every single phase of construction like a decision being made - in this case, how far out you want your petals to go. Once made, you should not contradict that decision if you can help it. Yes, the leaves don't actually go out to a single radius, but construction itself is an exercise in building up your spatial reasoning, and so our goal isn't to create a 100% faithful reproduction of the image. If you go on to contradict that initial decision, you'll end up with many conflicting answers to individual questions, which in turn will weaken the overall illusion of solidity. One question, one answer.
On your second stage of the sunflower, you definitely dived hard into attacking the texture of its central area. Experimentation is great, but there are a couple things I want to mention about how you went about it:
You saw something seemingly chaotic, so you attacked it by applying similarly chaotic techniques. Cross-hatching, semi-random strokes, etc. Keep this in mind: no texture is ever going to be random. There are always rhythms, patterns and such that govern each texture, and it is a matter of taking more time to observe what kind of visual elements and microforms are present that give that texture a particular kind of appearance, and how they're arranged, and the flows they follow. In general, do not use hatching - it's a sort of "catch-all" shortcut that students will use when they don't take the time to identify what is actually present there.
Once you've identified the actual forms present within a texture, what you want to do is not actually draw each individual form as you might for an overall construction - instead we imply their presence by drawing the impact they have on what sits around them. Specifically, we draw their cast shadows. Cast shadows are flexible - they're not lines, they can expand into entire shapes, and these shapes can merge with one another to create large, solid areas of black that do not attract the eye any more than they need to. They can also be blasted away with direct light to create lost-and-found edges, allowing us to transition from a solid black area, to a middle ground of texture, to a blank rest area. We remain in full control of where we apply our texture, using it as a tool to communicate certain properties of what we're drawing, rather than being beholden to the idea of having to match the photograph. I'd recommend looking at the notes on the 25 texture challenge for more information on this, though on December 25th the release of the rebuilt drawabox website and all of the new lesson content will go over this in much greater detail as well.
The last point I want to make is that as you push on through your plant drawings, you have a tendency to lay down loose, sketchy lines before committing. This is fundamentally against the techniques and mentality that drawabox is trying to instill, and it's something you need to pull back on.
Every single mark you put down should be drawn with the ghosting method and with the full confidence of a mark you intend to be seen. Before making such a mark, consider what the purpose of the line you're about to put down is, and whether or not another line might accomplish this task more effectively, or if another one is already doing so. If it contributes in a meaningful way to your construction, your understanding of space or form or the relationships between forms, or if it communicates an integral piece of information to the viewer, then draw it. Otherwise, don't. Don't sketch roughly and think on the page.
Following these principles will help you develop your linework to be more confident and concise, and will improve your line economy as well. It's not a matter of being more precious with your lines - simply of thinking about what you're putting down before you do, being aware of what you're trying to achieve with each stroke, and ultimately executing that mark with full confidence and no hesitation.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings, applying what I've mentioned here.
EHLART
2019-01-10 08:31
Hi, it's been a while since the holiday season... Here are 4 more pages of plant drawings. Thank you always! (New website looks awesome though!)
https://imgur.com/a/23sNU0X
Uncomfortable
2019-01-10 21:26
Fantastic work! These are vastly better and appear to correct every point I raised in my critique. There isn't much else to say - you've done very well, and I'm happily marking this lesson as complete. It's always nice to see my critiques implemented so thoroughly.
Keep up the great work.
Nougat1234
2018-12-17 20:01
Hi Uncomfortable,
Here is my submission for lesson 3: https://imgur.com/a/vvRQaiH
Uncomfortable
2018-12-18 00:08
You're doing a pretty good job overall, with reasonably solid forms and a good application of constructional techniques in most areas. There are a few things I want to address however.
Leaves:
Your leaves are pretty well done, and demonstrate a fair bit of attention being paid to how these leaves flow through space. The initial flow lines could be drawn with a little more confidence and energy (they do after all represent all the forces being applied to this flat, flowing form) but you're on the right track.
When constructing leaves with more complex edges, make sure that you adhere to the previous phase of construction (the simple edges that enclose your basic leaf shape). That means that the additional edge detail you're adding should come off that edge and return to it. Currently you have a tendency to zigzag back and forth over that line, which results in you losing the structure you'd set out originally. This explains this concept further.
Additionally, avoid working subtractively - that is, don't cut back into your forms and shapes if you can help it. Work additively, attaching new forms to your existing one to build up greater complexity.
When you have a leaf with multiple arms, don't blindly apply the leaf construction method without thinking about why this technique works in certain scenarios. Think about it and consider how it can be applied to each case. When you've got a leaf with a bunch of little arms, you've basically got a leaf made up of a bunch of smaller leaves - so apply the technique to each one and then merge them together, as shown here.
Branches
I generally found your constructions to be pretty good, and your use of leaf shapes had a much better sense of confident flow here than they did in the leaves exercise. I did find that this thing felt a little flat, mostly because the forms felt a little loose. I am however mainly point it out because I have a little demo I'd done in the past about what I assume is the same kind of object, which you can see here: https://i.imgur.com/IfSg0wm.png
Your mushrooms were quite well done, though I think the contour curves along the stem of the bottom one were a case of quantity over quality. You drew quite a few, but also didn't spend a whole lot of time on each one, resulting in a lot of sub-par contour lines that didn't entirely do their job. One or two very well crafted ones are going to be vastly more effective. Same goes for the cap, where along the top you've loosely implied what ended up looking something like a grid. Don't go throwing these contour lines willy-nilly. Think about how they're being used and consider if it's actually of any value. Remember that we're not sketching here - we're drawing every single mark with planning and purpose behind it.
For the most part, you do a good job of drawing through your forms, though I did feel it necessary to call out the fact that in this page, you didn't. That is to say, where the leaf overlaps the base of your pitcher plant, you allow the form to stop suddenly. These drawings are all exercises to help us understand how these forms exist in space and how they relate to one another. By cutting that form off in this manner, you severely reduce the drawing's effectiveness as a spatial exercise.
Lastly, probably the biggest and only particularly significant issue is the fact that you have a lot of extraneous lines that serve no purpose. I understand that you've drawn them as a vague attempt at texture or detail, but they very clearly correspond to nothing concrete in your actual reference image, and are a sloppy attempt at implying something you've not studied closely. Don't do this. If you want to put texture on your drawing, take the time to study your reference carefully, identify the visual elements that are present and transfer them in an intentional manner, a couple marks at a time, constantly looking back at your reference so as to avoid working from memory.
Otherwise, just don't add them. Focus on construction and form, and put all your effort towards ensuring your constructions are solid and that you have done everything you need to in order to fully believe that the forms you are constructing are more than just drawings on a flat page - that they are real, solid forms that exist in this world you're creating. This is where your time and effort should be invested, not in making half-assed scratches to imply detail. Even if you were to put the additional time into properly conveying the texture of your plants and leaves, this would only come after construction has been given its due.
Anyway, while that last point was harsh, you've still done a fairly good job overall. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
EntropyArchiver
2018-12-20 20:01
Submission Link: https://imgur.com/a/YRN6ix3
I found myself dreading doing this lesson and even ended up avoiding doing them and only doing boxes and warm up some days. I know that there were complete failures, a lot of them. Working through those failures and not avoiding them has been a challenge that I need to deal with better.
I was able to follow and copy your demo to some success('page 0'). When it came to me deciding how to construct myself though, it fell apart more than once. As seen with the first drawing, the palm tree, I tried to develop a process of breaking the shapes into basic forms without getting bogged down with detail needs work. The last palm tree came out cartoon and too dark but I was happy that I made progress. I changed gears and thought maybe I could learn something with more focused plants. Pages 2-5 were better but still have troubles with line weight and their readability. Page 6 went ok at first, but aloe plant went wrong, really wrong. I tried breaking down why.
I think the pandanus tree on page 7 was my biggest failure, everything became a mess and it ended up just look terrible. I really didn't want to draw but kept going to finish the page for the day. I think it had negative impact when I was drawing the pandunus fruit.
For the last page I decided to face the problem head on with things similar to the potato plant. I had a degree of success. Also I decided against the black background since it takes away from the subject matter.
I look forward to your input of what I should work on and how to proceed.
Side note: I've also been drawing boxes after my warm ups in parallel with this challenge, I hope those are ok for re-submission. If not, let me know. Also should I be including my reference or would you rather I not do that from now on?
Hope you are having a happy holiday.
Uncomfortable
2018-12-22 00:50
More often than not, the self-analysis that some students offer along with their submission does less good than some might think. Unless there are clear questions that need answering, it's generally better to just give me the floor and to discern what I need to know from looking at your work. The rest is just liable to confuse matters.
Now, looking over your work, while there are a number of issues that I will address, by and large you've shown a good deal of improvement over the set and have demonstrated yourself to be working through the challenges of construction and the spatial problems that lay therein. Despite the issues I'll mention, you are demonstrating a belief and understanding of the scene you're drawing as existing in three dimensions, and you appear to see that quality in your own drawings.
