Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects
4:47 PM, Tuesday March 21st 2023
There you go.
Starting with your form intersections, you're generally doing well when it comes to the intersections themselves, although I do get a very strong impression that while you're applying the right steps (in terms of using the ghosting method for your linework), your work does appear to be quite rushed. It seems as though in order to fill each page as completely as you did, you sacrificed how much time you spent on each individual stroke, resulting in a lot of lines that weren't as straight as they could be, or ellipses that aren't as evenly shaped as they could have been. It's not that you're not going through the right steps, just that you need to give yourself more time. Always remember that how much time you invest in a task is not determined by how much time you have, or how much time you'd like it to take - it's all based on how much time that task demands. You can read more about this in the "purpose" section from the ghosted planes exercise.
Continuing onto your object constructions, there are two main issues I want to call out.
The first of these is actually something that isn't present across all of your work, and is approached much more correctly in constructions like your power plug, so I think it's fair to say this is an issue you did become aware of, and ultimately worked to resolve. The issue is that the way you were initially leveraging your orthographic plans left a lot of things to guesswork, as shown here on your mug construction.
Ultimately, as explained in these notes (which include a fairly in-depth demonstration), the orthographic plans are all about making our decisions ahead of time so that when we actually construct our object in three dimensions, we're simply following the plan we've already set out - not actively making decisions at the same time as we're actually navigating the 3D relationships between the forms we're laying down. I strongly recommend that you review those notes - while you have definitely made big improvements in how thoroughly you're approaching this tool, there are still some areas where you do leave certain things to be approximated/eyeballed during your construction. One example of this from the later constructions are the buttons on your nintendo DS - you did a good job of pinning down their center points, but ultimately there's no guarantee that they're going to all end up being of the same size. We'd have to establish rectangles for their "footprints" more completely for that. All in all however, definitely a considerable improvement in this area from the start of your homework to the end.
On a similar note, looking back at the mug - specifically its curving handle - you appear not to have applied the notes from this section, which discuss how we should not be jumping straight into a curve, but rather define it as a chain of straight edges, or flat surfaces (and there's a demo linked in that section as well which demonstrates this on a mug as well).
The other issue I noticed comes down to the fact that your initial bounding boxes, inside of which your constructions are built up, are unfortunately very frequently skewed. I've applied some line extensions to a couple of your later constructions here to illustrate this point.
While I don't expect your convergences to be perfect, there are two ways in which, both more generally throughout the course, and more specifically in this lesson, this is really intended to be reduced and mitigated.
Firstly, you are of course supposed to be practicing the exercises introduced throughout the course as part of your regular warmups - so continued, periodic practice of the freely rotated boxes from the box challenge (including the line extensions) will help improve students' ability to judge their alignments - as long as they are of course giving themselves the time to consider how they're orienting their lines as they construct these boxes.
Secondly, in this lesson we are allowed to use a ruler. While that's great for simply ensuring our lines remain straight, there's an additional benefit to it - the ruler gives us a clear view of how our lines will extend off into the distance without having to commit to a particular trajectory. We can line up our ruler and compare its trajectory to those of the lines already on the page, in order to better judge our convergences before committing to a line. This does not appear to have been leveraged here, and we can see that more specifically in how the protrusion towards the front of your power plug, which is meant to run parallel to the main body of the structure, ends up coming off at a fairly sharp angle. In this sense, while continuing to practice those exercises from the first point in your warmups will help improve your overall skills, what we're looking at here is a case of simply not taking the time to apply what we can do right now, in terms of the process, to its fullest potential.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I think it's best to assign some revisions to ensure that you are correcting the procedural issues I've called out here, and ensure that you are indeed doing the best of your current ability without any rushing. You'll find your revisions assigned below.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
1 page of form intersections
3 pages of object constructions
Be sure to give each task as much time as it requires, so as to complete the work to the best of your current ability.
Thanks for the feedback.
Revision: https://imgur.com/a/7tiw8og
Starting with your form intersections:
Previously I stressed the fact that your linework appeared to be quite rushed. I have not seen any real improvement in that regard - your linework is still pretty sloppy, and while I can see you going through the motions of the ghosting method (placing start/end points for your straight lines, for example), lines that should be straight tend to arc a great deal, and your ellipses tend to come out quite unevenly shaped which suggests that you are not executing your marks with confidence. This is critical - the entire ghosting method's purpose is to push us to invest all of our time into the planning and preparation phases, with the final execution stage being one that is pushed through with confidence so as to maintain as consistent a trajectory as possible. The results of your work here still suggest that you're not actually putting more time into the execution of each mark.
Your intersections do have some issues - that's not uncommon at this stage, but some of the choices you've made in drawing your intersection lines (like including corners at arbitrary points) suggest you need to take more care in planning them out. While it's perfectly okay to make mistakes, our actions still need to be based on specific choices we're making, so that if someone were to ask why we went about it in a certain way, we can provide an explanation (even if that explanation is incorrect). What we want to avoid are choices that we make without thinking through them, leaving us without explanation to offer. I've called out some issues I noticed here.
As to your orthographic studies, as shown here you are still leaving quite a bit up to guesswork, as you were before. I also noticed the time estimates ranging between 20 and 40 minutes. For this lesson, it is not at all abnormal for students who are pushing themselves to complete the work to the best of their current ability to have to take an hour, two hours, or even longer in order to do so.
As a whole, what I'm seeing here is that you are still very much underestimating just how much time all of this work requires - down to executing each individual freehanded mark in your form intersections, to thinking through how you were going to specifically position each landmark in your orthographic plan (ensuring that everything is determined specifically, so it could be directly transferred to your 3D construction without estimation), and even to going through the feedback you're provided.
I also do have to ask, given the nature of your linework - are you adhering to the instructions in Lesson 0 pertaining to using the exercises that have been introduced as part of a regular warmup routine? Your results suggest that this may not be the case.
I'm going to ask you to complete the same revisions once again, however keep in mind that our resources in this course are limited. The critiques we offer are provided more cheaply than they cost us for the same labour being done, and that is covered largely by those who allow their credits to expire - meaning that when students demonstrate that they are not upholding their end of the bargain, not investing as much time as they require to do the work to the best of their ability, that can seriously limit how much additional assistance we can offer.
Next Steps:
Please complete the same revisions again - this time being sure to give yourself as much time as that requires. It is entirely normal for a single object construction here to require multiple hours of work (and it's entirely normal for that work to be spread out across multiple sittings as needed).
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.