Uncomfortable

Yup, the 25 texture challenge can be done any time after Lesson 2 - although keep in mind you'd move onto the 25 wheel challenge after that, not Lesson 7.

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary axes, for the most part you've done this quite well, but there are a few little cases where you end up forcing your vanishing point to infinity, resulting in no convergence for the side edges, and no shift in the scale between the end closer to the viewer and the end farther away. This isn't something you do all the time - I've definitely had cases where students would carelessly do that for their entire set, which would result in a redo of that section - but it is definitely frequent enough that it's important I call it out.

Forcing vanishing points to infinity in this manner is actually incorrect, and I explain why that is in this section. I'd also recommend going through the very new Lesson 1 boxes videos we released earlier this month, as it goes over the same concepts in greater depth. There's three such new videos:

• Boxes and the Absolute Basics of Perspective Projection

• Foreshortening and Vanishing Points

• and Rotating Forms, Perspective Grids, and Understanding the Concept of Infinity - this last one addresses this issue most directly.

Aside from that, you've done a good job, although I do think that you could stand to put a little more time into applying the ghosting method to your linework - both the straight edges and the ellipses themselves. Right now it seems like you're applying the methodology in part, but that if you gave yourself a few more moments to place the start/end point for the side edges, and to ghost through your ellipses a little more, it'll reflect in better overall control for your linework without harming its confidence.

Unfortunately moving onto the cylinders in boxes, it appears that you may have gone through the instructions a little too quickly, as you seem to have missed a pretty significant part of it. Specifically, you're not applying the line extensions correctly. This exercise is really all about helping develop students' understanding of how to construct boxes which feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square, regardless of how the form is oriented in space. We do this not by memorizing every possible configuration, but rather by continuing to develop your subconscious understanding of space through repetition, and through analysis (by way of the line extensions).

Where the box challenge's line extensions helped to develop a stronger sense of how to achieve more consistent convergences in our lines, here we add three more lines for each ellipse: the minor axis, and the two contact point lines. In checking how far off these are from converging towards the box's own vanishing points, we can see how far off we were from having the ellipse represent a circle in 3D space, and in turn how far off we were from having the plane that encloses it from representing a square.

Unfortunately you only actually extended the boxes' lines, and entirely skipped extending the three lines associated with each ellipse (the minor axis line and the two contact point lines). The purpose of the exercise is to drop an ellipse into the plane on either end, such that it touches all four edges, and aligns as closely as we can manage to the minor axis line defined by the box's spine. From there, we test how far off those three lines are from converging to the box's own vanishing points for each ellipse, so that we can alter our approach for the subsequent page's boxes, and repeat the process.

In neglecting to do this, you've unfortunately skipped over the heart of this exercise, and so this portion will have to be done again. These things happen some times, but it's important to consider why. Looking at the three issues I've addressed over all, it appears to come down to perhaps a lack of care and time investment keeping you from completing the work as assigned to the best of your current ability - in not quite putting in as much into the use of the ghosting method, as well as in not giving yourself as much time as you need to consider the instructions given to you.

I'm going to assign the cylinders in boxes once again as revisions - and of course, be sure to give yourself more time both in completing the work, and in going through the instructions provided (both in the lessons, and in past rounds of feedback you may have received).

Starting with your form intersections, one point I feel helps a lot in this exercise is to avoid drawing your intersection lines all the way around, and instead focus only in their visible portion. While I understand this may seem contradictory to our usual policy of "draw through your forms" (which we should still be doing for the forms themselves), having to worry about the intersection all the way around makes the task more difficult than it needs to be, which can itself become a distraction, demanding more of our cognitive resources and causing us to get less out of the exercise as a whole.

Aside from that, I have a couple points to keep you on the right track:

• When drawing your intersection lines, it helps to start the intersection where the two silhouettes meet, as shown here. While this is not strictly required, it's a good starting point that can help you avoid picking an intersection line that doesn't quite correspond to the specific orientation of the forms at play.

• For forms that have one or two circular ends (so cylinders and cones), be sure to leverage a minor axis line. You're doing so with your cylinders, but it also helps for your cones. Additionally, have your minor axis line extend beyond the length of the form itself, so that each ellipse is fully bisected by it, rather than having the minor axis line start at their center points.

• This diagram may help provide additional information on how to think about the way in which our intersections exist between individual pairings of surfaces, and how that changes when the edge between two surfaces changes into more of a gradual, rounded transition. I'm sharing this mainly just so you have it - for the most part based on your work I believe you understand what's shown there already, but I figured better to share it anyway.