The first issue with your leaves is that the lines that denote the flow of the form through space - that is, the first line we draw in relation to any leaf - is generally drawn hesitantly, and as a result comes out looking a little stiff. Being that the line is the core, driving element of the flow of the entire form, it carries over into the rest of the construction. It's critical that you draw this line - and all your constructional lines - with a confident, persistent pace pushing forwards through the path you have plotted, planned and prepared for using the ghosting method. This line represents the energy and forces applied to this form - the flow of wind and air that causes it to move as it does. Don't see this line as being a static object with a beginning and an end. View it instead as a visual representation of something that extends far beyond its beginning and end. Sometimes it can help to draw it with a little arrowhead (I often do).
I've noticed that when adding additional detail to your leaves, you have a tendency to use the simpler edge enclosing the basic leaf shape as more of a suggestion than something solid that exists there in the scene. What I see is that your more complex line from the following phase of construction zigzags back and forth across the line. There are two things wrong with this. Firstly, don't zigzag your lines - it causes us to go into autopilot and creates repetitive patterns that do not actually exist. Instead, draw each line individually, lifting your pen when it comes to some kind of sharp corner or turn. This allows you to design those marks more deliberately. Secondly, these lines should always come off the simpler stroke from the previous phase of construction, and then return to it. Treat it like an object or mass that exists in the world, not as a sketch or something to be ignored. Being that it's solid, your only option is to build on top of it. If at all possible, and it generally should be when dealing with leaves, avoid building subtractively (cutting back into a form you've already produced), opting to work additively instead. This should demonstrate what I mean.
The last thing I noticed in your leaves was that the few places where you seem to have attempted detail (nothing wrong with not tackling detail just yet), you merely applied vague hatching lines. Try to stay away from hatching - it tends to encourage the student to think less about the actual texture present on an object, and just focuses on filling an area in, or attempting to shade (shading being something that we poignantly don't tackle in this course).
In your branches, there are a few things that I believe are contributing to the same problem. The issue is that your linework here is quite stiff, and as a result the segments that create each side don't flow smoothly into one another. Instead you end up with a lot of stray ends that stick out. The goal is, of course, to have them all flow from one to the next, overlapping their ends to create the illusion of a single line. I believe that this stiffness may be caused by you drawing more from your wrist than you should be, which in turn may be encouraged by how small the spaces between the ellipses are. I'd recommend spacing them out more and engaging your shoulder to achieve smoother, more confident and consistent strokes.
As for your plants, I have some general observations:
I mentioned this in regards to the first exercise, but it's worth mentioning again. You aren't approaching the initial flow line of leaves/flower petals/etc with much attention - they're largely either drawn as a passing thought or not drawn at all, despite being the most important, driving element of that form.
Whenever you think to put down a mark, consider what its purpose is. Think about what it's meant to achieve, and whether or not that can be achieved by another mark, or whether it is already being done by another stroke on the page. Think about the specific mark you want to put down. Then, if it contributes in a meaningful way to your construction, or communicates some important part of the drawing as a whole, then draw it confidently, using the ghosting method. Otherwise don't draw it. I'm noticing that you have a tendency of drawing a lot of contour lines, and when I see this from students it's usually because they're not really thinking about what each contour line is meant to achieve. Generally one or two that have been drawn confidently and properly is more than enough to achieve one's goal. More than that and you start weighing your drawing down with unnecessary linework.
You're frequently drawing ellipses and ellipsoids but not drawing through them. You should be drawing through each and every ellipse you draw two full times before lifting your pen, focusing on drawing it with a confident, persistent pace.
I also see places where you draw things lightly and then go back over them with a sort of 'clean up pass'. It was mentioned in the form intersections exercise from lesson 2, that this is not an approach I want you to use in these lessons. When adding line weight, you're not replacing existing lines or designating some lines as being part of the real drawing and others not. You're meant only to add weight to local sections of existing lines (never their entirety), specifically with the purpose of clarifying specific overlaps. If you try following along the entirety of an existing line, you're going to end up drawing slowly and carefully, and the result will be a wobbling, stiff line. Even line weight should be applied by using the ghosting method to ensure that it is done confidently and smoothly.
Minor axes are an important tool for drawing cylinders and cylinder-like objects, as all the ellipses must be aligned to one another. These are missing from your flower pots and such.
I'd recommend giving yourself a lot more room for each drawing - splitting each page into quadrants is forcing you to draw in a much more cramped space. Giving yourself room to work is pretty important, especially early on, when learning to deal with spatial problems. Working smaller causes us to stiffen up and make mistakes we may not have otherwise done.
Now, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, for the reasons I mentioned at the beginning of this critique. That said, you have a lot to work on here, and will be able to apply most of it in the next lesson. As for your question about boxes, in my previous reviews I gave you all the information you needed to self-assess, so there isn't going to be much gained from continuing to submit your boxes. Finally, about the reference, sure - if you've got it, go ahead and include it. If you don't, it's no big deal.
You'll find that on December 25th, the drawabox website is going to undergo a pretty significant change as I release the rebuild I've been working on for the past few months. This includes heavy revisions to the first two lessons' content, along with modifications through the others. I'd recommend reading through the first two lessons' material once that comes out, and before moving onto lesson 4.
dvdjrnx
2018-12-28 05:46
Hey Uncomfortable,
Here is my submission for lesson 3. Definitely saw some growth as I worked through these and have been able to identify areas for improvement. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, and as usual, thank you in advance for sharing them.
Uncomfortable
2018-12-28 19:07
In most cases, when a student goes this heavy on detail, my critique is usually going to involve telling them to take a step back and focus more on construction. For the most part, that's not really the case here. You're doing a pretty solid job on your construction, and clearly seem to be focusing on getting it down before pushing on into detail - this is great to see. As a result, your constructions both include a very pleasing smattering of balanced texture (it's not ever overwhelming or distracting), as well as solid forms that feel believable and tangible.
On the flipside, this is not the kind of work I'd ever show other students as examples - not because it's not well done, but rather because it would drive them to try too much, too soon.
I do have a few thoughts to offer though:
Your construction on this leaf is a little off - notice how the top edge is considerably longer than the bottom one? Due to the physical qualities of leaves, you're likely to ever find one that stretches on one side. This suggests to me that you may be fighting against a more natural fold for your leaf, as explained here.
When tackling leaves with multiple 'arms' (there's one such leaf near the bottom left of your leaves exercise), you can construct each arm as an independent leaf construction of its own, before merging them together, as described here. I also have another demonstration of this process here.
Your branches exercises definitely show a number of issues that don't seem to be present when applying the technique in your later drawings, which suggests to me that you've identified and learned from those mistakes. This includes getting your segments to flow more smoothly into one another (as explained here), keeping the width of your branch consistent through their length (if you want to add knots, try using this technique instead), and generally working on both the confident execution and control of your ellipses.
When adding wavy edges to your leaves like on the bottom right of this page and the leaves on this page, try and hold more solidly to the original, simpler leaf edge from the previous phase of construction. Don't zigzag over it, but have your lines rise up from it and return to it. Also, whenever possible, try to work additively - rather than cutting into that simpler leaf shape, try and envision that you're building onto it, or manipulating its edge to rise and fall. Cutting into things requires a lot more spatial awareness of both what is being cut away, and what it is being cut from, and is much easier to mess up. I explain both of these points further in these notes.
So! By and large you're doing a great job, but do have a few things to keep in mind as you move forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.
dvdjrnx
2018-12-29 22:45
Thanks for the feedback, Uncomfortable. I think your points resonate well with mistakes I had noticed while working through the exercises myself, so Im glad my ability to self-critique seems at least fairly on point. Really enjoying the lessons, and feeling great about the progress Ive been able to make so far. Thanks for making that possible, and see you in lesson 4s thread.
mildly_terrible_art
2018-12-28 23:30
Lesson 3 submission: https://imgur.com/a/2BomlW0
Thank you for your time and critique.
Uncomfortable
2018-12-30 02:38
You're making some good headway, but there are a number of things I want to address.
In your leaves exercises, I can see some definitely attempts to adhere to the simpler leaf shape from the previous phase of construction, when adding additional edge detail like waves or whatever else. There are some places however (like this leaf) where you're still showing some zigzagging (as described here). From the looks of it, you were making an attempt to be aware of it, but still had some zigzaggy tendencies. Also, when you've got those lines coming off the simpler construction line, try and have it come up a little more smoothly and naturally. In many places I can see where the line turns a pretty sharp corner as it rises off that simpler line, making it feel more sudden and less fluid.
Also, I'm seeing a lot of these arbitrary little contour/detail lines that seem to be accomplishing the task of neither in a lot of your leaf exercise drawings. If you want to put down detail, then take the time to observe your reference carefully and ensure that the marks you put down reflect the visual information present there. If you're trying to use them as contour lines, then focus on accomplishing the task they're meant for, and try and assess whether or not you need to add additional contour lines, or whether what you've got serves the purpose just fine. I noticed in your later plant constructions, you definitely went overboard with contour lines. Thinking about whether or not you really need to add another is important - consider what you want your mark to accomplish, whether it is the best mark for the job, or if another one might do it better (or if another mark is present that is already doing the job).
