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.