Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

1:44 AM, Saturday May 23rd 2020

Drawabox Lesson 6 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/MBeXRA8.jpg

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Warmups like always, mostly form intersections.

The fire extinguisher gave me such a bad headache that I was actually kind of disoriented for a couple of hours afterwards, but I think it was worth it in the end.

As I think I mentioned to you on the Discord, I don't really understand what I'm doing here on a technical level so I've just been kind of doing things by how I see them in 3D. I'm still unsure if it actually matters if I do most things by intuition.

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5:40 PM, Saturday May 23rd 2020

To start, your form intersections are coming along nicely! There are still some little hiccups, but I think your second and third pages are overall very well done.

Moving onto your object constructions, your work here is actually really well done. I understand that you tend to overthink things, and frankly that is the only thing that tends to hold you back in any capacity, but I am pleased to see that you are really pushing past it all here (painful as it may be).

While your bluetooth speaker drawing comes out fine, the other two demos definitely are a lot bumpier for you. The barrel's hard for everyone, primarily because of two things: proportions and nailing the actual curvature of the barrel itself while connecting the 3 ellipses together. There is always a tendency to make the curve more consistent, but in truth the bulk of the curvature is concentrated towards the ends, causing its profile to swell out more rapidly and flatten out towards the center. One can even see this as being somewhat more pragmatic, as it allows for more volume within the barrel with which to carry medieval man's precious gatorade.

With your mouse, I think you approach it correctly, in that you lay things out, subdivide them, and all that - but what messes things up is that you draw the sides as effectively being as tall as the middle slice. This kind of confusion and disorientation is totally normal, especially when you just start getting used to subdivision hell, and I'd elaborate on it further but you appear to have done a much better job, making it somewhat pointless to do so.

Now, aside from your first three playstation move controllers looking like overly conspicious sex toys, I think that you're definitely demonstrating a well developing grasp of the relationships between all your forms. The placement of the buttons and such are obviously heavily approximated, but I still feel like these constructions are quite well done for what they are. I especially like the one furthest to the right, with the big prominent button and the cut into the form around it.

Your last playstation move controller was hilarious. It clearly discovered that uber eats delivers for that great donut place and got really fat during the quarantine. Setting aside the issues with proportion and the fact that it definitely is a cylinder and not just a box with bevelled edges, the actual technical aspects of this construction are excellent. You've laid the structure out in a way that I didn't actually recognize it as an obese playstation wand, and instead thought it was something real and tangible - maybe some kind of a speaker. Your subdivisions are on point, as are the placements of all of your little elements. So while it's the funniest drawing I've seen in a while for this lesson, I'd say it's still 100% a success. It shows that your grasp of 3D space, construction, and these technical breakdowns is actually very strong. At the end of the day, if your drawing doesn't look anything like the reference, but I'm still convinced that it's something tangible and real, then that is a complete win.

Continuing on from here, all of your drawings are objectively well done. The paper towel dispenser's cylinders are definitely somewhat misaligned - I suspect this is more the fault of the boxes than the cylinders, with them likely not featuring entirely square faces (the kind of stuff we practiced in the cylinders-in-boxes). It's a pretty minor issue here, but it does show the importance of getting those early proportions right. Everything else though - that fire extinguisher especially - are excellent.

The fire extinguisher's head was definitely complex, with all kinds of different pieces having to be positioned relative to one another in very specific ways, and I think you really pulled it off despite the forest of construction lines present. You also employed your line weight pretty well to bring out the object itself without seeming like you were replacing the existing linework.

So! All in all, you have a lot to be proud of here, and despite your struggles you've really knocked it out of the park. As such, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which precedes lesson 7. You're almost there!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:05 AM, Sunday May 24th 2020

but what messes things up is that you draw the sides as effectively being as tall as the middle slice

Could you clarify this? You mentioned I corrected this later on but I'm not really sure how. Is this to do with how the ortho for the mouse demo also encapsulates part of the top plane of the mouse?

1:38 AM, Sunday May 24th 2020

This should answer all of your questions: https://i.imgur.com/wPICXF8.png

6:38 AM, Sunday May 24th 2020

Oh god, the longer I look at it, the worse it gets. D:

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