For your branches, one thing I noticed was that you weren't really maintaining consistent widths through those branches - that's pretty important.
In terms of getting the branches' edge segments to flow into one another, you've got a bit of a mixed bag. A lot of people struggle with this, but I can see places where you're actually getting them to flow together pretty nicely, so you're definitely making strides forward there.
Last thing about the branches - watch your ellipses' degrees. As explained in this video, the degree you choose to use implies the orientation of that cross-section relative to the viewer. If you've got a lot of huge degree shifts through the length of the branch, it's going to start breaking the illusion you're trying to produce.
Jumping into plant constructions, I did find that when you have a lot of petals around a flower, you tend to focus much less on how those petals flow through space (like this one). Try and think more about how those petals are going to flow through space, rather than just letting yourself draw shallow arcs over the 2D page. This demonstration goes over this.
I do very much like the fact that you build your flower pots as solid, compound cylinders, with clear minor axes to which to align the ellipses.
These constructions were definitely showing a well developing grasp of 3D space as a whole, and the surfaces conveyed a strong sense of how they were flowing through space.
Admittedly I think the last several pages of your homework came out looking quite a bit stronger than the first half, and conveyed much greater solidity and awareness of flow. As such, while that first half is kind of weak, I'm still going to mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
L2D_
2019-01-04 01:41
Here is my lesson 3 homework. Thanks.
https://imgur.com/a/zBpUkMP
Uncomfortable
2019-01-04 03:58
Hey, don't forget that at your current patreon tier, you're only eligible for critiques of lesson 1 and 2, as well as the box and cylinder challenges. Lessons 3 and 4 require the $7 tier or higher.
L2D_
2019-01-04 15:43
ok.
L2D_
2019-01-04 17:06
I had already paid for this month but I did update it to the next tier but it will pay that amount beginning feb 1st.
Uncomfortable
2019-01-04 17:48
Yup, that's totally fine. You should receive a critique of your work later today.
Uncomfortable
2019-01-04 23:52
You're moving in the right direction, though there are some issues I want to address.
To start with, your leaves exercises are a good start. You're handling construction fairly well (you're not zigzagging around your previous phase of construction and are abiding by those previous phases properly), though keep working on thinking about how those leaves are meant to flow through 3D space. Try to think about the initial flow lines as carrying all the energy of the wind that drives the leaf, and draw it with a confidence befitting of that smooth, flowing force.
Also, I noticed that towards the right side of the page, you've got a leaf that arcs in a way that is unnatural, which compresses one side and expands the other as explained here.
Your branches are also coming along well - you're working on getting those segments to flow smoothly into one another, which is great, though in doing so you do seem to stiffen up a little bit. This may also be partially caused by the fact that your branches here have a tendency to be quite small - I'm glad you're trying to pack a lot into each page, but make sure you're giving yourself ample room to work through these spatial problems. Drawing smaller when we practice can cause us to cramp up and cause our drawings to come out more stiffly than they otherwise might.
When we get into your actual plant constructions, one major point I notice is that the issue I raised in regards to the flow of your leaves becomes quite a bit worse. Here, because you're focused on these larger, more complex constructions, you don't end up putting the same kind of consideration into each leaf or petal, and as a result they come out feeling stiff and flat, rather than giving the impression that they're flowing through space confidently. I explain this a little further here.
The point about drawing larger comes into play as well - you're cramming a lot of different drawings into each page. The sentiment behind that is great, but it is causing you to draw much smaller than you should.
Here and there where you've got ellipses, you do have a tendency in most cases not to draw through them. Make sure you're going around the elliptical shapes with a confident stroke that goes around two full times before lifting your pen.
Also, when it comes to line weight, you do appear to be quite liberal in its use. There are a lot of places where you're covering the entirety of drawings with additional weight. There are a few issues with this:
First off, it often looks like you're drawing with different pens - I can't be certain of this, but the difference between your darker and lighter lines is significant enough to suggest that this is the case. Make sure you're working only with a single thickness of pen - the recommended ones for all these lessons is the 0.5mm. This will ensure that your lines don't have a jarring sense of separation with some lines that look vastly thicker than others. The changes in line weight should be subtle, only enough for one's subconscious to pick up on, rather than being so blatant that it's being shouted at the viewer.
In lesson 2's form intersection video, I discuss that one should not follow a process of doing an underdrawing, followed by a clean-up pass. What this really means is that I don't want you to replace the entirety of a line with a heavier stroke after the fact. This ensures that you respect the underlying construction lines as being part of the drawing, and also avoids situations where you slow down and stiffen up in trying to match an existing line perfectly. Every mark we put down - including those we add for line weight - must be drawn with confidence, using the ghosting method. Line weight instead should only be applied in key limited areas, on portions of existing lines in order to emphasize and clarify certain overlaps of forms. Additionally, the mark should taper towards its beginning and end in order to blend back into the original stroke. I do see some places where you haven't entirely replaced an existing mark, but there is always a very jarring shift from light to heavy.
In general, drawing your marks with a confident, persistent pace (using the ghosting method) should result in line work that is much more fluid - one thing I'm noticing here is that your linework tends to stiffen up in a way that suggests that you're either drawing slowly, or pressing too hard. I say this because the marks tend to come out quite uniformly, without any tell-tale tapering towards either end of your strokes. When we draw with confidence, the pen already starts moving before we achieve our intended level of pressure, causing the line to start out skinnier, tapered, and expand into its full width. It's an effect that gives our lines a sense of liveliness and energy that is missing in your drawings. When we draw slower, this shift will likely happen over too limited a space to actually be noticeable, and when we press too hard, we ramp up that pressure far too quickly. Additionally, pressing hard is a common issue that also results in students damaging their pen tips and causing them to perform poorly well before they're actually running out of ink.
All in all you are moving in the right direction, but before I mark this lesson as complete I'd like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings.
Try and stick to one drawing per page, give yourself all the room you can, draw with confident strokes and focus on how these forms flow through 3D space. Don't go to any lengths to make your construction lines faint or unnoticeable (I can see that somewhat especially in the last page) - any mark you put down should be weighed in terms of whether or not it contributes to your overall understanding of your construction, or communicating some key element to the viewer. If the stroke achieves one of these things, then it should be drawn with confidence. If it does not, or if another stroke would do it better (or another stroke already on the page accomplishes it), then it should not be drawn. Then when you back over, you can build up that sense of hierarchy with limited, strategic use of additional line weight.
L2D_
2019-01-05 01:39
I do have a confidence and perfectionist issue, I'm slowly chiseling at the later and I hope the former gets better with practice. I have yet to find the sweet spot when holding my pen. Something still feels off, I hold the pen in the tripod position which is something i'm new to but that will hopefully come with time.
I'm definitely heavy handed and had issues with my pens ink flow, which caused me going over a few things, I'll be more mindful of that. I didn't know you can damage the felt tip until It was recently mentioned in a video I saw.
I will work on my flow lines, I agree, they are lifeless for the most part. Thanks for your time and patience, learning something new can be daunting.
OrangeSpicyHabanero
2019-01-07 09:22
Hello there, Uncomfortable!
Here is my Lesson 3 homework: OrangeSpicyHabanero Lesson 3 Homework
I have already pledged $10 for the 1st of February. I would have done it sooner but I was broke until the 2nd of this month. I've been an inactive patron for most of last year and I aim to change that. I'm super serious, you know?
For this one I had a hard time coming up with construction solutions for the plants I chose. Once I got to the full plant construction drawings I started using a lot of ink and found that I was focusing too much on the details (to the point where I discarded some of my earlier attempts). I decided to focus more on the construction process, which you do stress, but I just wanted to let you know that the inked pieces came before the solely construction ones. Hope I'm making good progress. I'm here to learn and I look forward to your critique.
Thank you so much in advance!
Uncomfortable
2019-01-07 20:35
Your work here is quite well done. There certainly is room for improvement, but you've already shown considerable growth and a good deal of understanding in regards to the subjects covered in the lesson. I'm also very pleased with the decision you made in regards to switching from more detailed drawings (which I will still address) to more construction-focused ones.
To start with, your leaves convey a well developing sense of how these flat, simple shapes flow through fully three dimensional space, and they carry that sense of flow on from the arrows. I don't get any sense of movement that feels unnatural, it all seems to match how these leaves would flow in response to currents of air and other external forces.
You're also making good headway with the branches - I can see you still struggling at times to get the individual segments that make up each edge to flow directly from one to the other, but I can also see improvement on this front. It really is a matter of practice, matching how these strokes flow and ensuring that they overlap smoothly. Keep at it, and you'll soon find that the'll become quite seamless.
One other thing worth mentioning here is that I want you to continue trying your best to maintain a consistent width for these branches - in a few places I can see where they get a little tapered through their midsection, mostly where you're trying to navigate curves and bends. I can see that this is not intentional, so it's par for the course as you learn to tackle this kind of construction, but it is something to keep in mind - that kind of pinching or tapering will undermine the underlying solidity of the form, so keep working to avoid it.