Continuing onto your object constructions, overall you're doing a good job especially when it comes to leveraging the subdivisions and other such techniques involved in building up a scaffolding for our structures. The approach you've used here lines up very well with the core focus of this lesson being on precision, especially in how we shift from the inside-out approach we employed in previous lessons (where we can account for any mistakes in proportion by adjusting the proportions of the later elements as we add them to the construction) to the outside-in approach we leverage here. 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.

While you haven't specifically included any orthographic plans for your objects here, I am inclined to think that you used them, based on how you approached the constructions, and the fact that your mouth wash bottle appears to follow the demonstration that was included with the orthographic plan notes. That said, if you didn't employ orthographic plans, I would strongly recommend that you review those notes - and be sure to include them with your Lesson 7 work in the future.

In terms of areas for improvement, I have two main points to draw your attention to:

• Firstly, remember that as discussed back in Lesson 2, form shading should not play a role in our constructional drawings. Our filled areas of solid black should generally be reserved for cast shadows. This means that the filled black shapes themselves should be designed based on the relationship between the form casting the shadow and the surface receiving it, rather than being shaped more arbitrarily, or by filling in existing shapes in the drawing. If you catch yourself filling in a shape that already exists on the construction (like the side planes of elements in this mouthwash bottle), then it's likely you're falling back to form shading. Also, in that mouthwash bottle you didn't take as much care as you could have in filling in those shapes - remember that this course requires its students to give every task as much time as it requires to be done to the best of their current ability. That means not taking shortcuts, not being sloppy, and putting in a little more time where it's needed.

• Secondly, remember that as discussed here in the lesson notes, you should not be jumping into curves directly, but rather defining them as a chain of straight lines or flat surfaces, then rounding them out. It appears that you were unaware of this when constructing this tape dispenser.

Anyway, the points I've raised here can continue to be worked on as you move through the rest of the course, as Lesson 7 will essentially take the same concepts and have you apply them in a context that will be more demanding and more time consuming, but still largely leveraging the same concepts. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary axes, there are a number of issues here that suggest to me you may not be taking as much care in thinking through each step and decision you make when constructing your cylinders. I say this because the issues are inconsistent - it's one thing to have the same mistake present throughout all your work (which suggests a misunderstanding), but when we see different issues coming up periodically throughout, with some cases where they're done more correctly, it tells me that the way in which you're approaching the work is different each time. That only really happens when the student isn't following the instructions carefully, but rather working from memory and hoping that they'll get things right.

Here are the kinds of issues I'm seeing:

• Not drawing through your ellipses two full times - you sometimes stop at 1 turn of the ellipse, or 1.5 turns, but there are many cases where you are not ensuring that you draw around the shape two full times as required back in Lesson 1.

• Your execution of your ellipses is frequently hesitant, resulting in uneven ellipses. You should be using the ghosting method when drawing all of your freehanded marks, including the ellipses, which focuses on investing your time in the planning and preparation phases, and ultimately executing the marks with confidence, and without hesitation. This helps us maintain smooth, even shapes. When our shapes come out unevenly and show a lot of wobbling, it specifically means that we are hesitating in our execution and not drawing confidently. I strongly recommend that you review the ghosted lines instructions from Lesson 1.

• I'm also not seeing any signs that you're using the ghosting method for your side edges.

• I'm not really seeing signs that you understand how the "degree shift" works. The ellipse on the farther end is meant to be proportionally wider than the end closer to the viewer, while also being smaller in its overall scale. I'm frequently seeing you either maintain the same degree for both ends, or have the far end be the narrower one. This is something that is also covered a fair bit in the Lesson 1 ellipses section, including in the video at the top of that page.

• There are also numerous pages, like the ones with cylinders 91-96, where you seem to force your vanishing points to infinity. This is specifically explained as a mistake in these notes.

As a whole, this part of the challenge was not done correctly. As explained in Lesson 0, it is the student's responsibility to ensure that the work they submit is done to the best of their current ability, taking care to apply the concepts introduced in the previous lessons, and taking as much time as is required to do that. You have not done that here.

Fortunately, the other portion of the challenge - the boxes in cylinders, which are generally much more time consuming - are considerably better overall. This exercise is really all about helping develop students' understanding of how to construct boxes which feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square, regardless of how the form is oriented in space. We do this not by memorizing every possible configuration, but rather by continuing to develop your subconscious understanding of space through repetition, and through analysis (by way of the line extensions).

