Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects
5:33 AM, Thursday January 6th 2022
Thanks in advance. (Seriously thanks).
Starting with your form intersections, your work here is quite well done. Not only am I seeing a fair bit of comfort in constructing these forms such that they feel consistent and cohesive within the same scene, but you're also demonstrating a strong understanding of how to navigate both flat-on-flat intersections (like boxes with other boxes) as well as the much trickier curved-on-curved intersections (cylinders/spheres/cones/etc). This demonstrates a well developing grasp of spatial reasoning.
Continuing onto your object constructions, one of the primary principles of this lesson comes down to pushing students to take the time to develop greater precision in their constructions. Precision itself is a term that is often conflated with accuracy, but they refer to two different, but somewhat related concepts.
Where accuracy speaks to our ability to execute the mark we intend to make, precision actually speaks to our having declared specifically what mark we wished to execute prior to every having done so. For example, in the ghosting method's "planning" phase, when drawing straight lines we plot down the intended start and end, defining the characteristics of the mark we wish to execute before actually drawing it. So, when we execute the mark, we can see it in relation to our intentions, allowing us to better judge not only our accuracy, but also to have our intentions exist wholly separately from our results.
In your investment into patiently subdividing your structures and identifying the specific points along the larger bounding box at which each element should be positioned and situated, you have demonstrated a great deal of precision throughout your constructions here. This is meaningful, especially considering that prior to this point, our constructional drawings have been much more forgiving - this often results in some students in being a little more relaxed with this lesson as well - or at least, having a bit of a wake up call to just how much time can be ostensibly invested into each drawing, so as to get as much as we can out of each exercise.
I am very pleased to see that requisite patience in a great deal of your work - although there are some examples where you attempted to cut corners, like with the more arbitrary positioning of this stool's legs. It looks to have been an experiment, and perhaps a realization that cutting down on the investment in precision really undermines the process, and so I have not seen any other such shortcuts taken throughout your other drawings.
Another point I am pleased to see is that, while there are fairly few cases where your initial bounding boxes come out wonky (which speaks again to that well developing grasp of space), the cases where they aren't quite perfect (like the bounding box on this one, which you'd find slight divergences on if you were to extend its lines out), you still moved forward, building upon that imperfect structure rather than trying to fix it. This shows that your focus is entirely on accepting what you've drawn as solid, existing structures, and understanding that once you've committed yourself to a course of action, all you can do is move forward along that path. This results in much more solid results, even if the perspective isn't 100% on point - whereas correcting a mistake would result in an inconsistent mess that would undermine itself, rather than appearing as solid and believable as your constructions do.
Before I call this critique finished, I want to quickly mention that the next challenge you're going to encounter, as this lesson did, does allow the use of ellipse guides. In a lesson like this one, with the wide variety of ellipses one might need (both in scale and degree), it's hard to work with anything but a full set of ellipses (which can be quite expensive), so it is normal for students to still freehand in most cases. That's not quite the same for the wheel challenge and Lesson 7.
For these, the more limited "master ellipse templates" you can find which feature a wider variety of degrees, but limited to smaller sizes, are still extremely useful and beneficial, despite the fact that they only cater to those smaller scales. Given that they're all included in one template rather than requiring a full set, they're also far more affordable, so I do strongly recommend picking one up for the wheel challenge and Lesson 7.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep up the fantastic work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 7.
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.
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