Now when you get into your plant constructions, you generally do apply the constructional method with a great deal of forethought. That said, I can see some hesitation in your linework, and signs that you're definitely stiffening up in the face of this additional challenge. No matter how daunting the task before you, once you've decided on a mark that you're going to add, focus on applying the ghosting method so as to ensure that you can invest all your time in the preparation of it, before executing with that smooth, confident stroke. That way you can separate yourself from the overall challenge and focus on what you know you can do well.
On this page, two things come to mind. Firstly, make sure you're not leaving any forms open ended, like you did on the bottom. It'll cause them to flatten out. Secondly, always try to adhere to your underlying construction as closely as possible. So when you put down the ellipses to flesh out the size of the top parts, you want to make sure that the forms you construct on top of that use it as a solid base, rather than treating it like a loose "suggestion". It's very similar to the concept covered for leaves here, where you're having your lines come off that underlying form and returning to it wherever possible.
Jumping ahead, I really like how you approached the base of this page, though I do feel it important to point out that the things coming off the top definitely felt very stiff in a way that really undermined their general sense of solidity. It seems that you got very cramped, and tried to make up for the insolidity with contour lines, but your contour lines were not drawn with a sense of confidence and instead exacerbated the problem.
Lastly, on the topic of detail, those drawings you did initially with all the heavy ink and texture, what's worth mentioning here is that your texture didn't actually convey what was present in your reference image. The marks I'm seeing instead tell me that you're working mostly from memory. That doesn't mean you haven't been looking at reference, but it does mean that you're allowing enough time to pass between glances that what you actually observed has been lost. Unfortunately "enough time" can be a matter of seconds.
When you're trying to capture detail, or really when you're drawing from reference in general, get in the habit of looking at your reference and identifying some specific mark or feature that you want to transfer onto your drawing. Once you've found it, you can draw one or two marks in attempting to capture it - ones that reflect exactly what you saw - before returning to your reference to refresh your memory. Don't attempt to loosely imply detail unless you're fully aware of what that detail is actually made up of. You can read about more of this in the new lesson 2 texture analysis exercise.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're making great headway, though I do think you need to continue focusing on loosening up on your execution (allowing yourself to draw more confidently) once you've put in all the necessary preparation beforehand.
OrangeSpicyHabanero
2019-01-07 20:47
Thank you! Insightful as always. I will take your advice to heart and improve.
L2D_
2019-01-16 19:50
Here's the 4 extra plants you told me to do. I've been working on making my leaves more lively but don't think i'm succeeding much.
https://imgur.com/a/Fm5hW0G
Uncomfortable
2019-01-16 22:26
So there are a couple major issues that I'm seeing:
First off, you're not paying the same kind of attention to the simple forms that are involved in some of these constructions. For example, the box in the first drawing is completely misaligned from the plant, and you haven't gone to any lengths to draw through it. You can't be treating any part of your drawing as an afterthought - every form is important. Similarly, the cylindrical flower pot on the third page is really sloppy. You're not drawing through your ellipses, you're not drawing it around a minor axis, and so on. I also guarantee that the flower pot was not just a simple cylinder, that there was much more to it than that.
Secondly, I can see that you have a tendency to draw things with a faint line, and then follow them up with a thicker line. For example, as we can see on this page, you draw each leaf in its entirety with a very faint, timid mark, and then outline each leaf fully where it would logically be "visible". Don't do this. I don't want you to be worrying about which lines should be drawn lightly or hidden, and I don't want you applying line weight in such a way that the marks are so long that you're drawing slowly and carefully and making everything stiff. When you go to put a mark down, you must consider whether or not it contributes to your understanding of the forms you're constructing, or if it communicates some key element of what you're drawing to the viewer. If the answer to this is yes, then you consider whether the mark you want to put down will accomplish this job well, or if another mark may do so better (or if an existing mark already does). If you determine that this mark should be added to your drawing, then you draw it confidently. You do not worry about what level of priority it has, whether it should be faint or bold, or anything like that. EVERY mark you put down must be drawn with that same confidence in order to ensure that it flows smoothly. Smooth lines are the cornerstone of solid construction.
Looking over this work, it is clear to me that you can do much better, but you're investing your time in the wrong areas. I want you to try these four extra pages again. Before you do however, I'd like you to go back to lesson 2 and reread the lesson in its entirety. It has been rewritten and reorganized (as of December 25th), so what you see there will likely be quite different from what you remember from a month ago. The first page, about "thinking in 3D" is especially important.
When you do the 4 pages, focus on drawing every mark confidently, from the shoulder, and don't neglect any part of your constructions. Just because we are focusing on form and construction does not mean that we're blocking things in vaguely - everything we see is made up of form. Texture and detail is really just the last little bit - everything is still entirely discernible and recognizable without it.
L2D_
2019-01-18 00:50
Thanks for the assessment. I'm not drawing lightly on purpose, thats how the ink flows from the pen. I'm using the ones you recommended. If I hold the tip down, more ink flows but then im pressing to hard. I think im going to go back to my rotring pen, it doesn't seem to have that issue with me. I'm sure its user error.
I'll go back to lesson2 and find away to get in more practice, I deal with annoying health issues that zap my energy, which is frustrating because I know I can do much better too. I'm going to slow my roll and accept I will get there a bit slower. I appreciate the honest feedback.
VikeriSyndrome
2019-01-17 20:07
Hello Uncomfortable,
I went through lesson 3 and did some homework along the way. I've posted 9 plants. I thought it would be good to include an extra one cause I wasn't sure if I didn't focus too much on detail. If you wish for references I've used I have them "ready-to-post" so if you wish to compare please let me know.
I used pocket brush pen you recommended to fill some shadows, still mastering using it so I apologize for excessive ink.
Looking forward to your opinion on my work.
Link: https://imgur.com/a/L9TFGnb (plants are not uploaded chronologically)
Edit: I've added new branches page to include forking a branch (and is newest chronologically).
Uncomfortable
2019-01-17 22:10
Though you mentioned that the album's order is not chronological, I definitely can see considerable improvement from the beginning to the end. By and large you're doing fairly well, though there are some issues that I want to address.
To start with, in your leaves I can see that you have a tendency to work subtractively when adding detail - that is, you cut back into your leaves. This is technically a valid approach, but one that is much more difficult to do successfully, and is something I avoid whenever possible (and in most cases it is entirely possible). Instead, strive to work additively - building off an existing form you've placed in space rather than trying to cut pieces of it away.
This is covered in the second half of this point.
Your branches are steadily getting better as you continue to practice them, though keep working on getting those segments to come out smooth and consistent - there's some wavering there that undermines the solidity of the resulting form. I'm not sure if you're applying additional line weight or if the process of overlapping segments is just accomplishing the same effect, but if you are doing the former then make sure you draw those marks with the same kind of confidence as you would with any mark you put down. Don't draw them slowly in favour of maintaining control, because this will cause you will end up making a wobblier line that will undermine your form's solidity. In general, line weight can and should be applied more to key areas that require clarification of overlaps, so usually you don't need to add weight to longer sections where drawing confidently becomes a problem. Aaaand if you do, then you can always apply the same overlapping segment technique, as long as you take care to ensure that they flow seamlessly into one another.
A minor note about this drawing - don't be afraid to draw the internal parts of your flower pots (or whatever objects). In this case, you really would have benefitted from actually drawing the full ellipse that defines the soil inside the pot. In general, this flower pot construction was missing a number of additional ellipses that would have made the form much more solid. Also, draw all your lines with the ghosting method - including the line you used for your minor axis there, which was something of an after thought from the look of it.
For your cactus, don't neglect to define where the forms intersect with each other. In this case, I specifically mean where the cactus intersects with the soil inside of the pot. Leaving these edges open and uncapped causes the form as a whole to flatten out. You do seem to have a habit here of neglecting to draw your flower pots with the same kind of focus or interest as you would for the rest of your objects. Everything you draw should be constructed in full.
As we hit the mushroom you drew along with the newer demo, you definitely start to show a much better understanding of form and construction, and capture the flowing nature of your leaves and petals more fluidly. There is still room for improvement, but you're showing marked growth through this set because of these later pages.
The last thing I want to mention is in regards to how you've approached the detail on this flower's petals. When you add detail or texture, don't just loosely put marks down. If you want to put detail down, take the time to observe your reference carefully and actually identify what is going on with the surface of that object. Put down only a mark or two to transfer very specific elements and features that you see in your reference before looking back at the image and refreshing your memory. Do not attempt to hold a great deal of information in your memory, because the moment you look away your brain will go to work simplifying it and throwing away critical information. If we look at the details you've drawn here, there's actually nothing there that really communicates any qualities of the flower petal you were working from - by and large they're just arbitrary lines that don't contribute anything.
You'll find more information on handling texture in the newly rewritten lesson 2.
Anyway! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I do strongly recommend that you give all the new material on lesson 2 a read, as there are concepts there that weren't being communicated quite as well in the previous version of the lesson. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, but keep what I've mentioned here in mind as you do so.
Foreigner24
2019-01-19 02:02
Howdy! I finally finished up lesson 3. I believe this is in chronological order. The first plant (not the demos) was indeed done before I looked at the demos and realized "Wow! This is terrible!".. so I figured I'd throw that in with my other plants for the homework. The arrows I threw in after I finished my plants since the site had changed the requirements in that time. I'm ready to get roasted. Thanks!
