Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles

8:42 PM, Sunday August 11th 2024

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Hello, I'd like to say that for the helicopter, I was thinking about drawing a bounding box and subdividing it, but the whole thing was so streamlined, it's like a fish flying in the air, just such a thin slice than I just decided to skip it altogether. I hope i make it to the other side. The last two lessons have been toll taking to say the least. Using a ball point pen kind of affected the slowly developed habit of not chicken scratching/ drawing once with confidence, that's not to say that I wasn't ghosting my lines but just that the pen was misbehaving or at least it seemed like a downgrade from the fine liners I was using for the previous lessons. Anyway, thanks for the feedback!

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2:03 AM, Friday August 16th 2024

Jumping right in with the form intersections, your work here is largely well done, especially when it comes to the intersections themselves, and that shows (along with much of the rest of the lesson) that your understanding of the spatial relationships between these forms is coming along very well. I did notice one issue with the cone-box intersection to the upper right, where you did something odd with the corner of the box. Basically you've drawn parts of two different intersections that could be correct, but they cannot be correct together. As shown here, it can either follow the curve you drew (which I went over in purple), leaving the rest of the intersection to occur underneath the box where we don't see it, or it can follow the green-yellow line (which includes the straight portion of the intersection you drew), moving the curving portion further back along the cone.

Additionally, don't forget to draw through all of your boxes - you mostly did, but forgot to on that upper right one - and remember that you want to keep the foreshortening on your forms consistent, which you mostly did, except for the cylinder to the bottom right which was way more dramatic. While the use of hatching isn't really an issue, I would mention that it is worth remembering the purpose of each thing we do - nothing here deals in aesthetics, everything serves a purpose. Hatching for example helps give us a visual cue as to which side of the form is facing the viewer, and which is facing away, when drawing through our forms. We get this just fine by applying hatching to one face, and adding hatching to additional faces doesn't actually provide additional benefit - as far as the practical purpose of those tools is.

Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes, your work here is looking fine, although it wouldn't hurt to extend your lines much farther, so as to give you a more useful analysis of any issues at a glance - these are exercises after all, and that is what this course does. It gives us tools to help develop our skills, and to continue developing them - none of it is a performance, and many students leverage these exercises as they continue forwards, so our goal here is to ensure that students know how to use them most effectively.

That brings us to a core point of my critique, in regards to the vehicle constructions you've done here. Your drawings are fantastic - in the sense that they look very, very good. They do very clearly show that your spatial reasoning skills are very well developed - but again, our purpose here isn't to just make sure the student can draw cool stuff well, it's about understanding the exercises and the tools we impart. And in that regard, you haven't done as well - especially when it comes to the thoroughness the orthographic plans demand.

Your form-intersection-vehicles are pretty well done - a bit more complex than was necessary (in that you didn't stick to primitive forms as you generally would for the form intersections exercise), but you did hold pretty well to what I'm most interested in here. With the way we approach our more detailed construction demos, it's easy to get the idea that we're laying down a lot of planning, but only bringing it together at the last step by connecting these floating edges and creating a final result. Kind of like building a model out of toothpicks. Instead, what we're doing is still more akin to carving something out of a block of wood - start with simple big forms, and gradually whittle them down. The form intersection vehicles help to remind us of this, and keep that process in mind as we continue forwards.

Continuing onto the more detailed constructions, the main issue is that you didn't really use the orthographic plans in the manner described back in Lesson 6, which the lesson material for Lesson 7 does reference. As explained back in Lesson 6, the orthographic plan is all about making decisions, so that when you're drawing the object in three dimensions, you're only following the decisions you already made, rather than trying to balance many different things at once.

Looking at your orthographic plans, they don't pin down specific relationships between the elements you're drawing, and so you're left having to make a lot of decisions as you construct them in 3D. We only have so much in the way of cognitive resources to spend on a task - and so if you have to spend some of that on the decisions, you're not going to be giving your all to the things you're meant to be doing at that stage. Practice is most valuable when those efforts are focused in a singular direction.

That's not to say your drawings aren't well done, or that they don't demonstrate a very strong understanding of 3D space. They absolutely are, and do - but this course doesn't ask us to produce beautiful results. It asks us to follow a process, so that we can push those long, tedious, time consuming things into our subconscious, allowing to rely on stronger instincts when we draw our own stuff. After all, when drawing your own things, you don't want to be having to think about how to do everything correctly - you want to be focusing on the what of what you're drawing, not the how, with as much of those cognitive resources as you can muster.

I will still be marking this lesson, and with it, the course as complete - you certainly have earned it (so a big congratulations is certainly in order), and I know you have the capacity to apply those instructions more effectively, had you chosen to. It's unfortunate you didn't, and that may leave a bit of a sour note on the completion of the course, but I don't think it would be worth your time or mine to worry about this point further. Just be sure to review the orthographic plan material from Lesson 6, so you're aware of what it asks, and so you can, going forward, choose whether or not you wish to include it in your own practice and studies.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:23 AM, Friday August 16th 2024

Guilty as charged about that cone intersection, I did notice that fatal flaw a bit too late and felt very stupid after the fact.

I now realize that I didn't use mirroring at all, and very little bit of subdividing and do see why I couldn't nail the bits that came out wrong. Like the spoiler in the F1 car, it's length came out to be more towards the side thats closer to the viewer and fell a bit short on the side away from the viewer basically making it not aligned with the center. Although I'm sure that's not something I could have avoided just from the information of the side profile/orthographic (because it's not enough data). I guess that's why studying all orthographics instead of just one will prove to be better.

While deciding where the various elements should go I was deciding which cube they would go into from the orthographic, wheel based grid, but after identifying the correct cube, I was trying to zero down in a manner similar to moving a 3D object along the X, Y, Z coordinates of that cube, and I did feel like something was missing as it was considerably difficult for me. Not sure if that way of thinking is alright or something that should be avoided. But I do see what you meant by this (although maybe not completely)

Looking at your orthographic plans, they don't pin down specific relationships between the elements you're drawing, and so you're left having to make a lot of decisions as you construct them in 3D.

Thank you Uncomfortable for the feedback and I hope to catch you in the Discord server every now and then with some questions (hopefully good ones).

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