11:28 AM, Friday July 18th 2025
Hi! I'm here to critique your lesson 6. I see you put a lot of hard work into it but there are some things that are undermining your work and holding you back. Here is a link to some images in which I add corrections and explanations which I mention in the text below.
Since there's a lot covered below, if there's anything unclear or I made a mistake, please let me know or ask, I will reply.
Let's begin:
Form Intersections
I can see that your form intersections improved over time, but there are some issues that I’d like to point out just in case, and maybe make the process easier.
And before I start, this is a fairly difficult exercise, one of the most difficult at Drawabox in my opinion. And it’s also possible I “misread” some overlaps as well because they can change drastically depending on which object is in the front or back. So with that out of the way, naturally we are all kind of led to guessing or drawing these intersections roughly and that is often close to the correct solution, but not quite the solution.
One thing I find particularly helpful is “surface extensions.”
Let’s show it on your box and sphere intersection (planes 3 and 4 in the imgur link above). You drew a smooth curved line which is very close to the correct intersection but is actually incorrect. To see why we will take plane 3, make it much bigger so it cuts the sphere (green plane). Then we will see a green intersection. Another way to think of this is taking plane 3 as a patch representing the water surface and now we just extended it to the entire “sea” in which the sphere is partially submerged. This border between air and water on the sphere is our desired intersection (green circle), but only for plane 3. And the red part is that which is visible on our smaller plane. And this is what we need to draw.
Now since planes 3 and 4 are different we can do the same for plane 4 with the “sea” being “vertical” now. The green intersection curve (circle) is now upright and we can see the red section in the smaller patch that we’re going to draw.
The two red curve snippets connect where the sphere and the two planes meet, creating a kind of sharp point, a kink. And that’s our desired intersection!
The same applies to planes 1 and 2 with the pyramid and sphere. That’s why I wanted you to show the kink.
Now the same logic can be applied to any other combo of planes and spheres (two planes will just create a line) etc. One of the tricky ones is a sphere with the curved part of a cylinder. But we can make that easy as well - unwrap the cylinder. You are already doing this right as I can see from your second image. Now you have an ordinary plane and a sphere as above. You get your intersection which is a circle (which you drew). But now the final trick is to wrap the plane back to the cylinder. And with it you will wrap the circle around the cylinder. That’s what I meant by “show wrapping.”
I hope this makes sense. If something is unclear, don’t hesitate to ask. I will try to answer it ASAP.
Laser Spray
The perspective you’ve chosen is a bit extreme, and the lower part of the spray, the lower ellipse, should be smaller if you observe the reference. That’s the main reason it looks distorted.
You should also align the surfaces to the bounding box - a plane inside the bounding box which is aligned with it should have its sides parallel with all of its sides (see red).
The little cylinder for the opening is hopefully facing away, i.e. we wouldn’t be able to see it if you rendered this? Just mentioning it, the line thickness is probably due to a double pass.
Your use of subdivision seems alright but the top part doesn’t seem to align with the reference.
Pencil Sharpener
You are not aligning your lines, they are not truly parallel / converging to the same vanishing point.
The little handle could have been drawn with a cylinder.
You did a good job showing the volume and the concave surface of the central ellipse.
It would be good to have the 3rd (front) view instead of just the top and side views as the front view holds many important features of this object. For example, the curved “bulging” sides like the object is “squished,” as well as the correct degrees and placements of the ellipse and hole. You could have used bounding boxes for this, but it looks like after doing all the hard work with subdivisions you just eyeballed it. Are you rushing this?
Pot (?)
The bottom ellipse seems to be floating. It’s not bounded by anything. Similarly to the Laser Spray, the lines on the sides of the box are diverging. You did not even try to measure the proportions. I think they would be very useful here in particular, as orthographic plans. You did measure out the front white plastic part (I don’t know how to call it). There seem to be some additional things that are not in the reference so I won’t mention these. You could have used ellipses to construct the top part. The curves used give it a sharper look that’s not visible in the reference.
