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10:26 PM, Wednesday June 2nd 2021
Starting with your form intersections, you're doing a good job with the intersections themselves, but have a couple things to keep in mind:
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Construct your cylinders around minor axis lines, and keep the relationships between the ends of the cylinders in mind (in terms of how you're making their scale and degree shift). Should be using minor axes for your cones as well, anything that has an elliptical end. Here your cylinders do admittedly feel a bit sloppy.
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Be sure to engage your whole arm and use the ghosting method when drawing those ellipses. You're a bit mixed here, with some coming out nicely, but a lot of them still come out rather unevenly. Naturally, ellipses are challenging and students are expected to need to practice these a lot more than the mileage they'll get in this course - for that reason, ellipse guides are definitely invaluable tools to help keep us from getting distracted when we work on the more complex challenges of constructing our everyday objects, wheels, and vehicles through the rest of the course.
To that point, all of the "allowances" I list at the beginning of the lesson in terms of what tools you're now encouraged to use are all strong recommendations because of how they allow us to focus on the more complex tasks before us. From what I can see, it does look like you're making ample use of rulers, which is good to see. It does however appear that you're still working with fineliners - which while admirable, is probably something that has held you back in your work here.
Fineliners impose specific challenges that throughout the first 5 lessons help build all kinds of good habits - but here, as we get into heavy subdivision and planning, ballpoint pens really end up being much more effective as a learning tool. Keep that in mind moving forwards.
Looking over your object constructions, there are a number of things I'm very pleased to see. For example, you're taking the time to apply extensive subdivision to your constructions, helping you determine more specific locations for any features you wish to add, rather than relying on approximation. That said, there are issues - for example, I feel that your construction of your boxes are somewhat rushed, without enough consideration towards how your sets of lines ought to be converging towards their shared vanishing points. Most of your boxes come out visibly lopsided or skewed as a result.
The use of a ruler here can actually help a great deal - being that we have this longer tool, we can actually see beyond the intended line to how far it extends towards a certain vanishing point. This allows us to pick up on cases where the line we're about to draw may be shooting off in a different direction - assuming that it's something we're looking for.
Another point I feel didn't really work out too well was the seeming arbitrary use of overly heavy line weight that comes up in totally arbitrary places. This was very much the fineliner at play, in combination with a lack of control. Generally when we get arbitrary areas of heavier lines, it's because the student is trying to hide a mistake in a particular location. Line weight is a specific tool with a particular purpose - to clarify overlaps between forms in specific, localized areas, not to arbitrarily reinforce the silhouette of a construction, nor to hide mistakes. If you make a mistake, leave it alone.
When it comes to the use of the techniques and concepts covered in this lesson, the only construction I felt wasn't handled well was the shoe. In this case, unlike all the others, there were much more significant jumps in constructional steps. The approach from the computer mouse demo was probably the best choice for something like this, which definitely can be approached as a geometric construction, but has elements to it which are more organic (albeit with curves that are more specifically designed). Defining the orthographic layouts within your three dimensional construction, and focusing more on specific spatial relationships (building things out to be boxier first, and then smoothing them out towards the end) would have yielded a much stronger result.
A construction I felt embodied this approach better was this jar - although it has its own issues, with totally variable line weight throughout, and gaps that seem to get wider or narrower in similarly arbitrary ways. There's a lot to be said about just taking more time, being more purposeful with your choices, and using the tools at your disposal (like that ruler) more effectively.
Anyway, all things considered you do have a lot to work on, but you're still moving in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto the 25 wheel challenge - and maybe practice drawing some shoes on your own, I think they'll be an effective subject to practice.
Ellipse Master Template
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.