Edit: I'm now a fan of mushrooms. Also while I have you, I'm still seriously struggling with any sort of rendering/detail work. I was afraid to do too much with the leafy flower kind of plants, but I went to town with the mushrooms. Any insight into that would be appreciated.
https://imgur.com/a/AJXuK5N
Uncomfortable
2019-01-19 20:45
Very nice work! You're doing quite well throughout, and are applying the concepts covered in the lesson to great effect. There are a few little hiccups here and there that I'll address, but you're overall capturing the illusion of flow for your leaves quite well, and are leveraging contour lines to convey the volumes of forms nicely.
I'm assuming that since this was early on and you seem to have been doing it correctly after this point, this was something you noticed on your own but I'll address it anyway. The leaf on the left-middle of this page shows detail being added subtractively (you're cutting back into the leaf). While this is a valid approach, it's also generally more difficult to make it look good and should be avoided whenever possible. It's not that difficult things should always be avoided, it's more that there are better solutions, the main one being working additively, building out from those forms you've already put down. Like I said though, you are showing an understanding of this through much of the lesson.
Your branches are definitely coming along well, but keep working on getting those edge segments to flow smoothly into one another. Letting your lines run further (rather than stopping them very soon after the last ellipse), even halfway towards the next ellipse can certainly help, as it gives you more opportunity to align them correctly. The way they are now, we can see a pretty stiff transition from ellipse to ellipse and segment to segment.
In this daisy, I'm loving the fact that you've drawn the flow lines with little arrow heads. Don't forget to strive to have your petals actually touch the end of that line though. It's not always easy to achieve this, but upon looking at your results here it does look like you may have been intentionally trying to leave that gap between the end of the flow line and the end of the petal.
You are definitely cutting back/working subtractively here, so as mentioned above, try to focus more on building on top of established forms instead).
Great forms and intersections on this cactus. Two things though - firstly, while I'm not looking at the reference right now, the arrangement of each little bud/protrusion seems a little too even. It may actually be that way, but this is probably a good time to point out the importance of studying even how things are spread out across a surface in your reference. Secondly, you definitely missed a great opportunity to focus on the shadows these forms were casting onto the cactus itself.
Another place where working additively would have been better. You're also letting those edges zigzag back and forth, rather than drawing each ripple individually as you have done elsewhere, and as is discussed in these notes.
I can definitely see why you've grown so fond of mushrooms - I think they're one of the best subject matter to get one's first introduction into really solid form-based constructions, and they're a blast to apply texture to. Ultimately however, when it comes to any kind of texture or detail, the key is taking the time to really look at your reference up close and study the arrangement of the forms that are present, the little details and to get in the habit of taking only a moment to transfer one or two specific marks that relate to particular features you're observing before looking back at your reference to refresh your memory. Memory is really faulty and will strive to oversimplify everything we see, making it very difficult to work for long periods of time without looking back at it. This is especially problematic with leaves because they have so much going on, but our brains insist to us, "no you just need to put down a couple marks".
The revised content for lesson 2 contains fairly detailed notes on the subject of texture, and even includes an extra exercise on it that you may be interested in.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
Foreigner24
2019-01-19 21:30
Awesome! Thank you so much! I probably will look back at the new lesson 2 stuff since I definitely remember the texture exercise being pretty difficult for me to work out. I think going through the texture challenge later would really help with that too. Anyway, thanks again! I'm super excited for lesson 4 and the creepy crawlies ^^
list634
2019-01-20 16:00
It's have been 2 months since I started my final subject (that took almost my time T__T), now I'm feelin guilty for this late submit >"<
btw, I have problem with the sugar cane leave shape, cactus shape, and the palm shape... I can't control the direction and make them look dynamic. Here is my lession 3 \^o\^
https://imgur.com/a/BwuzdsC
Uncomfortable
2019-01-20 20:30
Overall your work here is actually pretty good. There are a few little issues I noticed, but by and large you're employing the methodologies covered in the lesson to great effect, and are demonstrating a good grasp of how to establish the fluid motion of your leaves.
The first issue I noticed wasn't always there. It has to do with how you handle your more complex leaf detail. Towards the bottom left of this page, you're doing it well - you're adhering every little bit of extra detail to the underlying phase of construction. On the leaves on this page however, you're zigzagging back and forth more freely, sometimes sticking close to that underlying construction line, but not always, and it seems like you're drawing with a single stroke, back and forth. As described here, each little ripple should be drawn independently.
Also, on the bottom right of the leaves page, you do appear to be trying to follow the multi-step construction process for more complex leaves like this, but again you're drawing that final edge with a continuous line, and you're jumping gaps that are simply too big. This kind of thing must be done while adhering as closely as you can to the underlying phases of construction, as shown here as well as in this extra demo.
In your branches exercise, you're generally doing a good job of practicing getting your segments to flow smoothly into one another, but keep pushing yourself to draw these segments as confidently as you can. Some of them do tend to look a little stiff, especially the ones where you've made the segments longer than usual. As a result of the increased length, you slow down (which causes the stiffness).
When you're drawing your plant constructions, I'm noticing a tendency to put down lighter construction lines before committing with darker strokes to replace the ones put down previously. This was actually discussed in the form intersections video from lesson 2 - I don't want you to employ this process. Reason being, it has a tendency to cause us to draw more slowly and carefully as we follow up with that "clean up pass", which results in much stiffer linework. Instead, every line you put down must be drawn with the same confidence, without attempting to go out of your way to hide it. We then go over them afterwards to add line weight to certain key areas - generally not the entire length of existing lines, but parts of it instead, and we do so employing the ghosting method as before. Every mark you put down is a part of your drawing, line weight just becomes a matter of bringing some of them forward, or clarifying how certain forms overlap one another.
On this page, I can see where you've covered the branch/stalk below the petals with some really erratic contour lines. Remember that when you're working through these exercises, every mark you put down must be planned and considered. Don't draw mindlessly in this manner, as it results in lines that do not reflect clear intent, while also putting down marks that serve no real purpose. When we go to put a line on the page, we consider whether or not this mark will help us to further understand the construction and forms of the object, or whether it will communicate some key aspect of what we're drawing to the viewer. If it does either of these things, we then consider if its purpose can be accomplished by another mark, or if it is already being accomplished by a mark that is present in the drawing. We only draw marks whose purposes are clear to us, and whose purpose is not already being taken care of. This is the inherent difference between rough sketching and what we're doing here - not to say sketching roughly is bad, just that it is not what we are practicing in these lessons.
You asked about controlling the direction and dynamism of your sugar cane leaves, your cactus and your palms. To be honest, I'm uncertain of what you're referring to in regards to the sugar cane and palms, as I felt both of these had a great sense of flow, and that they moved through space in a believable manner.
For the cacti however, I think I might see what you mean. They do feel somewhat stiff, especially in this one. This isn't necessarily wrong, but this is actually something that comes up in the next lesson (specifically in these notes about how we handle the construction of legs with sausage forms). The trick is that when you draw forms that are essentially stretched ellipses - like you've done for your cacti - those shapes are naturally stiff and have no sense of flowing direction. This is because they are, through the first half of their length, constantly getting wider along both sides, and then through the second half, they are constantly getting narrower. This even roundedness makes it very difficult to portray them as bending, because either side is always getting farther away, or closer together.
When I want to portray a similar kind of form, but one with a greater sense of directional flow, I'd sooner use a sausage form - which is essentially two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Because the width along the length of this sausage is consistent, we can bend and twist it as we wish, conveying a gestural quality.
On the topic of that cactus, I do want to mention two other things:
Make sure that whenever you have forms that interpenetrate each others' volumes in this manner, that you actually define where they intersect by drawing a contour line right where they touch each other.
You definitely overused contour lines here without really thinking about each contour line's purpose. You could have achieved a similar result with just one or two contour lines, and didn't need to create a full wireframe here. The wireframe appearance however actually increased the general stiffness of the drawing as well. That's another great thing about sausages - we don't place contour lines along their lengths, we only reinforce where they intersect with one another, as this is usually enough to convey the illusion of solidity and 3D form. By leaving the lengths clear, we can focus on their gestural fluidity instead.
Anyway, I've had a lot to say here, but your work was still done quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
steadyh32
2019-01-29 17:32
Hey, Uncomfortable
I'm done with Lesson 3 .
Thanks.
Uncomfortable
2019-01-30 00:01
Pretty nice work! You're generally doing a good job, and show a considerable amount of improvement over the set. There are a couple things I'm going to point out, but by and large this submission is quite well done.
Your arrows are looking quite nice, and I can see their sense of flow carrying over into your leaves. I'm also pleased to see how you've applied the leaf construction method quite well - that is to say, the layers of complexity are built one on top of the other, and at no point do you tackle more than one challenge at a time. First you establish the flow, then you build out the basic shape as it moves through space, and finally you add additional spatial information. Keep this in mind, because I'm going to point out later in your lesson where you don't quite adhere to this quite as closely.