Shovel
This is a very unusual pick for a bounding box. It does sort of work in this particular case but this is not the goal of lesson 6 or the point of these exercises. This is closer to observational drawing now.
In this lesson the goal is to bound your object with a box of your desired dimensions so you can draw it in any kind of perspective and keep it true to the original, not merely copying it. For example if you have a particular shovel and it is 1/3 metal, 1/3 wood, 1/3 handle, you can draw this box in perspective and then subdivide it directly in that perspective into thirds, and construct your shovel using that. Maybe it’s a bad example because you can look at a shovel and draw it observationally, but what if it’s a spaceship or your favorite original character? Do you see the problem with the big box now?
Also since the plane and box do not belong to the shovel itself, I can’t give you any particularly useful pointers as I’m not certain what the subdivisions mean.
Blender
Here you did a much better job at construction and applying the orthographic plan to 3D. You also used bounding rectangles for the ellipses and cones which I’m glad to see. This is much better than the previous constructions.
There is still room for improvement with measuring. The orthographic view should be much longer, and since it’s shorter than the reference, the 3D is also distorted. Other than that it’s good.
Glass Teapot
The orthographic views are good, but are you really applying them in 3D? The base view subdivision into quarters along both sides should be visible on one of the planes in 3D, top or bottom. But what I see is a subdivision into 5 parts only along the long side, 3 quarters, 2 eights. I assume this is because of the inner part of the handle, and distortion. The approach is correct but that perspective distortion is holding you back.
Regarding the side view, the lines you drew there are planes in 3D. The top, inner container, and bottom ellipses live on those planes. But it seems you used this merely to roughly inform you where to put them, i.e. eyeball it more efficiently. But that’s not the goal of construction. You clearly understand this object, otherwise your orthographic views wouldn’t be as good as they are.
Mouse and Controller
This is similar to the glass teapot. Your orthographic views are very good again, with all the major info for 3D construction. But again you used them more as hints rather than key geometrical points / landmarks.
Because of this the key details of your objects are misaligned like the planes of the thumbsticks on the controller and the curvature of the scroll wheel line on the mouse. You could also use the shape of the bottom side of the mouse to help you lay in the bottom part of the 3D construction.
There is very little keeping you from making excellent constructions. Perhaps the problem is a misunderstanding of sorts. This is not just drawing. This is more like architecture - the core part of this is measuring, drawing and subdividing the planes and constructing, as in mathematically, geometrically constructing, the bounding boxes, rectangles, spheres, and other forms like fillets and polygons and ellipses. Yes, it’s an absolute pain. Yes, it takes an eternity.
But it’s worth the time. I did what you did here in my lesson 7. Not gonna lie, I was just wasting my own time. But someone pointed it out and I also encountered it later on in other books and courses. Now it’s one of the most satisfying parts of drawing, if you can believe that.
A good thing to ask yourself when doing these is - if this were the final blueprint for some building - would I want to walk into it?
If not, then perhaps there is still something you could improve.
Next Steps:
What I would like you to do:
Because you had issues with bounding boxes and ellipses inside them, I would like you to find some cylindrical objects as inspiration like the spray or pot and do the cylinders in boxes exercise with error checking for 20 views. Pick some crazy perspectives. Make them big. See what goes wrong. Try to correct it.
4 more constructions of objects in which you draw through all forms like in intersections. Like X-ray vision. You can pick new ones or redo old ones. Among these 4 make sure there is:
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one cylindrical object like the spray or pot
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one more complex object with many curves/plane changes like the mouse or controller
And if you have a really good cylinder in a box from the 1st part you can reuse it here.
You can do it! And take your time. These kinda make your brain hurt (source: personal experience). But that means it's growing lol. It's also prep for the engineering/technical/architectural horror that is lesson 7.
Make those lines count!