Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

10:00 PM, Thursday September 5th 2024

Drawabox Lesson 6 v2 - Album on Imgur

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This is a redo of lesson 6, as my previous submission did not make proper use of the instruction material, demonstrations, and resource provided in the lesson plan.

This iteration, I took extra care in the Form Intersections and implemented the advice from the previous submission critique.

I was more deliberate with the Object Constructions, making sure that I used plans for curves and orthographic planning for each object. In addition, I selected simpler objects to get more out of the lesson.

I hope that this submission demonstrates a better understanding and execution of the course material, meets the standards and expectations of a student, and more worth the time of the reviewer.

One thing I realized I was having an issue with was subdividing boxes. I can make an orthographic plan, but the end result is not what I aimed for because the subdivisions are not properly aligned with the vanishing point. This process was difficult and I expect it to continue being difficult.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOB5eKX8Y-o

Like anything and noted in this video, it will take practice and time and mistakes are to be expected.

Again, thank you for your time and effort for the official critique of this material.

Let me know of any issues.

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11:20 PM, Monday September 9th 2024

To start, I do want to say, just to dispel any unnecessary anxiety, that your work here is considerably better than last time, and I will be marking it as complete. I do have some additional advice to offer, and my critique will be focusing on where that can be provided rather than treating this as a fresh critique of the lesson material, just so I don't end up repeating myself needlessly. To that end, I'll be trying to structure it in more of a point-form format.

Form Intersections:

  • These are much, much easier to visually parse, and from what I'm seeing your intersections are certainly moving in the right direction - that is, when you do draw them.

  • To that point, I can see that there are a lot of places where you could have resolved an intersection between forms, but where you didn't. None of these are especially major and I'm fine with the quantity of intersections you did include, but there is no real reason to leave any intersections out. So for example, the bottom left intersection between the cylinder/box on this page, the upper-left of this page between the box and cone, etc.

  • One tricky thing with curving intersections is that while you may properly assess the general nature of the intersection that is required, you may be off in just how dramatically that intersection needs to curve. For this, we can pay attention to the cross-sectional slices that are relevant to our intersection. If you take a look at what I've drawn on top of your work here, the top plane of the cylinder is like a knife blade cutting into the sphere, and based on its orientation, the ellipse I've roughly drawn in blue is the cross-section of the sphere that is relevant here. And so, our intersection for that portion is going to follow that cross-section (which is more dramatically curved than the intersection line you drew). Similarly for the other portion of the intersection, we'd look at an orientation based on the lengthwise portion of the cylinder. Another example of this can be seen in this diagram I included in your last critique (this is just as an additional example, not a criticism that you missed this previously - understanding and applying these concepts takes time).

  • Your linework definitely could be a lot better - I'm seeing hesitation and a suggestion that you're not consistently applying the ghosting method/drawing from your shoulder for all of your marks. Some - especially those where I can see the tell-tale signs of the planning phase of the ghosting method - are fine, but there are others where I don't see those signs (suggesting that you may have just drawn them directly). Alternatively you may be applying the ghosting method consistently, but shifting time away from the planning/preparation phases and in turn compensating by spending more time in the execution phase at times, which actually leads to more hesitation, rather than less, and makes it less likely that you'll get that confident execution. It's a common issue where students just slowly forget the core principles of the ghosting method, so it's not a bad idea to review the methodology and reasoning behind it.

  • Also note that a lot of your cylinders are drawn with side edges that are parallel on the page, despite not specifically being aligned perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight. You can refer to my critique of your cylinder challenge work for more information on why this is incorrect, and something to avoid.

Object Constructions

  • I'm pretty pleased with your use of orthographic plans here - you've definitely gone to the other extreme in terms of really hammering out your choices ahead of time, planning things out, and so forth, so I'm glad to see that.

  • I can see a number of places where your linework (when executing curves or larger ellipses) ends up with very thick areas where you've tried to correct mistakes/inaccuracies. There are two main issues with this - firstly, because you're focusing on keeping those ellipses/curves as accurate as possible, you're also breaking away from the principles of markmaking to avoid mistakes (meaning you're avoiding executing those marks confidently, and are instead doing so more hesitantly, steering the strokes and making those shapes uneven/wobbly). A confident but inaccurate stroke is always preferable even if it means your construction suffers for it. Your homework is not there to create a beautiful drawing, it's to go through a process and allow me to assess whether you're going through it in a manner that will help you continue to develop your skills as effectively as possible - a lot of that still involves making mistakes in your execution, which is fine. But changing the approach to create a result that will, in the short term, perhaps be more presentable, works against this goal. Similarly, and secondly, correcting such issues by adding more ink is more short-term focused thinking. It doesn't help you gain more from the exercise, but it does gradually encourage your focus being shifted more to what's going to look more presentable now. Better not to bother correcting those mistakes, and to let the choices you've made stand for themselves. I'm fairly attune to picking up on them even when attempts have been made to hide such mistakes (not in a sense that you're trying to hide them from me, but more from yourself), but in general when submitting work for feedback hiding mistakes is counter to the overall point.