Where the box challenge's line extensions helped to develop a stronger sense of how to achieve more consistent convergences in our lines, here we add three more lines for each ellipse: the minor axis, and the two contact point lines. In checking how far off these are from converging towards the box's own vanishing points, we can see how far off we were from having the ellipse represent a circle in 3D space, and in turn how far off we were from having the plane that encloses it from representing a square.

In applying your line extensions correctly, you've been able to give yourself plenty of information to assess, so you could adjust your approach for the next page and keep working to get those line extensions to align more consistently.

So- I am going to need you to redo the 150 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, but fortunately because your second section was done well, I won't be assigning a full redo. Just be sure to take much more care in following the instructions. Additionally, keep in mind that you're meant to be practicing the exercises you've been introduced to throughout the course as part of a regular warmup routine, so you continue sharpening those skills, and aren't prone to forgetting to apply them to your work. If you haven't been doing so, that is unfortunate, but be sure to start doing so now. I'd also advise you to review all of Lesson 0, to ensure you haven't forgotten anything else in regards to how this course is meant to be used, and what your responsibilities are.

Jumping right in with your form intersections, I did note some areas where your intersections weren't quite following the surfaces of the forms in question. I've marked out some corrections here - note how we have to look at how each surface flows through space, in terms of whether it's curved or flat. Each intersection is made up of pairs of surfaces, and whenever the intersection line crosses over an edge from one surface to another, it ends up with a sharp corner (since the path is changing suddenly). Keep that in mind - I noticed some places where you used more of a rounded corner as you crossed over an edge, like here, where a sharp corner should have been used instead.

Lastly, this diagram may help demonstrate how these intersection lines behave as they cross edges, and how that changes when we switch from a hard edge to a more rounded transition from one surface to the other.

Continuing onto your object constructions, I'm very pleased to see the fact that you've gone to great lengths to apply the use of subdivision and other such techniques to build out the scaffolding of your objects. That said, I do believe that your linework is at times a little less careful than it could be. The lesson not only allows for the use of tools like rulers, but actually encourages it. While some of those tools, like ellipse guides, won't always work and you will for these object constructions have to freehand a lot of your ellipses, when it comes to straight lines there's really no reason to have to freehand them for this lesson. Some students feel that they want to freehand them anyway, thinking that this will allow them to practice that freehanding more, but this is misguided. There are plenty of targeted exercises whose purpose are to improve our freehanded markmaking. In this lesson however, we want to focus our mental resources on the specific problems introduced here. By taking the extra time of using a ruler, lining it up, and guaranteeing that the line will fall where we want it, we can avoid the kinds of issues that can throw off our construction as a whole.

On top of that, remember that a ruler gives us a visual extension of our lines before we commit to drawing them - so we can track how our line extends off into the distance while we decide how to orient it, allowing us to avoid more of the issues that arise from our trajectories being a little off. Of course, this only works if we think to take advantage of it.

Continuing on, I definitely understand the temptation to go back over your linework with a thicker pen to really make the lines stand out from all the construction lines, but it's really best that you continue to limit your use of line weight in all the drawings throughout this course as explained here - meaning, using line weight to specifically clarify how different forms overlap one another. And of course, as noted in the lesson instructions, don't switch pens when drawing your linework. Stick to the same pen throughout. You can switch to a brush pen when you want to fill in your areas of solid black, but there are two main things you want to stick to when working with those filled black shapes:

• Firstly, they should be outlined/designed using your usual pen, then filled in with a thicker pen or a brush pen.

• Secondly, those filled areas of solid black should be reserved for cast shadows only - meaning that when you're drawing them, you're thinking about the form that's meant to be casting the shadow, and the surface receiving it, and how they relate to one another in 3D space. It's that which determines how we design the shadow shape.

Lastly, overall I think you're definitely making good progress in how you're leveraging the orthographic plans. In your earlier constructions there were definitely more landmarks that were not marked out on the orthographic plan (so you'd have to guess/estimate at them when constructing them in 3D), but as you progressed through I can clearly see that you've made big steps forward in planning your constructions out. I'm especially pleased with how you approached the stapler planning.

All in all, there are definitely things you can be doing better here, but it mainly comes down to the care with which you're using your tools, and giving each action enough time to be done to your best. In terms of understanding the concepts from the lesson, you're generally doing pretty well, and I expect you'll continue improving as you move through the rest of the course. Fair warning - Lesson 7 is more of this, but much more time consuming and demanding, so be ready to give it all you've got.