Your branches are equally well done - you're developing the ability to construct longer, more complex lines with a series of segments that flow smoothly into one another. There still are visible points where those segments connect if you look for them, but at a glance they're hard to pick up. This will continue to improve with practice, but as it stands they're done very well. I'm also pleased with the spacing of your ellipses - there's not so many that things feel cramped and stiff, but not so few that your individual segments are too ambitious.
Your first few plant drawings are definitely somewhat weaker as you're getting used to the techniques as applied to more complex objects - we can see where the stems, for instance, don't show nearly the same level of control as you demonstrated in the previous exercise. Your leaf constructions are also somewhat stiffer, and you seem to be jumping in a little too complex on your first one.
As you continue to move through these drawings however, you quickly start to get more comfortable and demonstrate your underlying grasp of 3D space and form. The constructions with more tangible forms (like the cherries, the pepper, the mushrooms) show a good sense of volume (though the linework is just a little stiff so try and loosen up, always draw from the shoulder and make sure you're drawing these marks with a confident, persistent pace).
One thing I am noticing however is that you have a bit of a tendency to use line weight a little too liberally. It's getting to the point that there's a visible difference between the underlying construction and the lines of your "final" drawing. Get used to the idea that all of these lines are an equally valid part of the resulting drawing, and that when you add line weight, it is to build a smooth hierarchy, pushing some lines back and some forward, but only to clarify overlaps between forms and strengthen silhouettes. This line weight should always be drawn with the same confidence of the original strokes, so as to avoid stiffening those lines up by drawing too slowly and carefully.
Another point, on the hibiscus (plant 8), I can see you adding some waviness to some of the petals using a continuous line that zigzags back and forth. As explained here, this should be avoided in favour of separate segments that come back to the original, simpler shape's edge.
The last point I want to raise is something I see in a few places, but most prominently in number 9. Notice how your leaves have somewhat wavy edges to them, but don't follow any underlying, previous phase of construction? Here you've jumped ahead too quickly, and have attempted to solve two spatial problems (the overall movement of the leaf through space, and the more local movement of the edges themselves) at the same time. When we tackle multiple problems together, we tend to afford each one less of our focus, and the result tends to feel less believable. Always break things down into individual problems, and solve them separately. First establish how the leaf as a whole flows through space, then add some wavy deviation to those simpler edges.
Anyway! As I said, you're doing quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.
remsummer
2019-01-30 19:34
Some moths ago I stranded with lesson 3 and was asked to redo the Dracaena Draco tree.
During the holiday I finally managed to draw a tree where I think I applied the right technique.
You can find the drawing here: https://imgur.com/a/yQJDfSK.
Thanks for taking the time to assess the drawing. I will update my payment soon to be up to date with new pricing and tiers.
Uncomfortable
2019-01-31 01:07
Nicely done! I had to go back and dig through the homework and feedback that called for this additional drawing, but I can definitely see vast improvement from then to now. Your leaves are considerably more fluid in how they move through 3D space, you've clearly put a great deal of patience and care into drawing each one individually rather than trying to rush through them, and the underlying trunk and branches feel solid and believable. This is looking vastly better than your previous attempt.
So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete! Feel free to move onto the next lesson, and keep up the great work.
remsummer
2019-01-31 08:47
Unfortunately I couldn't reply to the old post anymore because it was already archived. I only have time for drawing during the holidays unfortunately. Sorry for the inconvenience it caused.
Thanks for the feedback. Can't wait to get going with the insects.
boxstudent
2019-01-31 17:50
Hey Uncomfortable, here is my homework for Lesson 3: https://imgur.com/a/hXcgy7d
I also wanted to say, the site overhaul is fantastic! It's what motivated me to finish Lesson 3, after a half-year long period of procrastinating on it.
Thanks in advance for your critique!
Uncomfortable
2019-01-31 22:57
I didn't realize that you were still pledged to the $5 tier (and therefore not eligible for the lesson 3 critique) until after I finished writing it out. Since it's written and all, I'm not going to go and delete it, so here it is - I hope you'll go and adjust your pledge to the correct amount (and I hope you're able to in the next few hours, since it's the last day of the month). That said, you've been a patron for quite some time so it's not a big deal either way.
I'm glad you liked the overhaul - it was a lot of work, but the response has been well worth it.
You've done a pretty great job with this lesson! I can clearly see through the first two exercises (the arrows and the leaves) that you're approaching the material with a strong sense of how these forms flow through 3D space, and a really solid grasp of how the constructional method involves working through problems one at a time, rather than trying to tackle many different challenges simultaneously.
One very tiny point I noticed in your leaves was that while you were doing a great job of keeping the edge detail very close to the simpler outline from the previous phase of construction, there are places where you opt for working subtractively (cutting the more complex detail back from the edge) rather than working additively (building onto the edge). I discuss this a little in these notes. Admittedly both are valid approaches, but I do generally recommend that one work subtractively only when doing so additively is no longer an option.
Also in some places on later pages (like the bottom right of this page) I see you zigzagging that edge detail with a continuous stroke. The same notes I linked before touch on that as well.
Your branches exercise is coming along fairly well. Your ellipses are a touch stiff at times, but you are doing a good job of working with separate segments and getting them to flow smoothly into one another.
I can see a few places where you've tried adding some variation to the width of your branches (like to add knots and such). When doing so, I strongly recommend building the branch with a consistent width, then adding additional forms afterwards as explained here.
Your plant construction drawings are generally done quite well. You're very mindful of how your leaves need to flow through space, and you pay a good deal of attention to the non-plant forms (flower pots and such), taking the time to construct them fully with inset ellipses, minor axes, etc. This is great to see.
I especially loved this drawing, as it captures everything about leaves in all the right ways. Each one flows independently, each one's been constructed separately from its neighbours (rather than trying to avoid the overlaps), the edge detail has been added right onto the previous phase of construction, helping to maintain its solidity and believability, and your use of line weight has helped to organize the drawing overall without being overbearing.
Admittedly, you did try your hand at some particularly complex, challenging subject matter (the winding branches of this one definitely got to be rather overwhelming, and I feel that in certain places it may have caused you to get tired, resulting in somewhat sloppier linework), but you've clearly demonstrated a solid grasp of the material throughout this set.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
boxstudent
2019-02-01 00:09
I've upgraded my pledge tier, hopefully in time. I'm terribly sorry about that, I'd somehow misunderstood your announcement about the new tiers and thought I had until the end of February before needing to upgrade. Hope I didn't cause you too much trouble.
As always, thank you for your critique! I'm pretty excited about Lesson 4. :)
Uncomfortable
2019-02-01 00:15
Oh no, you weren't wrong about that part. It was that prior to this recent update, lessons 3 and 4 were reserved for the $7 tier. Thanks for fixing it so quickly though!
HeXaGoN62
2019-02-01 17:31
Hey Comfy,
https://imgur.com/a/PNSd19t
Going off of your e-mail, I'm thinking lesson 3 is complete. Let me know if I'm mistaken though. Thanks in advance for the critique!
Uncomfortable
2019-02-02 01:26
To start with, your arrows are looking good, so that lays down a solid foundation being able to establish a sense of flow amongst your leaves.
This does carry over into your leaves, although we see it more significantly in the ones that have just a little more wiggle to them. It's clear that you're slowly breaking out of your shell here, pushing yourself to be a little more bold in how you lay them out, so that's good to see.
One recommendation I have is that as explained in the second half of this section, try to work additively whenever possible. We can see here that when you want to add edge detail to your leaves, you have a tendency to cut back from your edges (working subtractively). This isn't wrong by any means, but when we start getting into more complex objects and forms with more thickness and volume to them, it can become much more difficult. There are places even in these flat leaf shapes where adding to the original leaf shape rather than cutting into it would have yielded a stronger, more believable result.
The trick is that once you're doing this at a bigger scale of complexity, you have to be able to convey an understanding of how the form you're cutting into, as well as the piece you're cutting away, all exist in 3D space. We do this by actually defining these pieces, using contour lines (similarly to how we use them in the form intersections). Of course, none of this is necessary here because everything is a flat shape moving through 3D space, but they are deeply related concepts. Getting in the habit of thinking additively will serve you well in the future.
Your branches are starting okay, but they do need work. What stands out to me most is that you're not necessarily always thinking through the degrees of your ellipses before you draw them. There are some cases that look very well done (top right of your first page of branches), but you've got many others on that page that look rushed and inconsistent. Don't forget to apply the ghosting method here, and try to keep the width of your branches fairly consistent throughout.
Admittedly when you sent me that email asking about what I mean by filled pages, I thought you were asking about the plant drawings themselves (in which case devoting one page to a plant is totally fine). When it comes to these exercises, similarly to those in the previous lessons (which all have example pages which show how I fill in all the space I can), it generally is best to maximize the use of the space. There's a lot more room to squeeze branches in here. Sorry for not clarifying that previously.
I do think there's definitely lots of room for improvement here, so we'll want to delve into this exercise a little further.
