Uncomfortable

Timezones: Promptathon starts at 12AM (midnight) UTC. So whatever timezone you're in (as represented by a + or a - and a number of hours), you can add or subtract that number of hours from midnight. Alternatively, from roughly the time this comment is posted, it starts in 12 hours.

Posting: This is explained in the announcement, here.

Discord: As LLBR11 noted, being on the Discord isn't required, but it can make it easier to realize that there's no specific expectation of quality for what we're drawing for this event. We're all just interpreting the prompts however, and producing whatever we can - and often it's silly nonsense.

How does it start: The drawabox home page will change to show the promptathon prompts where the "start your journey today" banner currently sits. It'll also move the sketchbook posts higher up and give them more room, since that's where promptathon posts will ultimately go, and homework will be pushed to the bottom.

Try not to worry about what you're doing beyond applying the instructions as they're laid out. This exercise is ultimately about developing your capacity to estimate convergences (given a set of lines, being able to add another line such that it converges consistently with the others), and being able to negotiate that coming from different angles in order to resolve those corners that are dependent on edges coming from multiple directions.

As long as you're adhering to the instructions, then you're fine.

Jumping right into the form intersections, by and large you're doing pretty well as far as the intersections go. At this stage we find it entirely normal for students to run into issues with those intersections that involve curving surfaces, while generally being more confident with those with straight edges. You're definitely past that mark, though there are areas where the curves still give you trouble, as shown on the notes I've drawn on some of your pages here.

When it comes to navigating the curving surfaces (and the exercise in general), the key comes down to focusing on the surfaces themselves, and considering how each one sits in space. You are doing this to a point, but there are cases where - for example, the corner I pointed out on the bottom half - where you may not have been thinking as much about where the shift in trajectory would actually fall. This diagram may help by exploring how to think about these intersections, and we'll revisit this exercise as part of Lesson 7. As it stands, you're progressing as expected, but you will want to keep working at it to keep solidifying that understanding.

Continuing on, one thing to keep in mind when it comes to the difficulty of building up all of the lines are the notes on which tools we permit students to use for this lesson, as noted here. The key takeaways include:

• You are permitted to use a ballpoint pen. You'd likely find this to be much easier to deal with, given that ballpoint can allow you to build up more gradually, whereas fineliners force you to choose between full black and full white, with nothing in between.

• In the same point, we do advise that using a different pen for a clean-up pass should still be avoided. In your case while you didn't switch to a different pen, you did end up employing a sort of "clean-up pass" approach to separate your object from the construction lines - most notably in the nerf gun, which we still want to avoid. You can read more about that in these notes from the form intersection instructions. While your use of it didn't fall into the usual concerns we have surrounding that approach, it still would have been much better to leverage line weight - specifically with a focus on clarifying overlaps rather than applying it more broadly as you tended to in other constructions. This video from Lesson 1 goes over thus in more detail.

Now as a whole, your work in this lesson is very well done. You've clearly pushed yourself quite far to prioritize the core principles espoused throughout this lesson, which largely center around the idea of precision. Precision is often conflated with accuracy, but they're actually two different things (at least insofar as I use the terms here). Where accuracy speaks to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, precision actually has nothing to do with putting the mark down on the page. It's about the steps you take beforehand to declare those intentions.

So for example, if we look at the ghosting method, when going through the planning phase of a straight line, we can place a start/end point down. This increases the precision of our drawing, by declaring what we intend to do. From there the mark may miss those points, or it may nail them, it may overshoot, or whatever else - but prior to any of that, we have declared our intent, explaining our thought process, and in so doing, ensuring that we ourselves are acting on that clearly defined intent, rather than just putting marks down and then figuring things out as we go.

In our constructions here, we build up precision primarily through the use of the subdivisions. These allow us to meaningfully study the proportions of our intended object in two dimensions with an orthographic study, then apply those same proportions to the object in three dimensions, and you've leveraged this very effectively throughout your work here.

When it comes to what you said about your remote control, at first from what was written I assumed that you'd opted to go with less precision here (defining groups of buttons, then perhaps estimating their positions within those groups), and so I was ready to use this as a point of critique, but looking at how you actually approached the problem, you nailed it. You are absolutely correct - you can break up the plan into separate sections with their own underlying sub-subdivisions, which helps you to avoid the specific divisions from one section to bleed over into areas where they're not relevant. This allows you to maintain the full precision of laying down the footprint of each button, but with much less overall complexity. ... not that you didn't still have to deal with a ton of complexity here, but it certainly could have been much worse.

