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11:05 PM, Thursday April 3rd 2025

Jumping right in with your form intersections, it's very normal for me to call out issues here without the student having fallen short of expectations - as the expectation is that they'd be comfortable with intersections involving flat surfaces, but to still have some issues when curving surfaces are introduced. In your case however, I have no such issues to call out. Your work here is fantastic, demonstrates a very well developed grasp of 3D space, and shows that you're very much thinking about each and every intersection in terms of the individual surfaces that are intersecting. That is no small feat, as it involves having to assess exactly what is in front of you, rather than relying on any sort of memorization of "rules", and relying quite a bit on the intuitive skills we're working with students to develop throughout the entire course.

I will still share this diagram with you - I expect that everything demonstrated there will be obvious to you, but I generally share it with students at this stage, and I figured I'd include it just in case it provides or further solidifies some insight.

Continuing onto your object constructions, you're really keeping up the same trend. As a whole, you've done a phenomenal job of adhering to the principles of precision that this lesson espouses and emphasizes. Precision is often conflated with accuracy, but they're actually two different things (at least insofar as I use the terms here). Where accuracy speaks to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, precision actually has nothing to do with putting the mark down on the page. It's about the steps you take beforehand to declare those intentions.

So for example, if we look at the ghosting method, when going through the planning phase of a straight line, we can place a start/end point down. This increases the precision of our drawing, by declaring what we intend to do. From there the mark may miss those points, or it may nail them, it may overshoot, or whatever else - but prior to any of that, we have declared our intent, explaining our thought process, and in so doing, ensuring that we ourselves are acting on that clearly defined intent, rather than just putting marks down and then figuring things out as we go.

In our constructions here, we build up precision primarily through the use of the subdivisions. These allow us to meaningfully study the proportions of our intended object in two dimensions with an orthographic study, then apply those same proportions to the object in three dimensions.

Your use of orthographic plans is incredibly thorough and careful, and it's very clear that you've applied every last tool and concept laid out within the lesson material. This stuff isn't easy, and even with a clear understanding of the material demands an incredible degree of patience to apply correctly, and you're checking every single box. If I'm honest, I really don't have much in the way of negatives to call out, and while I feel a little bad for not being able to provide you with clear avenues to further improve your skills, it's also kind of nice - this is the last critique of a long day, and it's always wonderful to get one like this to cap things off.

So! Thank you for that gift. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the fantastic work - Lesson 7 will be even more demanding than this one, but I have no doubts that you'll be able to conquer it just fine.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for Lesson 7.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:55 AM, Friday April 4th 2025

Thank you! This lesson taught me to focus on planning and being patient. Before, I tried to finish a page/piece in a single session, at times rushing and acting before thinking. I knew that it's important to take as much time as it takes, instead of trying to meet an imaginary and arbitrary deadline, but I didn't have enough discipline to actually stick with this advice until now.

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Framed Ink

Framed Ink

I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.

Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.

Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.

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