Cornball

i love this so much xD

Thanks so much for the thoughtful critique! All very valid criticisms - I definitely goofed up on the Impala but by the time I realized it, it was too late T_T

You're so right about the boat - thanks for pointing that out. I figured the proportions would translate well enough between the two techniques, but something clearly went awry. I'll be more deliberate about picking a measuring technique and sticking to it in the future, rather than swapping between the two.

And yeah, I regret filling in the back of the train with black the way that I did - if I had spent more time analyzing what I was seeing, I could have built out the door and the lower portion of the driver cab more clearly, but I was so unsure of what I was looking at and had already spent so much time on it I kinda just gave up and defaulted to filling it with "shadow" to save my sanity xD It's definitely worth being more conservative when filling in areas with solid black, which I'll keep in mind moving forward.

Thanks again for the unprompted critique! I'll definitely try sticking around in the community, I've had only good experiences here and I hope to pay some of that generosity back as best I can!

Hey Simon! Thanks for the unsolicited critique again! Greatly appreciated as always :)

Yeah, the overall structure on some of these (17, 4, and 21 in particluar) got really screwed up early on in the process, but I figured I'd push through anyway. I think your second point is also right, I was losing steam toward the end of this challenge and rather than take some time away and come back when I was feeling motivated, I pressured myself to grind through to the end because I was eager to start on Lesson 7. This was surely a mistake, and it's good to know that the drop in attention is easily noticeable.

And yeah! The sides of the wheels I really didn't know what to do with. Most of the time they're fairly featureless, but I could have at least included a few more ellipses to help indicate that the side bulged out too. Ultimately, I didn't think I had enough room (small ellipse guide and whatnot) to preserve the ratio of tire/hubcap while also indicating this side bulge, so I just left them alone for the most part.

You're so right about watching the degree of the interior ellipses - I should have been more careful about that. There were a few that I even deliberately chose different degrees since I thought it looked more correct, but of course this turned out to be wrong for the same reason that having "parallel" lines converge to different VP's is wrong. Just one of many lessons I learned through this challenge!

In my defense, I really was trying to stick to purely implicit shadows on all of these, but some of the larger tire treads were difficult to imply without explicitly outlining parts of their form. 21 was just wrong from the start, but for the rest that was truly my best effort. It's hard to admit for tires like 11, 8, and 21, but I really was trying my best xD

Thanks again for all the feedback!

YES PLEASE.

I know Imgur sucks at ordering your uploads - if you do it all at once, they upload in a random order and the "rearrange" button often stays grayed out for no reason, but doing it one at a time sucks. I feel ya, but it makes it waaay easier to see your progression.

This is a screenshot of Uncomfortable's reply to a similar question on the Discord.

Basically, review all of the lesson material (instructions / videos) starting from lesson 0, but don't work through the homework exercises. Just focus on doing the exercises in your warm-up pool (for you, this would be all the exercises from Lesson 1) for 1 week per year you spent away from the course, then resume where you left off.

I'm gonna have to disagree with Stulern on this one - I definitely agree that the purpose of using different colors is to provide clarity to yourself and to the grader when assessing your work, but I don't think that using a single color per box is "wrong". Either can work, and in fact I found that as you begin to get more bold and add more overlap to your boxes, having separate colors for each set of edges makes things less clear than having a single color per box.

Take this page from my submission as an example. I used a different color for each set of edges, and the whole thing is a muddled mess. Unless you have 15 different colors of pens, you're going to end up re-using some colors, and since we're extending to the edges of the page, you're going to have some of the same colors overlapping, sometimes to very similar vanishing points, and it just makes the process of identifying which lines belong to which plane more difficult. Not impossible by any means, just harder, which goes against the purpose of using different colors in the first place.

Contrast that page with the last page of my submission, especially toward the top and bottom left. There are four distinct sets of lines that are all overlapping and converging relatively close to one another, but because I know that each color corresponds to a single box, it makes it much easier for me to follow that color back to the appropriate plane - I only needed to use 5 different colors of pen, so there are no repeating colors to get confused with. Each color goes back to the same box, so even in the mess of overlapping lines, I can always quickly pick out which lines go back to where.