Before that though, you've still got the wheel challenge, so I'll mark this lesson as complete, and have you move onto it.

Sorry for the delay in replying - I've been traveling and attending a funeral, so I've been a bit behind on my usual work.

Diving right into the critique and starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, I'm very pleased to see the general trend towards improvement over this set. For the first bit, you were definitely a lot less certain about what you were doing and how to set out the relationship between the ellipses on either side - but as you progressed through it, you became more comfortable and familiar with the basic mechanics of how the circles in 3D space change as we slide along the length of the form. You demonstrated the degree shift more consistently, and also demonstrated an understanding - either conscious or subconscious - of how the shift in degree works in tandem with the shift in scale from one end to the other. This can easily be overlooked, but because both function as a manifestation of the foreshortening applied to the form as seen by the viewer, and thus conveys just how much of the cylinder's length is visible right there on the page, and how much exists in the "unseen" dimension of depth.

I'm also pleased to see that you're identifying the minor axis lines carefully and fastidiously, being careful not to get too comfortable with cases where you're just a little bit off. Continuing to identify those small mistakes as you have been will ensure you avoid plateauing your skills in this area in the future.

Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes, you've similarly done a pretty good job here, especially when it comes to applying the line extensions. Essentially this exercise is really about the boxes themselves - the cylinders function as an additional "error analysis" step, allowing us to add additional line extensions. In testing how consistently they converge towards the box's vanishing points, we can identify how much we need to adjust the proportions of the box in order to achieve boxes with ends which are proportionally squared. So, by doing this repeatedly, we gradually hone our internal sense of those proportions, and improve upon our ability to construct boxes with squared ends.

One thing I would push for however is to try your best to have the ellipses touch each edge of their enclosing plane, to ensure that the line extensions applied to each ellipse accurately describe the proportions of that plane. I did notice a tendency to have the ellipse fall a little short on one side in many cases. This is of course something that you may end up doing even while intending to have it touch all sides (mistakes certainly happen, and you'll get better with continued practice), but just make sure that your intent is first and foremost to have it touch all four sides. Secondary to that would be to have it align to the minor axis defined by the line passing through the centers of the two planes, leaving the two contact point lines to be the main discrepancies that can be addressed by shifting the width of the plane in one dimension in subsequent pages. In other words, it cuts down on how many variables we have at play down to just one dimension of the box. If the ellipses touch all four sides and align to the minor axis line, then if our contact points are off, the solution is to make the box wider or narrower on that one dimension.

Anyway, all in all you're making great progress, and are clearly demonstrating a good sense of how to apply these two exercises going forward. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Unfortunately it appears that the URL for your 100 cylinders in boxes is not working, and leads to a 404 error. Please reply to this with a working link, and I'll do your critique as soon as I am able.

Starting with your form intersections, your work here is generally looking good. I would generally advise not drawing the "invisible" intersections (just to avoid the additional complexity in an exercise that is already very challenging), but you seem to have handled it well. Your cylinders in boxes are similarly looking good - I'm pleased to see that you're applying the line extensions correctly. This is mainly what I keep an eye out for, as it's the most critical part of the exercise that will ultimately ensure that students get the most out of the exercise when tackling it on their own in the future.

Continuing onto your form intersection vehicles, there are a couple of issues I want to call out:

• Firstly, it seems that in your linework you're not really adhering to the principles of markmaking from Lesson 1, or leveraging the ghosting method as you should be. You've approached these more loosely, going back over lines repeatedly, and so on. This is rather important, as the purpose of this course is to ensure that students have had plenty of mileage being hyper-intentional with every choice and action they take, so that when they draw more freely and loosely in their own work, it will reflect the underlying thought processes that get shifted down to our more automatic behaviours. If you train your instincts by using your instincts, things end up messy - so throughout this course, it is important that you employ the techniques as carefully and intentionally as you can, and you have not done that here.

• Secondly, remember that every form should be drawn in its entirety, even when they overlap. A notable example where this was neglected was where you cut off the cylinders for the wheels on this truck. I'd also advise you to use a minor axis line to help with the alignment of those cylinders.

Moving onto your vehicle constructions, the linework issues are present here as well. I won't beat the dead horse, but I will point out that the instructions allow and encourage the use of tools like a ruler are not merely allowed, but encouraged. You appear to have used rulers for the subdivision/scaffolding of the construction, but appear to have purposely decided to freehand the constructions themselves. Either you weren't aware of this permission (and should have ensured that you were giving yourself ample time to read through and be aware of them, rereading those instructions as needed), or you made the choice not to follow them.

