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7:36 PM, Sunday July 24th 2022

Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your lesson 6 homework

Form Intersections

-Starting with the form intersections, you are doing a good job when it comes having the whole set look like they share the same 3D space, although there are a few times when you draw forms that are too small or too big which does undermine the whole set, but it is just something to be aware of the next time you try this exercise. Another thing that I want to address is your lineweight, I can definitely see that on some parts it gets pretty chicken-scratchy and sometimes it does not taper correctly. So I want to quickly redirect you to this diagram which shows how to apply lineweight correctly.

-The intersections themselves are moving in the right direction, I do think that you still have trouble wrapping your head around how to intersec flat surfaces (the faces of a box or a cylinder) against curved surfaces (like cones and spheres), so I’ll link you to this set of diagrams , you can also find this whole album on the #lesson 2 discord channel.

Objects

-Moving on to the objects the first thing I want to call out is that you used pens of different colors, I’m pretty sure that the instructions say that you should only use one kind of pen. Using different colors can be very useful when it comes to things like the subdivided boxes from the "advanced" box challenge section, but in your actual object constructions I do want you to stick with one color. Yes, it results in a mess of lines, but ultimately learning how to see through the forest and to leverage line weight to clarify that mess is a useful skill.

By sticking with one kind of pen, we avoid redrawing lines that are already part of the construction, and end up treating every step of the drawing the same way, instead of thinking in terms of construction, followed by "the real drawing”.

-When it comes to the actual construction process you are doing a good job, but first let’s talk about what exactly it is that we are looking to learn in this lesson.

The main focus of this lesson is precision, this is something that we didn't worry about in previous lessons, we just focused on breaking each one of our subjects into its more primitive elements and we had to stick to the result of our choices, regardless of how how they had turned out .For example we might have drawn the head of an animal too big, but that was not an issue as we were just looking to explore how each of those things existed in 3D space and how they related to each other.

Precision and accuracy are two different things and in the context of this course accuracy refers to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, but precision has nothing to do with drawing that mark, instead it is about the steps and decisions that we take beforehand to declare our intentions.

A good example of this would be the ghosting method, when going through the planning of a straight line we can place an initial and ending dot, this will increase the precision of our drawing by declaring what we want to do. Once that is in place we can draw the mark, it may nail those points, it may overshoot or undershoot, etc. The important thing is that prior to any of that we have used the ghosting method to think about each mark's purpose and how we are going to achieve it best rather than figuring everything as we go, this kind of approach is more useful for the kind of geometric forms that we are working with as they have different planes, sharp corners, and clearly defined proportions.

We can capture all of these elements through the use of subdivisions, these allow us to meaningfully study the proportions of our object by way of an orthographic study, after that is done we can apply those studies to the object in 3 dimensions. That way everything that we do is the result of careful planning, and nothing is done by eyeballing or improvising.

-One of the main things you can keep working on is to break everything down into straights, instead of jumping straight into drawing curves, as explained here , curved lines have an element of vagueness to them and it is better to first try to build a chain of straight lines and then round them off towards the end. I think this happens quite a bit when it comes to handles, so I want to show you this diagram which gives a pretty good example of what I am talking about.

-Aside from these issues you are showing a good understanding of the material, and I also like to see that you challenged yourself with a lot of complex objects like the shoe, they are particularly hard but in all honesty it came out pretty good. I do not have more to add so I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete

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25 Wheel Challenge

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
10:24 PM, Sunday July 31st 2022

Hi! I totally got the pen thing mixed up with the subdivided boxes exercises, but I'll keep it in mind from now on. I've been struggling this whole time with the lineweight and how to make it more subtle and accurate, it's good to see a refresher on the basic concepts from time to time.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the critique!

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