Since that opportunity to provide further critique was a bust, I have only a few minor points to call out:

• For your coffee mug, your approach is entirely correct (the proportions are off but that's not actually a problem as we don't get into how to develop the proportions across multiple dimensions of space until Lesson 7), but you definitely could have gone one small step further and applied curves to the straight edges you'd built up. Generally the mistake people make is that they jump into the curves too soon, without the appropriate scaffolding. In this case, you set up the scaffolding, but didn't apply the curves, which is much less of a concern, but still worth pointing out.

• Now this one's more of an opportunity to provide extra context/information, but when it comes to the black bars we use in the bluetooth speaker demo (which you carried over into your beer can construction), the logic behind those is that since the core structure (a box) doesn't traditionally have rounded corners, using them helped to reinforce the roundedness of the curves. Simply rounding it out on the construction wasn't quite giving a clear enough impression, so this kind of hatching helped. In the case of your can however, since it's already a cylinder, it definitely would have been enough to stand on its own, so the hatching wasn't really required.

Anyway! All in all, solid work - although I definitely would recommend using a ballpoint pen for lesson 7, where the construction lines only get more complicated. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

I think it may be time for you to refresh your memory on how we want students to approach this course. You are holding your work back and doing it over and over because you're worried you won't pass, because you're concerned it's not good enough, but what you're forgetting is that it is not at all your responsibility to determine those things.

We very specifically do not want students exceeding what we assign - so if we ask you to do 2 additional pages, that doesn't mean a dozen pages of practice, followed by 2 more to impress us. It means you do only 2 pages, taking the time to go through the feedback you've received, and to apply it as best as you can right now. All we want is that you don't rush, so that you're giving yourself the best shot you can to apply the information that has been shared with you. Whether it comes out better than before, or worse than before, is not relevant, and it is simply not for you to decide.

The work you submit serves a very specific purpose: to provide the person giving the feedback with a body of work that represents what your understanding of the material is right now, so they can better understand what advice will benefit you most.

So, please review the material I linked to, and then submit your latest two pages of animal constructions in reply to DIO so he can review them and give you advice accordingly. If he decides that you still need additional advice, he may ask you to do a full redo of the lesson (in which case you'll be charged 2 more credits to compensate him for his time, as unfortunately we have limits on how much we're willing to cover as free revisions), but the only way to progress is to follow the manner in which this course operates without any modification.

The top one is marked with an X because the degree of the contour lines are a the same. The orientation isn't a relevant factor here, and if it were flipped the issue would still be present.

Ah, I see.

Well, no worries there - as you've probably noticed we've gradually been working through the lesson material, overhauling it to address inconsistencies and issues like that, while also integrating more of the additional concepts TAs currently share through their feedback into the material itself. But this is a slow process - since we operate on very limited resources (our TAs are paid more than the base price to receive that same feedback in order to ensure they are paid fairly for their time, without undermining our core tenet of providing reliable critique as cheaply as possible), the overhaul is lower in priority than providing official critique and managing the community as a whole. But it does continue to plod forward, steadily.

Currently I'm working through the material for the first section of Lesson 2, so this issue along with others will certainly be addressed.

It is actually initially introduced in the ellipses section of Lesson 1, both in the video at the top (where I demonstrate this concept using circles cut out from cardboard and connected using toothpicks), as well as in the sections in the written material labelled "degree" and "degree shift".

Do your best. Ultimately while I'm sure when it comes to those providing community feedback, ensuring they're ordered well is gonna be more meaningful. For the TAs, we're more accustomed to identifying trends and patterns across the set, which can make it easier to identify issues even when the pages are out of order (and since ordering is particularly difficult with imgur, while imgur also makes it easier to critique in other ways, we understand if the work is all over the place).

Jumping right in with the form intersections, overall you're doing quite well, but I did take some time to be a bit nitpicky with the notes I've written here on your work. Ultimately it can be a bit tempting to be vague or less intentional with the individual marks we make, especially when we're not 100% confident about how the intersection should be defined, but it's important to always go back to thinking about the specific surfaces that are intersecting, and how that is occurring. So for example on the cone-box intersection to the far right, the portion running down the length of the cone is fine (could actually even be straighter) but the second section of the intersection is also fairly straight despite needing to wrap around the rounded portion of the cone. Similarly, for the cone-sphere intersection to the far right, considering which cross-sections are relevant to the intersection (you can also refer to the diagram I shared with you back in Lesson 6 for this) will help you break a complex intersection down into separate parts and solve them individually, to create the whole.

Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes, your work here is looking good - you're adhering to the core elements of the exercise and are applying the line extensions correctly so as to get the most out of it going forward.

Looking at your form intersection vehicles, you've done a great job with these - many students really end up overestimating how much complexity this exercise demands, but you've done an excellent job of sticking to exactly what is requested: simple primitive forms, just like the form intersections exercise, but arranged in such a way that they follow the plan of a vehicle. The main purpose of this is to remind students that despite the later more detailed demos can feel at times like we're only really stitching a bunch of lines together into an object at the very end, that we are indeed still thinking in terms of big and simple to small and complex. Or in other words, rather than building an object out of toothpicks, we're carving it out of a block of wood.

Moving onto your detailed vehicle constructions, by and large your work here is very well done, and there's visible improvement throughout the set, as you get into the groove of working with these tools. In particular, this car came out very well, although it is a little unfortunate that you didn't apply the concepts relating to curves (in the sense of breaking them down into chains of flat edges), especially considering that I called this out to you in your Lesson 6 feedback. This does suggest that there is room for improvement in how you're leveraging the feedback you're receiving (in terms of reviewing it to ensure you continue to apply it going forward), so do be sure to keep that in mind - especially as you move onto other courses, where if feedback is offered, it's generally much more expensive than ours, and you won't want to end up missing out on that value.

One of these points in which you visibly improved is in taking more care in applying the subdivisions, mirroring, and so forth to build out the initial unit grids to define the overall proportions of your vehicles. Looking at this bus, it very quickly jumped out to me that while the front portion of the longer side looked correct, it almost seemed to bend suddenly outwards, so that more of that long side would be visible to the viewer. Digging in more deeply, I did find a number of areas where your application of the subdivisions and so forth was not quite as meticulous as it could have been, as shown here. While those little areas where our diagonals don't quite cross the center at the right point, or where we might accidentally extend a diagonal too far up or down beyond the upper/lower bounds, definitely will accumulate and contribute to the proportions being more and more off, what I think really threw things off was switching from mirroring your unit (as determined by the ellipse at the front) back one at a time, to doing so in groupings of 4, then subdividing some of those. Continuing to go one by one, probably would have been better, and the length of the bus would have been closer to this, pushing more of the bus's actual length into the unseen dimension of depth, which would also better match the difference in degree of the two ellipses used to identify the size of one unit (where one was 30 degrees, and the other was 60).

One last minor point - in this course, due to our limitations in working with ink, and therefore strictly black and white, we generally want to avoid using filled areas of solid black for anything other than cast shadows. Admittedly the demos being older don't always adhere to this (as the overhaul progresses that's something we'll be working to correct and standardize), but basically the reason is that it adds an additional moment where the viewer has to consider whether the filled black shape they're looking at is a cast shadow, or whether it is meant to represent something else (like a void space, or form shading, etc). If every use of a particular visual element always conveys the same kind of spatial information, then the viewer is able to understand what they're looking at that much quicker. A delay of a few milliseconds seems inconsequential to us, but when it comes to things we do on a subconscious level, they can really matter.

And so, I would avoid using it for filling in wheel wells or the space in between a tank's wheels, as well as using it to separate faces that are oriented in different directions (as we can see in the akira bike). One exception is with the internals of the car (specifically as shown here where the internal structures are still visible and windows are cut out). We generally get away with this because ostensibly the external structure of the car is casting shadows into the interior - not technically accurate since light would still come in through the windows, but it's enough for our purposes. Filling in the window's surfaces themselves however, as we see here should still be avoided.

Of course, all of that applies not as global and generalized rules, but specific to the limitations we work under in this course.

Anyway! All in all, very nice work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson, and the course as a whole, as complete. Congratulations!

Jumping right in with the structural aspect of the challenge, your work here is coming along great. You're making good use of your ellipse guides (the far end ellipse does end up being pushed to be pretty wide, but this isn't inherently an issue, and I also understand that sometimes you just have to decide between no degree shift at all or a pretty significant one with the more limited master ellipse guides, so no worries there).

