2:52 AM, Tuesday June 24th 2025
It's been a long day. I think you're my 11th critique of the day, I've been working since 11am and it's now almost 11pm. One might reasonably ask, "why are you telling me this," and it's for one simple reason. Submissions like yours, where I get to see all of the hard work come together in a clear grasp of the concepts the course seeks to share, make it all better.
Jumping right in with your form intersections, your work here is almost perfect, and the only mistake I saw was where you accidentally confused the diagonals you used to find the center in this pyramid's base as an edge, and had your intersection line form a corner upon it. Mistakes of course happen, and what's important is that we don't correct them or make too much of a fuss, and simply allow them to stand for themselves. Beyond this however, you're clearly demonstrating an exceptionally strong understanding of the relationships between these forms as they sit in 3D space. Something about how this cone peeks just above the box's top plane to introduce a bit of curve to the intersection is extremely gratifying - but maybe that's just the critique exhaustion kicking in.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, though these could stand to be a bit bigger (drawing bigger is always good for engaging the brain's spatial reasoning), you're executing it very well, and all of your line extensions are applied appropriately to ensure that you're being made aware of anywhere your proportions could be altered or adjusted in subsequent attempts, showing that you're well equipped to use this exercise to its greatest effect going forward.
For your vehicle form intersections, admittedly this is something that confuses most students - they tend to assume it's asking for much more than it is (and so they stray from simple primitive forms and even end up working some subdivision into there). Most still hold to the principle of the exercise, which is to remind us that even though the more detailed demos can make it seem at times like we're only piecing together a final object at the very last stage from a forest of lines, that we're still approaching it from simple to complex, big to small, and effectively working as though we're carving out of a block of wood, rather than building up out of toothpicks.
That said, your work here, while remaining within the confines of what the exercise prescribes, actually demonstrates just how far those primitives can be taken even without the complexity of subdivision or non-primitive forms. The excavator is really stealing the show on this one, although all of your constructions for this section really show how these complex objects are made up of the simplest of building blocks.
And lastly, your more detailed vehicle constructions. Here you demonstrate an exceptional degree of patience and care with every aspect of the construction. Ultimately these are 99% planning, 1% execution, and that can really wear on one's patience. Of course, that's not remotely uncommon in this course, and so our students tend to be better prepared for such things than most - but it's still nice to see it put into practice to such great effect.
Unfortunately, I have no critique to offer in terms of your execution of the concepts from the lesson - the work is very well done - so instead I will give you a couple of stylistic suggestions. These likely aren't things that you're going to make use of, since they're very specific to the limitations of this course (working strictly in black and white, for example, narrows the choices we have down considerably).
A lot of it comes down to how those filled areas of solid black are leveraged as a visual element. Ultimately the more separate things a single type of visual element can potentially represent, the slower the viewer will necessarily be able to interpret what they're looking at. Now, we're talking about a difference in milliseconds, but it does make a difference. So for example, if you use filled areas of solid black for both cast shadows and to represent form shading (in this case we'll use form shading to also refer to the separation of planes, like how in this vw beetle's wheels the side planes are filled with black, while the outer face is left white), then the viewer's brain has to spend an extra moment processing whether what they're looking at is intended to be a cast shadow or form shading, and so their read of the image will slow down, impeding how effectively it gets the idea depicted across.
If instead it is only used to represent one thing, the viewer will process that more effectively. But, which do we use? At this point, we consider what information each one will provide that isn't already present. Cast shadows are very useful, because (and this is a major focus of how we engage with texture in this course) cast shadows through their specific shape define the relationship between the form casting the shadow and the surface receiving it, in 3D space, which is very much up our alley for this course. Form shading however doesn't actually give us much that isn't already conveyed by the silhouettes of our forms (and how those silhouettes "turn" to imply the presence of a side plane alongside a front plane (as shown here - this is what "turning" of the form means, and it took me years to understand that as a beginner with no foundation in spatial reasoning).
So, in effect, using filled areas of solid black for cast shadows in these scenarios is inherently going to give us a lot more information than using them for form shading. Of course this'll change drastically if we're able to include midtones between black and white, but that's a story for another day, and another course (preferably one on shading).
I would also generally avoid using black to identify the local colour of darker objects (the closest example of this is your steering wheel and seat in this truck, although I'll explain in a moment why it's not a great example), simply because it's inconsistent - we're not identifying the local colour of anything else, so singling out dark things doesn't really make sense. Consistency is key.
And, having said that, I'm going to immediately break that rule and mention that when it comes to vehicles, what does generally work out fine is filling in the entire interior of a vehicle with solid black - so taking what you did with the steering wheel and seat, and applying it to the whole, like this - although the more cut-outs, the better. I usually explain it away in terms of the exterior frame casting shadows to cover the interior, but technically that doesn't entirely hold up to scrutiny since you'd get light coming in through the windows.
The last thing I wanted to share is much more subjective. I find that when drawing objects in isolation like this, it's best to fill in the shadows that are cast back upon other parts of the object itself, but to simply outline them when they fall onto the ground plane - and to do so with the same line thickness as the rest of the construction (so like the chevy step van, but without the extra thick line). It keeps the shadow from being too distracting, whereas the self-shadows like those we see on this biplane are extremely... well, the technical term is "juicy".
That's not even a joke, it is very much what they're called.
Anyway! As should be clear through my gushing throughout my critique, your work here is phenomenal. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson, and the course as a whole, as complete. Congratulations!