TL;DR, do whatever makes it more clear for you. I started out using one color per set of lines, but found part way through the challenge that one color per box ended up being much more clear, especially as you begin to overlap your boxes more.

Thank you! I haven't been drawing very long, at least not seriously. This course has helped a ton, not just on the fundamentals of form and perspective but on shifting my mindset on the practice. I'm sure if you follow this course, you'll be where I'm at soon! Honestly I'm not very far along in my art journey :P

It wasn't until about a year and a half ago that I started to take art more seriously as a discipline. I never had any formal training or took any art classes in school (I studied computer science at uni), so having this course start with the baseline assumption that you have zero experience or knowledge really helped for me. I would draw intermittently throughout my life whenever inspiration hit me, and spend like 6 hours on a piece that was super amateur but I still felt pretty good about for someone with no idea what they were doing.

I think there's a lot of valuable aspects to this course, but the core of its value stems from its focus: developing spatial reasoning skills through exercises in building believable forms in perspective. This is a convergent instrumental goal for any artist - no matter what artistic goals you have, or what branch of art you intend to explore, this will help you anywhere you choose to take your practice. That's what makes this course special - it's an effective on-boarding process for literally any type of artist. This course doesn't pigeon-hole you into a specific style or medium - you can take this knowledge anywhere and everywhere with you, and you will still find ways to benefit from it.

I hope you're able to derive some value out of this course! It's hard work but it's fully worthwhile. Good luck with your journey and happy drawing :)

NO FUN ALLOWED, ONLY BOXES AND PAIN >:-O

jk you're totally right, once you're able to shift your mindset the process can be quite enjoyable, I think the difficult part for most people is just setting their ego aside and allowing themselves to enjoy their "bad" drawings as part of the process of creation.

I like your interpretation. To me, the 50% rule is more of an ethos and mindset than a hard-and-fast rule to follow. Yes, I know its a hard-and-fast rule for this course, but I definitely think you have the right idea by continuing the practice into your other ventures - I kind of think that's Uncomfy's whole point: Throughout your drawing career, if you can foster a healthy relationship to creation then you're much more likely to stick with it when it's hard, and to ultimately achieve your art goals (whatever they may be).

Nah you're not crazy - I only drew these lines for it because I didn't need to reference the top plane (probably because I wasn't approximating my curves correctly), and even then the construction lines for it came out really faint in the scan. I'm also just now realizing I should have drawn through those forms!

Hey thanks for the critique! I always notice more things about my work every time I get outside feedback, so I very much appreciate it, it's very helpful.

I was doing a similar thing for the form intersections - doing my best to figure it out and when I had doubts I used Tinkercad (instead of blender) to check my intuitions.

You're totally right about approximating curves with straight lines before committing to drawing them - that's something I didn't really even notice I was missing until after I had finished the lesson, but it would have helped with my precision significantly and I'll try to apply in lesson 7 when I get there.

I don't own french curves unfortunately - I was re-drawing over my curves to add line weight, especially for the object silhouettes. If I understand correctly, we're supposed to be increasing line weight on the silhouette to help the object read more clearly, so I don't think that was a mistake on my part (if I'm understanding correctly). It was intentional, even though it was a bit messy I thought it was more important that the silhouettes stand out among the mess of subdivisions. I could be wrong though! I definitely concede I tend to make my line weight too pronounced though, so I'll try to make it more subtle going forward.

For the mug, I actually was following the example from the lesson instructions, but it's definitely possible my process was flawed. I started by building out this bounding box for the handle. I didn't built out the top portion with additional masses because my reference mug had a flat top to its handle, so I could just use this plane to define the top of the handle. I cut a diagonal along the bottom to form this bounding box, and built it out from there using the reference points I had. At this point I should have approximated the curves with straight lines line you mentioned before, so I definitely could have improved there, but for the overall construction I think I followed the process well enough? Idk.

You're totally right about the value of trying out different techniques, and I actually completely ignored this process for the nalgene bottle, which contributed to why that loop was angled wrong and was way too long. I for sure should have built that out with a separate bounding box like in the mug demo.

Again thanks for the unprompted critique! I'll definitely work on approximating curves before committing to them and making line weight more subtle in the future.