Looking at your dandelion, your overall construction is actually quite well done. You've drawn each petal, you've been quite thorough in ensuring that every component is drawn individually on the page, and you've stuck to each stage of construction rather than contradicting yourself with new "answers" to the problems your construction has already solved.
I am noticing that your flow lines definitely do feel a little more hesitant and uncertain than they have previously, so your petals do end up coming out a little more stiffly. Always remember that as soon as your pen touches the page, you have to draw confidently and boldly. The ghosting method prior to that will ensure that you're in the best position to avoid mistakes, but the execution phase should involve no consideration to that end.
In your prickly pear, there are two things that stand out to me most:
You're overdoing the contour lines a bit - a lot of these serve no real purpose. When adding contour lines, always think about what they're meant to achieve before actually putting them down. This goes for any mark you draw - you should think about what the purpose of that mark is going to be, whether it is the best mark for that job, and whether another job might do it better (or whether another mark is already accomplishing that task).
You need to be bolder when it comes to letting these forms overlap initially - let them intersect, and then draw the actual contour lines that define their intersections. That is, the line that runs along the surface of both forms, establishing where they merge together into a single object. Right now those intersections are missing, which is unfortunate because they tend to be a much more effective use of contour lines to convey the illusion of volume and solidity.
Jumping ahead, your work on this page is technically moving in the right direction, but your linework is really hesitant again. If you look along the edges, we can even see where you're starting to chicken scratch a little - there's visible disjointedness between the strokes, and they're drawn slowly enough to result in some stiffness and wobbling.
You've approached the cylinder well, but your lack of confidence in drawing your ellipses is what causes it to fall a little more flat. Additionally, watch that bottom ellipse - its degree should be larger (as explained in these notes).
This mushroom you drew from the demo actually came out pretty well. The one point that I feel is missing is that the silhouette feels a little loose and unrefined, and would benefit from a touch of extra line weight here and there to sure up the solidity of the overall form. Right now because the internal details carry much more weight, the form as a whole doesn't feel quite as cohesive. Adding a bit of weight to certain sections of the silhouette (and doing so with a confident, smooth stroke driven with the ghosting method - don't draw these slowly and carefully, otherwise you'll stiffen it up) would do it some good.
Here's what I want you to do:
1 page of organic intersections from lesson 2.
2 pages of branches. Make sure you're making full use of the space on the page.
4 plant drawings, a mixture of those with more leaves, and those with larger masses (like mushrooms).
Above all else, focus on applying the ghosting method across the board - that means thinking and planning before you draw, considering the purpose of the mark you want to put down, and then executing it with smooth confidence. No hesitation.
[deleted]
2019-02-01 20:00
Here it is https://imgur.com/a/kAESUmO
This is a submission of a reassignment you gave me back then.
I wanna say a few things and ask a few questions.
First of all I tried line weight and I tried to draw the line confidently with my shoulder and not with my wrist though sometimes I was off so should I draw the line weight slowly or confidently?
Secondly I drew the lines using the ghosting method which is why there are so many dots but is that okay?
Thirdly yes I still rush sometimes for many reasons and I hope I can start focusing better with how much I'm trying to empty my mind and focus on drawing so forgive me if you find that I rushed a bit.
Fourthly there's this plant with a weird yellow organic shape on a stem and it has little yellow leafs I think or whatever. I drew one of them with the leafs and that made it look like its not organic so how should I tackle this? Do you want to see the reference? I drew the rest as organic shapes though.
Fifthly I finished my drawings like you said I should even though I messed up sometimes I still finished it. I thought you might not like some of them so I drew an extra plant as sorry.
Uncomfortable
2019-02-02 01:49
To answer your questions:
Don't draw your line weight slowly, otherwise it will cause your drawing to appear stiff. Always draw it confidently, applying the ghosting method. Yes, this may result in you missing the mark at times, so generally we try and limit our line weight to small, key areas to clarify how specific forms overlap, but regardless, it's better to slip up on one line than to make everything stiff and hesitant.
Definitely use the ghosting method whenever and wherever you need to (which is generally everywhere), but usually you'd put your points where they'd get engulfed by the line you draw, ultimately making them less noticeable in the end. It's not a big deal right now if they do end up being visible, but I'm not sure why they'd be floating all over (unless you decided not to commit to a specific line, leaving its point floating there - in which case that's fine for now, though you should work towards reducing that).
Not a question! :P
Yeah, I can't really give an answer to this without the reference image.
Good on you!
You actually did a pretty good job overall. The quality of the results varied from drawing to drawing, but I could see you applying the principles of construction throughout.
Your first drawing was a good start, though I think it suffered from being drawn a little small. I'm glad that you drew each sprout/leaf individually, not trying to hide them where they were overlapped by a neighbour. The base of your flower pot definitely should have had a wider degree though, for the reasons explained here.
The sprouting leaves are a little stiff, but not bad by any measure.
Your second drawing demonstrated a pretty decent use of the branch technique. It's definitely tricky to work with ellipses that are quite so small, but you did pretty well. I agree that the leaves are a little stiff, but aside from that, they're still well constructed. The only thing that stands out as a mistake here is that you didn't give your flower pot a rim, so it appears to be paper-thin (which wouldn't be the case). Forms like this should always be given some thickness.
The leaves were very well done in your third drawing - they flow very fluidly and naturally. The flower pot was off, but I can see that you tried to construct it around your minor axis, and that things just went awry. One thing you may want to consider when handling these flower pots is that there are often more ellipses involved than you'd think. If we look at a pot like this one, you can see that this flower pot has two sections. It's got the top cylinder which establishes its rim, and then the bottom, tapering cylinder which starts near the rim and comes down to the base. Thinking about these as separate forms, you'd have two ellipses for the bottom section (one for the base, and one where it connects with the rim), and then another two ellipses for the top section. On top of that, you'd have one last ellipse on the inside of the top, to give the rim a bit of thickness. I demonstrate this here, where you can see the five distinct ellipses.
Jumping ahead to the last drawing, I think you're demonstrating better flower pot construction, along with excellent management of your branch forms, nice flow of your leaves and great use of line weight/blacks to separate out your forms.
Overall I think you do have room for improvement, but it's all of the sort that will come with further practice over time. You're doing pretty well as it stands, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Also, it's worth mentioning - I understand that you struggle with a lack of confidence, but at the end of the day, you're not in any position to judge the quality of your own work. You will get better at that as you continue to work at this stuff, but right now you shouldn't be trusting yourself to assess whether something is "good enough to submit". Your only job is to complete the work to the best of your ability, to follow the instructions as closely as you can, and to submit what you've finished at the end of that. I will handle the rest.
[deleted]
2019-02-08 00:07
Hi, long time no see! That is to say that this exercise took me waaay too long to finish, and i got actually disappointed a bit as a result.
Nonetheless, i pushed through whenever i could and managed to finish in slightly less than two months, just in time for the tiers to raise! Just kidding, i think your work is great and i would support with more if i could :)
Anyway, since i stretched this lesson in a long timespan, you might find some inconsistence in my learning.
I would also like to point out that the plant drawings that you see in the album are not sorted by temporal order - the right one being 5,6,2,1,7,8,3,4 - in case you wanted to notice some progress (as per your instructions, numbers 1-4 are pure constructional and the rest include some level of detail). Why didn't i draw them in order, you ask? I honestly do not know.
Well, here is the album.
Uncomfortable
2019-02-08 21:06
Whew, looks like I have a lot of critiques to do today. Better get started!
You've got a good spread of work here, with some parts coming out quite well, and others showing a few areas that could use some work. There are also a few things that show a bit of a misunderstanding as to the concepts and approaches covered in the lesson, so I'll focus on those issues above all else.
There is a tendency here to jump into forms and shapes that are complicated without first putting down enough structure to support that level of complexity. To put it simply, you're doing too much, too quickly. Construction (as explained here) focuses on the idea that we build up our drawings gradually, starting from the most fundamental, simple shapes and forms, maintaining their solidity and the illusion that we're drawing something three dimensional (there's a good breakdown of this concept in the new lesson 2 material which you should read) rather than a series of lines on a flat page.
For example, some of your leaves across the top of this page, specifically the top left and the one to the right of it, show considerable deviation from the basic constructional process outlined here. We start out with these simple leaf shapes because they allow us to focus on how these elements flow through 3D space first, before worrying about any further detail like frayed or wavy edges. As shown here, we even approach leaves with many different 'arms' in this same fashion, constructing each arm independently before merging them together.
There are definitely drawings where you're approaching it a little more correctly, putting down a simpler form and then adding edge detail, but you do have a tendency to zigzag that detail and treat the previous phase of construction as more of a suggestion than a hard bound - something I address in these notes.
In your branches, you're moving in the right direction but are definitely still struggling to get your segments to flow smoothly into one another. Each segment has a pretty visible tail where it sticks out from the one that proceeds it - you want to make sure that this flows directly into the next one instead. One area where you may be making things more difficult for yourself is that you're drawing these branches to be quite small on the page. Try drawing them bigger, giving yourself more room to engage your shoulder and giving your brain more room to think through spatial problems.
As for your plants,
In this one you're approaching things in a meaningfully constructional manner, aside from the leaves which I touched upon above.
