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6:53 PM, Monday April 22nd 2024

Alrighty, we're off to the races. Jumping right in with your form intersections, overall, you're handling these very well. At this stage, students have had the opportunity to develop their understanding of how different forms relate to one another in 3D space through the constructional drawing exercises we've focused on from lessons 3-5, and while those focus primarily on organic forms, it still feeds back into a more general grasp of 3D space. So, we find it pretty standard to expect students to be pretty comfortable with intersections involving flat surfaces, but to still have some issues when curving surfaces are included in the mix.

I'd say with a fair bit of confidence that you are further along than this - for the most part you're demonstrating a good bit of comfort with intersections involving curving surfaces. I did notice a few little hiccups, as I've called out here, but for the most part the nature of the intersections were correct, it was just the degree of curvature that didn't always match with the curvature of the surfaces in question. So for example to the left the upper part of the intersection had a pretty dramatic turn, and at that point the surface of the sphere would be more shallow. Same thing for the intersection to the right, between the sphere and cylinder - the curve was simply too dramatic.

For the intersection towards the middle, you focused primarily on following the cylinder's surface, but on the left side there we would be able to see where that intersection would follow the sphere a little more dominantly. This demonstration, which explores how an intersection line changes as we go from a sharp and sudden transition between two surfaces into a more gradual, rounded transition, the way in which it impacts the intersection line - although based on your work I think you probably grasp this on some level already.

Oh, one last minor point - remember that when freehand ellipses in this course, we draw through them two full times before lifting our pen. You appear to be stopping after the first turn.

Continuing onto your object constructions, your work here is admittedly a little mixed. At first glance, it's pretty solidly done - your linework is clean and concise, and you're demonstrating an understanding of the subdivision and mirroring techniques demonstrated in the lesson, but where things get a little weaker in exactly how you leverage the tools the lesson arms you with.

The main shortcoming relates to what is explained in this section on the use of orthographic plans. The assignment doesn't require students to include their orthographic plans, but you definitely should be using them (in case you hadn't). Orthographic plans give us somewhere to make our decisions - that is, as explained in the section I linked, the decisions on where different forms are placed, how they relate to one another, how big they should be, and so forth - so that we can avoid having to make them alongside having to worry about actually applying them and constructing our three dimensional object.

In other words, having to observe our reference and decide how to break it down into simple forms, and figuring out where to actually place those simple forms - it's a lot to do all at once, and we only have so much in the way of cognitive resources to bring to bear at the same time. By making these decisions two dimensions at a time, we can process our reference image and decide how we're going to interpret it (after all, the goal here is not to replicate the reference perfectly, but rather to use it as a source of information to inform the object we do construct) without also having to balance a ton of other tasks.

Of course it's very possible that you are using orthographic plans, and just didn't include them (which again, is fine). The structured manner in which you approach your subdivisions in constructions like this AC adapter and this measuring tape certainly suggest a clear, concise decision making process that an orthographic plan would help you to achieve. This brings us to the next way in which your approach can be improved.

Make sure that when you're making those decisions, that you identify all the major landmarks necessary to build your object. I noticed a number of things that would have had to have been approached using some amount of guesswork or estimation, based on observation of the reference, which should have been first identified in specific terms. For example, here on the AC adapter where the specific footprint of each prong was not identified. The bottom two seem to have had their center points pinned down, which is at least something although not enough to ensure the prongs are equal in size, although the top one looks to have been positioned more arbitrarily than that.

Now, by all means, you do a fantastic job of estimating those elements, and for the purposes of this lesson in particular, that's fine. But I called these out because with the complexity of the structures we encounter in Lesson 7, this simply will not suffice (which is why orthographic plans are required there). More importantly than that though, keep in mind that we want to do everything throughout this course as mindfully and intentionally as possible, and avoid relying on our instincts or our ability to estimate by eye. Reason being, everything we do in this course is meant to hone those very skills - those very instincts - so that outside of the course, the shortcuts you take are better informed and more reliable. Using your instincts to train your instincts tends not to provide much benefit.

Similarly, I noticed that your approach to this construction suggested that you may not have gone through the material explained here about breaking curves down into chains of straight edges or flat surfaces, so that their specific nature can be better controlled, before rounding them out towards the end.

Lastly, aside from being upside down it appears that the box you started with for this construction was drawn without any noticeable convergence, resulting in the top plane being severely misaligned to the rest of the structure. I assume this was just a simple mistake, that you misjudged what you were doing, and it appears to be so, since you didn't run into this kind of issue elsewhere. One thing I do want to mention though is that we can use our rulers in novel ways to help us better judge or estimate our convergences. After all - a ruler provides us with a visible extension of whichever line we wish to draw. We can line up the ruler as intended, then look at how that ruler extends out in relation to the other lines of the same set, and adjust its alignment accordingly. As long as we're mindful of those convergences in the first place, this can help us construct initial bounding boxes that are more reliable than just focusing on each line one at a time, and only using the ruler as a tool to provide straight lines.

