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2:28 AM, Wednesday July 28th 2021
Starting with your form intersections, your work here is coming along really well. You're clearly drawing your individual forms with a lot of patience and care both in terms of the execution of your linework, and the orientation of each stroke. Your boxes' edges, for example, are converging well enough for the naked eye (obviously if we extended those lines we'd see mistakes, but we're not looking for perfect here, just good enough). Looking at the intersections themselves, they're demonstrating a strong, well developing grasp of how these forms all relate to one another in 3D space - both in terms of the simpler flat-on-flat intersections as well as those tackling more complex curves.
Moving onto your object constructions, for the most part you're doing a very good job. What is most notable to me, is that while this is the first lesson where we've really thrown students into this kind of dense, complex, and time consuming subdivision of structures, and the building of more precise scaffoldings to help support their constructions, where many students will approach this in a more hesitant manner, you appear to be throwing yourself at it whole-heartedly. You're breaking your structures down to very fine levels of complexity, ensuring that you have ample information present to help you decide how to build out your objects and position their different elements with precision.
Your work isn't always perfect - there are some where you make some mistakes - like the game controller which I'll touch upon in a moment - but that is completely normal as you're exploring something new, and learning to use new tools. The overall trend however is that you're employing those tools very effectively, and that you're understanding how they ought to be applied to the greatest effect.
The game controller really does stand out as the one that gave you the most trouble, and there are a few little issues that we can look at to help explore why that was:
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First, looking at the side-view of your orthographic studies, I noticed that there was definitely more guesswork here. You did the major subdivisions, breaking that enclosure into quarters, but there was definitely a lot more that could have been pinned down - from the specific height of that left thumbstick, to exactly where in the height dimension the controller hit its widest point. There were a lot of these little things left to the eye - and I think you learned from that mistake in other more successful constructions like your ballpoint pen, where you appeared to really go to town on every possible cross section of note.
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When you jumped into the actual 3D construction itself, you ended up using a lot more approximated curves in your construction. As explained here, it is best to first pin everything down with straighter, flatter forms. Basically, create a boxy controller with clearer planes, then round out the corners when you're done. This will also give you clearer landmarks that you can use subdivision to pin down.
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To the same point, it's important to build out anything cylindrical that needs to be oriented in a specific manner in space, starting with a box. Your thumbsticks were definitely good places to start out a little simpler. Boxes are easier to position in space relative to other elements of your construction, and they give you a much clearer structure in which to then build your cylindrical structures.
You definitely did jump into a lot of subdivision here, but an object like this is really demanding - it's actually more akin to some of the cars we'll tackle in lesson 7, which by their very nature are going to demand several hours of work just to hammer out one such drawing.
So! With that, I still think you're doing a great job, and while I focused my time on pointing out the flaws in that one construction, I'm still confident that you've absorbed the core material of the lesson across the rest. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 7.
Color and Light by James Gurney
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.