  • This vitamin bottle is a little intriguing. At first I thought it was an example of building up inaccuracy where subdivisions not converging consistently towards VP has a tendency to do that (so my assumption was that you'd found the center on the bottom, subdivided it to create that smaller central plane, and then transferring it up to the top of the box), but looking more closely while there are some edges that were transferred up, there do appear to be some gaps. It's still possible you did this, using a point transferred up from the bottom on one side, and then trying to achieve consistent convergences with other edges (in which case transferring the points up from both sides and simply connecting them together would probably have given you a better result), but it seems more that the subdivision at the top was performed more arbitrarily, with some of these edges being placed more based on approximation. I'm unsure of which is the case, but either way the result is that the center you used for your bottle's cap was different from the center of the bounding box, resulting in that offset appearance.

  • Those subdivisions are, as you noted, tricky beasts when it comes to lining them up correctly in perspective. The box challenge, specifically the exercise of having to estimate your convergences and then check afterwards to see how close/far you were, is very good for getting used to this (and so if it hasn't continued to play a role in your regular warmups, it is very important that you rectify this), but there is another consideration that can help in this lesson: the ruler. Rulers aren't just useful because they allow us to draw straight lines. Rulers also provide us with a visible projection of where that line would go if it were extended, but without needing to commit to drawing that line on the page. As such, it gives us a free line extension we can use to compare to the other lines that one is meant to converge with. It's not perfect, since you still have to try and follow the path of the other lines that have already been drawn, as they extend out towards their VP, but having one free extension of this sort can be very useful in making these judgments, if you know to pay attention to it. This definitely would have helped with the inset portion of the USB stick, in that it would have helped you see that the orientation of the edges you were planning to use to cut that piece out were not running along with the main edges of the larger bounding box.

  • This likely would have also helped with the vitamin bottle (and other constructions where you struggled with those subdivision convergences), along with taking care to go back to "the source" whenever possible - that is, if you want to find the center of one side of your box, don't do it based on another subdivided plane inset within it (since this may already have other inaccuracies baked into it) - do it based on the larger overall plane. Not everything will have that kind of option to work off elements that have been less "tainted" by that inaccuracy, but when those opportunities exist, it's important to identify and take advantage of them.

  • For this milk carton, the alignment for the cap appears to have been approximated - constructing a box first and then placing a cylinder inside of it would have given you something a little easier to place in 3D space than jumping to the cylinder directly.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I've given you a number of things to pay attention to as you move forwards, but ultimately it's going to come down to both positioning yourself so that you've got enough time to apply them within your process, and a lot of continued practice and experience.

Next Steps:

Move onto the 25 wheel challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:29 AM, Tuesday September 10th 2024

Thank you for taking the time to look at my Lesson 6 submission. Your opening statement about dispelling unnecessary anxiety demonstrates your experience as a teacher. It is as you if you read my mind.

It bothers me immensely that my linework, an extremely important fundamental, is this unsatisfactory, especially since you made the same critique of my linework back in the 250 Cylinder Challenge. I believe the issue might stem from not spending enough time in the planning/preparation phases, as I do recall attempting to apply the ghosting method in the Form Intersections.

I will have to review the ghosting method, the concepts, and remind myself to apply them more deliberately in my warm up. I do draw boxes as warmup, but seeing the poor execution of subdivisions, I will have to increase their frequency.

Cylinders with parallel edges look like that because I tried to give little foreshortening to them, but instead made the aforementioned mistake.

I would like to explain what happened with the vitamin bottle, since you found it a little intriguing and the explanation might help someone else in the future.

This was the first drawing where I applied an orthographic plan and I put the plan on the face of the box. I found that putting the orthographic plan is fine for blocky/rectangular objects, but doing this with a cylindrical object caused problems. Primarily, it was difficult to estimate the vertexes of the ellipses if the orthographic plan was on a face of a box. I only have one vertex point I was sure of. To make sure I had more points to get the vertexes and the co-vertexes of the ellipse, I was forced to project the subdivisions of the orthographic plan to the other visible faces of the box. This combined with my poor execution of putting subdivisions in respects to VPs lead to me offsetting the cap with the rest of the bottle.

Putting the orthographic plan in the center plane of a box gave me much more confidence for centering components of an object. I applied this to later cylindrical objects: the coffee mug and the cartridge. This helped with the cartridge in particular, as the bullet looks concentric with the casing. Now I know that the edge points of the center plane of the orthographic plan are the vertexes, allowing me to better plan to apply the ghosting method to the ellipse.

Your comment about the milk carton cap is a revelation. Putting a box and then putting the cylinder inside would have helped make the cap come off perpendicular to the angled surface.

I am glad that I completed Lesson 6, but I cannot shake off this anxiety that something is fundamentally wrong, as if there are cracks in the foundations. Perhaps it is the aforementioned linework deficiencies that trouble me so much.

Regardless, I'll keep pushing on through Drawabox for experience and practice. Time to draw some wheels.

Thank you for giving me the advice to think about as I move forward and for the great amount of time and thought in this critique. The official critiques across the various lessons are gold mines to look back on.

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