Anyway, I'll leave you to apply what I've explained here going forward, so you can consider this lesson complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for Lesson 7.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
2:58 PM, Tuesday April 23rd 2024
edited at 3:02 PM, Apr 23rd 2024

Thanks for the detailed breakdown. I absolutely agree, I really had trouble on leveraging the tools provided in the lesson. I tried really hard to find objects that would make for good references in regards to the process the lesson expects us to follow. But they all seemed either way too mechanical or way too organic.

I tried looking for objects with major landmarks falling at standard fractions, midpoints, thirds, quarters but really came up short. And for curvy objects it seemed very baffling to apply the tools of this lesson at all. For example the mouse demo has one thing going which is having an axis of symmetry (although not really because of the thumb buttons). If I take a completely asymmetrical object, I just get lost about how to apply any of these tools to construct it, for example a vertical mouse. All I can think of is drawing a bounding box for such an object and just using french curves or even freehanding it as correctly as i can.

It seems I did overthink it perhaps while selecting my objects as the measuring tape I drew doesn't really have much symmetry or major landmarks placed at standard fractions.

I really did not find the ellipse template to be of much help, while I get they can't cover all the degrees possible but the sizes are too small so either I must draw the objects at a significantly smaller size than I would like to or have to freehand the ellipses

Also the french curves are a bit limited as they mostly provide the ability to draw asymmetrical curves. So symmetrical arcs or partial circles needed to be drawn freehand. And my lack of experience with french curves didn't help either.

Although the biggest thought that kept popping up in my mind was, why? Why the sudden shift from eyeballing and freehanding to something so measured. Short of using technical pens that we have to fill up with ink and hold upright, it feels almost like drafting/technical drawing. While I'm no expert, I'm fairly familiar with orthographics and they have a very technical connotation for me. I'm afraid of Lesson 7. Vehicles seem lightyears ahead of eveyday objects.

edited at 3:02 PM, Apr 23rd 2024
9:36 PM, Wednesday April 24th 2024

I get that the approach is different here, but it is for a reason. At the end of the day, from lesson 3 onwards, we're always focusing on the same core problem (developing our subconscious grasp of 3D space and how to convey that space on a flat page), but we attack it from different angles, with each subject matter and the way in which it frames that problem serving as a different lens through which to look at the same core issue.

Lessons 3-5 involved working from inside-out, an approach that reduced the importance of working with correct proportions, or being particularly precise with each action we took. That is to say, you might start out with some of your initial structure being too big, having misjudged or simply not executing it as intended, but that's okay, and worrying about it as a problem at that point would have been detrimental, by asking the student to focus on more things simultaneously, and spreading their cognitive resources thin.

This lesson is the first one where we really dig into precision in a meaningful fashion. 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.

So yeah - it's a hell of a lot more involved and taxing, but that's because students are ready for looking at space and construction in this fashion. By being forced to think about every choice they make individually, we shift the student's instincts away from just doing things without thinking, to developing the instinctual need to spend even just a split second considering what it is your mark is meant to achieve, before executing it. It makes students less sloppy, and it helps make their drawings considerably more concise, especially when sketching in a looser manner outside of the course.

As to your other concerns, in Lesson 0's tools video where I present the different tools we leverage throughout the course, I talk about different kinds of ellipse guides you can get. I generally encourage students to go for the cheaper option (a master ellipse template), arguing that ultimately there isn't really enough benefit for the course itself to shell out the additional expense for a full set of ellipse guides. The big distinction being that what the full set covers is not too difficult to achieve freehand. Where we really need an ellipse guide, which is both in the wheel challenge, and in Lesson 7 specifically for the "Constructing to Scale" technique you'll come across in one of that lesson's videos. For the rest, if you don't have a full set, freehanding is still probably preferable. Just make sure that when you do freehand those ellipses, you're setting up structure to define the ellipse you want to make (in other words, establish a minor axis and a bounding plane, then drop an ellipse into it, instead of jumping straight to the ellipse.

Lastly, yeah - Lesson 7 is a doozy. It's going to take a lot of time. While it's definitely on the more extreme end, I've had students who spent upwards of 10 hours on a single vehicle construction. But Drawabox isn't a course where you either complete the whole thing, or you get nothing out of it. You've gotten plenty thus far, so you get to decide for yourself whether you stick with it, or whether you move on with what you've learned to a different resource, and that's different for each person. But at the end of the day, let's say Lesson 7 takes 40 hours to complete, and that perhaps that would occupy 3 months of your life. Those 3 months seem like a lot right now, but in the fullness of your life, they are a drop in the bucket. Just a question of whether there's a different way you'd like to spend that drop.

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