Another important point I want to call out is that you're not using the orthographic studies correctly. In my critique of your Lesson 6 work, I noted the following:

To that point, I do want to point you to these notes which were added only last week, so I expect you may not have had a chance to see them yet. The short of it is that as I've been critiquing homework for this lesson, I've been putting more and more emphasis on how those orthographic plans can be used. This information will eventually be incorporated into the demo material (although it'll be a while, as we're basically doing that for the whole course), so in the meantime those notes explain how to leverage those techniques best.

The notes I linked there are also referenced again in Lesson 7, here. They emphasize the importance of focusing subdivision where it counts - rather than subdividing the whole thing evenly, as you appear to have done fairly consistently throughout all your orthographic plans, the focus is towards identifying the specific position of all the major landmarks at play in the construction. Furthermore, it's not about identifying them with hyper accuracy (which might require many levels of subdivision), but rather that we are making decisions, choosing whether a subdivision down to 50ths is necessary, or if 5ths will do well enough for our purposes.

The goal is to have the orthographic plans be where we make those decisions, two dimensions at a time, so that when we move to actually putting the construction down we merely need to apply those same decisions in 3D space, using the same subdivision techniques which apply equally in 2D space as they do in 3D space. That way we can reduce how much we're thinking about at any given time - similarly to why we employ tools like rulers whenever they can serve to reduce the mental load.

Looking at the vehicle constructions themselves, you're clearly demonstrating a fantastic level of skill, especially when it comes to your 3D spatial reasoning. I'm pleased to see it, but the homework assigned is not there to demonstrate what you can do now, but rather to demonstrate that you understand how to apply those same exercises going forward to continue building upon them. This is not where your skills should plateau, but in being careless in their execution and not taking the time you require to read the instructions, to read feedback you've received from me in the past, and to apply the techniques you've learned previously throughout the course, you are not getting all you can from what we offer, and you are not holding yourself to the standards laid out for our students in Lesson 0.

You can do better. A lot better. In fact, from what I can see here, in investing that time and care, you can knock it out of the park. I'm going to be assigning revisions below so you can prove me right.

Unfortunately that's not something we're really equipped to help with. As much as we'd love to be able to help in that area, our limited resources keeps our expertise focused on conveying the principles and ideas, and leaving students to ultimately do what they can to apply them in their own situations. There are cases where the student is able to strike a balance themselves, and still benefit from what we can offer, and there are other situations where those hurdles are harder to clear, and run into harder limits in terms of where we can help.

This doesn't at all mean that the student is incapable of crossing that hurdle - just that it may require assistance from people with far greater expertise when it comes to both drawing and dealing with physical disabilities, which we simply aren't able to offer at our price point.

I'm sorry we're not able to help more with this, but with an understanding of the kind of motions we talk about in Lesson 1, you may be able to approach your physician to identify how those might be achieved, or comfortable compromises that may get you some of the way there.

I will say this however - if your disability makes the shoulder motions much less feasible to the point that it won't be something you can reasonably use in your own drawing, then you can make your own call on whether or not you should go through this course with your elbow instead. Most marks can be executed from your elbow decently, we simply focus on the shoulder because those who are able to use it comfortably certainly should. This is one of those "compromises" where it makes more sense to ensure you can comfortably and reliably create the kinds of lines you're going to be using the vast majority of the time, rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water to pursue marks you may only require occasionally.

That said, if the concern really comes down to the rotation of the page being inconvenient (but not impossible - so if you can unclip, rotate, reclip, etc.), then I would still advise that you do so - but I'll leave it up to your judgment.

Lastly, in future submissions make a quick note about the line quality being rough as a result of a disability, so TAs don't call it out needlessly. I imagine that would be rather unpleasant for you on the receiving end.

While it's not inherently an issue, you might want to reflect upon your reasoning. I can see plenty of reasons not to want to use hatching - it can be quite time consuming to execute those individual lines with care, so one might look for an alternative. But even in applying an alternative like filling the plane in with a marker, you still need to employ some care - and I can see that your execution there definitely spills over the lines defining that plane. I can also see that you're going back over lines repeatedly in a manner that looks like you're either attempting to correct mistakes, or without as much care as you could. Always be sure to apply the ghosting method in its entirety, taking as much time as you require to plan out each stroke and ghost through the motion of its execution, before finally committing to a singular stroke, with confidence. Don't hesitate, and don't go back over the line in order to correct it.

And of course, this applies to the application of line weight as well - use the ghosting method.