Starting with your form intersections, I can clearly see that in working through the combination of forms throughout lessons 3-5, you've pushed and developed your understanding of how these different forms relate. I can clearly see that you've got a good deal of comfort dealing with flat-on-flat intersections, and that you're making progress with those involving rounded surfaces - though at this point it is entirely normal for students to not yet be entirely comfortable with these more complex ones, and I did find a number of little mistakes that I've marked out here. I'm not worried, mind you - this is entirely expected, and in reaching this stage the goal is really just to reach a point where the student has achieved more familiarity with these kinds of spatial relationships that we can talk more about the theory behind them.

At its core, it comes down to remembering that intersections occur between surfaces, not forms. One might immediately default to thinking that an intersection between a cone and a box is going to be a complex, curving intersection, but the cone itself has both a surface that is curved, and a surface that is flat (its base). Thus, if the box is only intersecting with the base, our intersection is simple and flat.

This diagram demonstrates how we can think about or intersections as combinations between the different surfaces at play, and how we alter the intersection lines themselves when a flat surface might be replaced with a curved one. Give it some thought and play around with that manner of thinking. We'll be revisiting the form intersections with Lesson 7 as well, so we'll see how things come along then.

Continuing onto your object constructions, you've demonstrated a great deal of patience and care throughout the set, and have generally done a good job of adhering to the lesson's core focus on precision in your approach. That said, I do have some suggestions to offer on how the tools introduced here can be leveraged to push things even further.

Before I get to that, I do want to mention that in the instructions here, where I gave permission to use ballpoint pens, I did specifically state that you should not be switching between different pens, and that you should use the same kind for all your subdivision and object construction. You may have missed this, so please adhere to it going forward. I don't want students to get the impression that the object they're constructed is physically separate and independent from the steps they take to get there - everything we build up exists in 3D space as scaffolding, and we need to be engagging with both the subdivisions and the object itself in the same way.

Now, as I stated above, the main focus of this lesson is on the idea of precision. Where our previous lessons focused on a more reactonary, inside-out approach, where we'd simply build upon the structure that is present from the last step, regardless of what their proportions ended up being, here we're trying to make a lot more of our decisions up-front.

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.

As a whole you are doing a great job, but there are definitely ways in which aspects of your approach can be adjusted to further improve the overall precision of your work. One of these is to make as many decisions as you can in your orthographic plan, leaving you to merely apply what you've already decided when you get into the 3D structure. If we take a look at this front view plan from your camera, you'll see that I've highlighted a number of landmarks whose positions relative to the overall bounding box are not defined. Each of these will have to be decided upon at some point - if not here, then perhaps as you build up your construction. The earlier we define them, the better, but what we want to avoid most of all is making the decision as we draw (this is essentially what we'd do when we were sketching purely from observation).

So for example, you've got an inner bounding box defining your lens as a whole, and it is itself subdivided as needed. But how this internal box is positioned relative to the outer bounding box is unclear. It looks like, by eye, it's centered horizontally on an axis positioned 5/8ths along the width (starting from the left - so from the right it'd be 3/8ths in) - but this is a guess I'm making based on what I see, it's not clearly defined with specific subdivisions.

Remember - we're making decisions. That means we don't have to know exactly where this lens box should go in order to be accurate - we merely need to have a concrete decision made. So if we were in a situation where a landmark would be positioned at 39/50ths to be accurate, there are plenty of situations where you would lose nothing by simply placing it at 4/5ths. Is it perfectly accurate? No - but with the decision made, we still have something solid upon which to construct our object.

Another point I wanted to call out is that I can definitely see you applying the concepts shared in these notes about breaking curves down into flat edges to increase their specificity - for example, in this hour glass - but you appear to be inconsistent in where you apply them. For example, this would have been useful in the side grip of the camera (this section), where you jumped straight into the curve. Your results still feel extremely solid and three dimensional (which speaks to your strong spatial reasoning skills), but remember that the purpose of this course is to arm you with exercises you can use to help continue developing those skills. This means taking the long way around, and going through all the steps to first establish that structure as something more boxy, then rounding it out.

This is part of the reason I insist on students using the same pen - when we switch pens (whether thickness or colour), we end up envisioning that outer scaffolding as something that's not really there - that only what's drawn with the black pen in the end is the final object. But this obstructs us from perceiving the intermediary steps, where we can build a boxy camera first, then build complexity upon it, rounding out curves and otherwise adding structure with that simple structure as a base. Remember - construction is about working from simple to complex, and that applies even when we're working outside-in with a bounding box and subdivisions.

Anyway - as a whole you're still doing great. This lesson merely introduces the concept of precision and working outside-in, so you will have ample time to push yourself even farther. Though I think it's fair to say you demonstrated considerable patience and care throughout your work here, and I don't want to suggest for a second that you were at all sloppy. It's just that what is ultimately asked of you in Lesson 7, is undeniably a lot - and so be ready for it. Ready to push yourself as far as you're able, and farther.

So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.