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5:12 AM, Tuesday March 16th 2021
Starting with your form intersections, for the most part these are looking good. Your forms are quite solid, and the intersections themselves are generally showing a well developing grasp of the relationships between these forms in 3D space.
Your cylinders in boxes on the other hand have one pretty significant issue - you appear to be drawing them with absolutely no foreshortening whatsoever. Basically as we look farther back in space, there is no convergence to your lines as they recede towards a shared vanishing point. The only situations where this would occur is where the vanishing point gets pushed back to infinity, which in turn only happens when the orientation of the set of lines goes fully perpendicular to the angle at which the viewer is looking. None of these forms fall into that category, and therefore they should all at least have some foreshortening to them. It seems that instead, here you opted to draw all the lines as being parallel in 2D space, instead of thinking actively about how they ought to converge towards shared vanishing points.
It's fine for these forms to have very little foreshortening, but to have absolutely none is fundamentally incorrect. 0 foreshortening tells us that there is absolutely no distance between the ends of the cylinder - that it has a length of 0. Looking at the cylinders however, we can obviously tell that this is not the case, that there is at least some length to each of these cylinders. And so the viewer is left with a visual contradiction.
Continuing onto your vehicle constructions, there are some notable issues.
First, looking at the drawing you did along with the boat demo, while the construction is generally fine, a pretty key issue jumped out at me at a second glance. The verticals of your core construction, specifically the box you started with, are all over the place. You've got verticals that are angling way out, making the far plane of the box much larger than the near plane, in a way that is extremely obvious to the naked eye. I'm kind of confused as to how this happened, given that you have full freedom to use a ruler, which should really simplify eyeballing your perspective convergences by simply having a physical extension of those lines (the ruler) without having to commit to actually drawing it all on the page.
Moving onto the cab-over truck, it quickly jumped out at me that your back wheels were way too wide, so I tried to break down the perspective by taking the measurement of your front wheel and repeating it back in space. As shown here, I'm not really sure what happened but it's likely that when you extended those measurements back in space, something went wrong. At a glance, I'm thinking that you may not have found the correct vertical middle of that plane, and had it much higher than it should have been, which resulted in the distances being exaggerated.
I did notice that you were handling the rounded corners better, although you did still have a tendency to redraw certain lines and bulging them beyond the actual constructed forms, as shown here. In my demonstration I did do something like this, as shown here, but the key difference is that my lines were still drawn to carefully follow the 3D forms they were being extended from, to continue to be laid out in three dimensions, rather than just as lines on a page.
Admittedly this is probably something I'll want to remove when I get around to revising the content for this lesson (which will be far in the future - right now I'm working through revising Lesson 1 content, and am going to get all the way through the course over many, many months), because the nuanced difference of doing this kind of thing "correctly" (ie: while continuing to think about how those edges move through 3D space) and doing it incorrectly (just drawing lines on a flat page) isn't necessarily something students can always grasp at this point.
The bigger issue at hand is that tracing back over your lines like this basically marks that you're treating your drawings as though the construction is now finished, the "decoration" phase has begun. In this "decoration" phase, you're allowing yourself to go back to treating it as a drawing, as lines on a flat page, and doing so completely undermines the solidity and believably of the 3D structure.
This is a big problem, and it's essentially going to be a theme through the rest of this critique. Where the cab-over truck was drawn following a demonstration, so you were basically made to establish a lot more overall structure, your own car drawings saw similar issues occur more quickly. To put it simply, you're just skipping steps way too easily and quickly, and leaping into levels of complexity that simply aren't supported by the structure you've built up. It's like trying to build a building without enough scaffolding.
So here's what I'm seeing:
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You're starting off with a box, and you're constructing it using the constructing-to-scale techniques covered in the lesson. You appear to be using them reasonably well, although your enclosing box tends to have its outermost vertical lines converging in the wrong direction (you can see it pretty clearly here, the side vertical lines are converging upwards, here they should probably be about parallel, just running straight up and down on the page.
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You lay down the proper subdivisions and construct your wheel ellipses. You also subdivide the overall box a couple times.
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Then you jump ahead to drawing the cars from observation, using the enclosing box as a sort of loose guidelines and suggestions, but not actually building out the major forms and constructing from simple to complex. You've fleshed out the overall space in which you'll be working, but then you jump straight into purely observational drawing from then on.
The kind of core structure we see being used, laying out major box forms with a lot of straight lines cutting across 3D space in this step of the shelby mustang demo, is entirely missing here. You jump straight into the more final lines, without first solving the bigger overall problems. As a result, those shapes feel flat. Then when it comes to smaller elements - like headlights, the front grill, etc. - everything comes out very simplified.
While I'm fairly certain you demonstrated a far greater capacity to do this kind of construction back in Lesson 6, it seems that all of your imgur links are turning up 404 errors, so for whatever reason I can only imagine that they've been deleted. What I do have, however, is my response to your last round of revisions for that lesson:
This is so much better. You've really pushed yourself hard on this one, and the results definitely show it. You're demonstrating a much stronger grasp of the construction of your individual forms, a stronger awareness of the shared vanishing points of your sets of lines, and of general patience and care in how you've tackled this one.