Definitely liking the solidity of your mushroom constructions. Watch how you're applying that line weight though - you tend to go over it with a slower, more careful stroke, rather than executing your marks with a confident, persistent pace as you ought to. This is causing your linework to stiffen up.
I'm loving the flow of these leaves and the tenacity with which you approached drawing each and every little component. Nice work.
In this one you definitely got caught up in detail over construction, and moved forward with forms that didn't feel particularly solid. The linework is quite chicken-scratchy and stiff, which suggests that you may have slipped off the ghosting train here.
Just a couple points about this one. If you've got a box, draw through it so you can fully grasp how it sits in 3D space. Also, the pot itself has a little bit of thickness to it. Leaving the flower pots or vases paper-thin is a common mistake I see from students, and simply requires a slightly inset edge to be added to give the impression of thickness.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do two pages of leaves and two pages of branches. Your overall plant constructions are quite well done, but I think hammering this out will be particularly useful. Make sure you go back and read the updated lesson content for lesson 2 as well, as the notes will be quite helpful as you move forwards.
[deleted]
2019-02-08 23:54
Thank you for your critique! You have actually pointed out many things i felt "wrong" in the first place.
I would like more insight on how to do a more confident weighting. When making a second pass, i noticed i struggle a lot to stay on track and the result is the overall stiffness you noticed in my mushrooms. How can i tackle this?
Anyway, i'll dive into the extra homework first thing in the morning. Thanks again!
Uncomfortable
2019-02-09 01:35
It comes down to the principle that once your pen touches the page, there is nothing you can do to avoid a mistake. All of that is handled beforehand, through planning, preparing and ghosting through the mark you intend to make. Your execution of the stroke should be confident and persistent, without hesitation.
In most cases, line weight is used to clarify very specific overlaps, and is only needed to be applied in limited areas, making it fairly easy to execute. In the few areas where you do need to add weight to a longer line, you can apply something similar to what was explored in lesson 3's branches exercise - getting individual segments to flow smoothly into one another. It is tricky though, and when done wrong, will look chicken-scratchy.
[deleted]
2019-02-09 17:39
Hello again, here are my extras. Hope i did better this time.
Uncomfortable
2019-02-09 19:24
Your leaves are definitely showing a better grasp of how to apply construction in phases, gradually building up that detail. Your branches however suggest that you may have understood what I meant - I probably should have been clearer.
What I said in my critique was,
When I talked about drawing them bigger, I meant wider rather than longer. Making the ellipses themselves larger on the page, more proportionally similar to what I've drawn in my various demonstrations.
I think it would be in your best interest to do one more page of branches. Try and mimic the one I've drawn on the page above, with four or five ellipses drawn confidently to be smooth and even, and spaced comfortably apart so as to give each edge segment the room to flow smoothly from one to the next. When those ellipses are so close together that each segment ends up being quite short, it ends up being rather easy to stiffen up.
[deleted]
2019-02-09 20:29
I tried again many times, and i have to say it got a little frustrating. These branches keep looking stiff to me. While i get your point, i am not entirely sure i can apply it successfully, maybe i have to practice more. Please have a look and let me know if you see some improvement now.
Uncomfortable
2019-02-10 19:12
Definitely an improvement, they're flowing more fluidly, but there is still room for improvement. Here's some redlining to highlight the issues. Your ellipses are still pretty small and cramped, and you should try and extend your segments halfway to the next ellipse, rather than just a little bit past the previous one.
Another little reminder - don't forget that you can, and should, rotate your page as you do this. Always find a comfortable angle of approach while applying the ghosting method to these strokes.
I am going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but be sure to continue practicing this as part of your warmups.
[deleted]
2019-02-10 19:48
Ok, thank you for your patience! I'll definitely practice more in my warmups. See you next lesson!
jagodapo
2019-02-13 15:28
Hi, here is my homework with plant drawings. I am taking it slower now, drawing more between doing drawbox assignment and practicing lines, elypsis and boxes in between. I haven't improved much at drawing plants yet but at least my lines are getting a little more confident and straighter. It helped me a lot to switch to a larger paper size I try to draw more on A3 instead of A4 whenever I can.
I struggle with adding texture to plants, especially leaves. I know it was not the main purpose of this class but I don't really know what to draw it1 especially if the photo doesn't have much detail or there is not much contrast between light and dark areas. Also some leaves are quite smooth and I have no idea how to draw them using only pen. Which is why my homework includes quite a few attempts at drawing leaves.
Here are my drawings: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/a2z08mseybnj14p/AAA-_oTxOedjJ2x8JIsA6WvHa?dl=0
I would appreciate your feedback.
Uncomfortable
2019-02-13 22:55
Nice work! There's definitely a fine sense of fluidity to your linework and it imbues your drawings with a strong sense of flow. Throughout this set, I can also see your understanding of 3D form and construction as whole developing, though there are a few places where your approach can be adjusted in order to yield better results.
What stands out quite a bit to me is how you're approaching your leaves. You put down the flow line for your leaf, and you construct your simplified leaf shape around it - but when it comes time to put down any sort of further complexity or edge detail like on the right side of this page, you treat that underlying construction as more of a suggestion. You'll adhere to them loosely, but you'll zigzag around them as needed. This undermines the kind of solidity we're trying to carry through every pass of construction. Back in lesson 2 I talk about the concept of drawing being similar to lying, and how when you tell a lie you need to keep your story straight. You can't contradict yourself, otherwise you'll undermine the illusion you're creating.
In order to follow that principle, construction is all about building directly on top of the previous phase. We can add forms to what we've already constructed, or carve back into it, but we can't outright ignore it. I explain this further in the context of this exercise in these notes.
If you have more complex leaves that break away from the standard single-flow-line pattern, then you may want to combine that process as shown here.
Another thing I noticed was that you sometimes have a tendency to draw lines a bit too loosely. The biggest example of this is this page. Here, I'm not getting the impression that each line is planned and prepared for beforehand (using the ghosting method), or that each mark is drawn with confidence. Instead, it looks specifically as though you're going out of your way to leave as little of a footprint on the page early on, so as to leave it cleaner for when you add detail and texture.
If you want to go into detail and texture, you're absolutely welcome to - but the way in which you approach the earlier phases of drawing and construction should not change. You should be ghosting through each and every line, and drawing every stroke with the same kind of confidence.
Now when it comes to texture, you certainly did have some struggles, but you also had some decent successes. On this page, we can clearly see where you relied very much on hatching on that larger leaf. This didn't go well because it doesn't really suit the medium we're using to draw. It works great with graphite, or even with ballpoint pen, but when we're working with fineliners that put down a strong, bold mark the moment it touches the page, we need to find alternate strategies to communicate with our viewer.
Always remember that - you're not here to reproduce the texture you see in your photograph perfectly. You're meant to learn how to process the information that is there, and find some way to communicate it to the viewer. This means you don't necessarily have to put every little piece of information down - implying it more carefully through use of shadow as explained back in lesson 2 and controlling the density of your details puts you in control. You are not a slave to the photograph you're working from - it just gives you the tools that you may choose to use.
Now the drawing across the top there on the set of smaller leaves is VASTLY more successful. We can see where details transition from being sparse to dense, and where they get dense we don't get the kind of scratchy, unintentional white/black noise we see in the bigger leaf. Instead you're not afraid to merge those shadow shapes into large swathes of solid black.
The problem with creating "noisy" effects with hatching is that it becomes very distracting to the eye. You lose control of where the viewer is looking, and it generally results in an unpleasant drawing. Making the decision to go full black, or to control how dense your texture is at a specific point allows you to determine exactly how the viewer is going to interact with your drawing. It also leans into how these tools work - as I said before, we're working with a specific medium that behaves in a particular fashion, and we need to work within those limitations, not try and turn our pens into pencils.
For this reason, try to stay away from any kind of hatching lines. Hatching is generally used as a sort of generic texture or sort of marks that people will use when they want to convey light and shadow. I explain in this section from lesson 2 why we avoid shading in this manner altogether. When we do decide to add form shadows like that, it is always as a means to some different end. The shading itself is not the goal, it's just a tool.
When it comes to smooth surfaces, as you mentioned, how I handle them depends. If it's smooth and metallic, I'll probably add a few strong streaks of solid black along the surface of the object, to kind of create a sense of reflectivity. If it's smooth but not particularly metallic or reflective, then I'm more likely just to leave it blank in most areas, being very careful with any detail I choose to add.
Now, rounding back to your construction, I did notice that you were sometimes a little sloppy with your contour lines (like on the flower bulbs on the far left of this page). Always remember that whenever you put a mark down, you've got to think about what its purpose is meant to be, and how that mark can best serve that purpose.
Lastly, your branches are coming along, though keep working on getting those segments to flow smoothly into one another. Ghosting through your lines, drawing from the shoulder, and rotating your page as needed will continue to help eliminate those little visible tails. That said, it is a difficult skill to develop, so keep at it and don't feel that you need to be able to do it perfectly right off the bat.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
creakinglemon
2019-02-22 00:29
Here are my drawings from lesson 3:
https://imgur.com/a/pBuLnKb