I'm pleased to see that you're making considerations as to how much of a sense of "inflation" the tire requires, based on your reference, and altering just how many cross-sections you set out and how much the midsection widens relative to the outer sides to convey either that the wheel would land with a bounce, or more of a heavy thud, when dropped.

Overall you've handled the spokes of your rims fairly well, but there are a couple ones I want to flag:

• I would avoid filling in the side planes of those structures with solid black, as you did in cases like 25. Generally in this course we want to try and limit our filled areas of solid black for cast shadows, and when we apply it more similary to form shading (such as cases where we fill the side planes in), it can hinder the viewer from being able to parse what they're looking at quite as quickly. It's just an extra moment to figure out whether they're looking at a cast shadow or part of a structure, but it's those little barriers that can make a notable difference.

• For cases like 19 and 4, we run into a conundrum. Here the bike-style spokes are very thin - so thin that it's pretty normal for students to try and represent them as simple and singular lines. The issue with this is that a line isn't enough to properly convey three dimensional structure. For that, we require at minimum two edges enclosing a space between them. While this would lack the internal edges to define it as fully three dimensional, it's still enough to imply a potentially 3D structure, with that 2D shape basically functioning like the silhouette of a 3D form. Of course, this would force us to draw those spokes as being wider than is accurate to the reference - but as our priorities in this course always come back to understanding what we're drawing as it exists in 3D space, this would still be the better call for our purposes here.

Continuing onto the textural aspect of the challenge, here I can see that you've tried to tackle conveying the texture of your tire treads in many different ways, but there's one key issue that binds them all together: by and large you appear to be mainly focusing on drawing what you see, as you see it, which unfortunately skips a crucial step. As explained here in these reminders from the texture section of Lesson 2, what you're missing is the step of "understanding". Ultimately our reference images are sources of information, but our job here is to interpret that information and understand it, using it to make our own decisions as to how to design the shadow shapes we use to imply our textural forms.

It's fairly normal for students to largely forget what's discussed in Lesson 2, and while in such cases the right course of action is to review that material so as to better understand how to apply it here, it's common enough that they don't that the texture section of this challenge serves as a trap, or a reminder, that sometimes things do require reviewing, and concepts can fall through the cracks as we progress through the course. The key takeaway here is that implicit markmaking is key to how we approach conveying texture in this course, and therefore understanding the distinction between it and explicit markmaking is important.

The reason we use implicit markmaking instead of explicit is fairly simple, although it's not always obvious. For example, looking at one of your more texturally dense wheels like number 2 on this page, it looks quite nice floating in the void, all full of detail. But when it becomes part of an existing drawing, all of that packed detail can actually work against you by drawing the viewer's eye to it whether you want it to or not. This interferes with our ability to control composition (which is all about dictating how the viewer experiences a piece, what they look at and in which order), which while outside of the scope of this course, is still something I want to give students the tools to engage with more easily.

Explicit markmaking basically locks us into an agreement with the viewer: whatever is drawn is present, and whatever has not been drawn, is not present. And therefore to convey each textural form, we have to declare its presence explicitly. Implicit markmaking on the other hand gives us more freedom by disconnecting the marks we draw from the specifics of what is present.

This hinges on the idea that we're drawing cast shadows, which as shown in this diagram, can end up being very small and inconsequential where the light is hitting our textural form at a steep angle, or very long and deep in the case that the light hits it at a shallower angle, allowing the shadow to be projected further. In essence, this means the same textural form might cast no visible shadow at all, or a huge one, or anywhere in between, depending on the lighting. For our purposes here we don't even have to worry that much about where the light really is (although this is important outside of our course), we're just running with the fact that they can be different, and therefore we have a greater degree of control over how the texture is conveyed when adhering to these rules.

The last thing I wanted to share on this topic is to do with those cases where it comes to tires with shallow grooves, or really any texture consisting of holes, cracks, etc. it's very common for us to view these named things (the grooves, the cracks, etc.) as being the textural forms in question - but of course they're not forms at all. They're empty, negative space, and it's the structures that surround these empty spaces that are the actual forms for us to consider when designing the shadows they'll cast. This is demonstrated in this diagram. This doesn't always actually result in a different result at the end of the day, but as these are all exercises, how we think about them and how we come to that result is just as important - if not moreso.

Anyway, with that, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete - but I do strongly recommend that you review the texture material from Lesson 2, and also consider if there are any other concepts in the course that you may similarly need to refresh your memory on.