Nothing in this course is focused on just drawing a picture. The actual approach used, the process of building up from simple to complex, laying groundwork and scaffolding to support the next phase, which in turn supports the next, etc. is the core focus of this entire course. Yes, it's true - you can draw a half decent car by eye (though there are definitely plenty of areas that get wonky) - but as it stands, you are not constructing them.
You start out on the right foot each time, but I'm not sure what it is - whether it's impatience, boredom or distraction - you jump ahead and fall back into old habits. There's not much more to be said on it, and while you have definitely shown improvement and growth compared to the last set, the core issue is still here.
There is no point in any of these drawings where you are free to just draw lines on the page. Everything needs to be the result of construction, everything needs to be painstakingly built out from simple forms. Even when we hit that end point where we can construct our specific, defined curves (hinging on the scaffolding of straight lines and planar structures), we're still positioning them in 3D space, with no deviation because all the spatial problems have already been solved.
I'm going to assign revisions below, but you need to decide whether you are willing to complete them using the techniques we've explored throughout these long 7 lessons. And if you are uncertain on what those are, then you will have to decide what it is you don't understand, and ask.
Next Steps:
Please submit:
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4 pages of "form intersection" vehicles, as described in the homework section for this lesson. I just noticed that you don't appear to have included these at all. It's basically doing the form intersections exercise, but as though you were building a vehicle (which you should have reference for). Don't worry about proportion here, just on the arrangement of forms. You won't be using an enclosing box or the constructing-to-scale techniques, just focus on laying out boxes, cylinders, etc. into the likeness of particular vehicles.
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4 new car drawings. Each one is expected to take many hours, and will probably need to be spread out over multiple sittings. Each construction should slowly build up from the simple box forms (first building a big box as an enclosure, as you've done correctly thus far, then building more boxes inside of it to gradually flesh out the overall structure. Do not skip steps, do not jump into greater levels of complexity, and do not let go of construction in favour of pure observational drawing.
1:04 AM, Sunday April 4th 2021
9:36 PM, Monday April 5th 2021
Starting with the "form intersection" constructions, this pickup was done mostly correctly, but the other three (especially the first) missed the mark. The point here is not to go out of your way to draw a car from direct observation, drawing what you see. The point is to break it down into simple forms, and to draw those forms in their entirety, as one would for the form intersections.
It's just the form intersection exercise - where you're drawing individual boxes and cylinders - and positioning them according to a reference image of a vehicle. As I said in my previous critique:
just focus on laying out boxes, cylinders, etc. into the likeness of particular vehicles.
Moving onto the main vehicle constructions, you clearly put a lot of time and effort into subdividing your bounding box, which is good, but there always appears to be a pretty significant gap in steps between that bounding box and the vehicle you draw inside of it. You're not building that vehicle up gradually, but instead skipping countless steps as shown here. The result is that your construction feels very flat - there's no established understanding of how the smaller forms actually sit in space, no attempt to define forms with straight lines before rounding out corners, and so on.
I really don't have the time to point this out time and time again, and it isn't working in any case - so instead I'm going to point you to another student's work. I generally don't like having students compare themselves to others, and I'm not doing this to say that I expect you to be able to produce work to this particular level of quality. Instead, this is to emphasize that what you are attempting to do is fundamentally different in key areas from what the course asks.
Here is the work submitted by another student, VeeDraws. When looking through her work, I want you to focus on two things:
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First and foremost, look closely at the levels of construction. She starts off with a bounding box, as you do, but then she breaks them down into smaller box forms inside. This bugatti has a smaller box built right around the core body of the vehicle, and a box around each wheel. She then further subdivides the box around the body and lays down more specific, but still simple forms, very gradually working her way down. At no point does she jump ahead and start drawing based purely on what she sees. Everything she sees is then translated into a form that is constructed. That intermediary phase of breaking it down into a basic form and adding that to the construction is always present. In your work, you tend to hit a point where you simply start drawing what you see, with no intermediary phase.
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She also included a time sheet showing precisely how much time went into each and every drawing. I'm not sure how long you spent on each drawing, but you may want to assess whether you are putting quite as much time as you could. It's not uncommon for students to expect these drawings to be accomplishable in 30 minutes, when in fact they tend to take vastly longer, in the order of hours rather than minutes.
As a side note - she also didn't completely understand the "form intersection" vehicle drawings (I probably need to update and clarify that explanation). For that, this basic form intersection vehicle by LordNed or this one by DDDDKim0525 may serve as better examples. The focus here is entirely on building things up as simple forms. The focus is first and foremost on drawing the forms themselves, drawing through them, and positioning them in space. Don't jump ahead to greater levels of complexity.
Next Steps:
Please try the previously assigned revisions - 4 form intersection vehicles and 4 full vehicle drawings.
At this point, if the examples I've provided don't result in you moving in the right direction, I feel that you may not be entirely grasping the core principles of this course, and what constructional drawing is as an exercise - even though your previous lessons did eventually demonstrate some level of understanding. We may have to consider pushing you back to earlier lessons to explore those concepts more fully, but we'll see about that based on what you submit next.
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