Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects
4:25 AM, Wednesday June 1st 2022
Hi, this is my submission for lesson 6. Thank you!
Starting with your form intersections, largely you're doing pretty well with these, but there are a couple things I want to call out:
Firstly, remember that this exercise is not to be done in little clusters, as explained here.
Secondly, I did notice a couple little bits of weirdness, or little corrections to offer. Here's the first one, here's the second, and here's the third.
Continuing onto your object constructions, as a whole you've done a great job here, primarily due to your heavy focus towards the core principles of this course, which themselves focus on the concept of precision. Prior to this lesson, through lessons 3-5, we pretty operate through reaction. That is, we put our forms down, and if a form ends up longer or shorter than intended, that's fine - we just build upon what we've laid down, but it means that there's not a lot of preplanning going on, we're continually responding to how things turn out, and in that sense, we end up working without a lot of precision.
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.
Throughout your object constructions, you've done a great job of employing these subdivisions, and they very clearly establish your intentions ahead of time, showing that you've considered where things ought to go, and what purpose each mark really means to serve as part of the construction. As far as this core aspect of the lesson goes, you are doing a fantastic job. There are some cases where students will do quite well, but they'll hit a certain threshold where the details they're working with get too small or inconsequential for them to put in that extra bit of time - I'm pleased to note that you do not appear to hit such a threshold, and even with the things students are prone to fudging/approximating, like buttons and knobs, you still plot them out ahead of time. Very well done.
When it comes to criticism, all I really have is a reminder - a reminder of the way in which we're approaching these constructions, and the things we purposely leave out, or the way in which we use certain tools. This falls into two main categories:
Firstly, remember that as discussed here, we are not incorporating any form shading into our drawings in this course. Now, I think there are some points in the lesson that may make this a little more confusing, a little less clear - for example, where in the bluetooth speaker demo, I'm using hatching lines at the rounded corners to convey more strongly how that surface curves through space. The reason I do that there is simply because it's a form where one might not expect the surface to be curved (since boxes usually have sharper, more prominent corners, and our constructional approach can result in more visual clutter that can make the presence of those rounded corners less clear). There are other situations however - like on cylindrical knobs - where we have a rounded surface, but where it's what's expected. Cylinders and cones are primitive forms, and so they already demonstrate that curvature quite strongly, making the extra help unnecessary. But, the most important part here is that what we're doing is all about conveying information, not decorating or rendering our drawing, so the shading here is definitely way outside of what we're doing in this course. I should also mention that you're still using straight lines in your hatching, despite conveying a curved surface. As a result you end up working against the surface. That's something you can read more about in these notes on hatching.
Similarly to the previous point, you are generally pretty liberal when it comes to filling in areas. Within the context of the course however, it's best to always reserve your filled areas of solid black (or in this case since we're working with ballpoint, tight hatching lines) for specifically designed cast shadow shapes only. Avoid filling any existing shape in (because this is likely going to be more akin to form shading), and avoid trying to capture any sort of local/surface colour (where some aspect of your reference is actually of a darker colour - after all, we can't capture distinct colours given our limited toolset, and so it's best to give everything an equal treatment, and look at our objects as though they're covered in solid white. This allows us to focus only on the information that impacts how the objects exist in 3D space, the things we can feel with our hands. To that point, ensuring that we're always designing these filled shapes on their own allows us to consider the nature of the form that is meant to be casting this shadow, and its relationship with the surface upon which it's casting, so we can always convey our understanding of those spatial relationships and reinforce them in our drawing.
And that about covers it! As a whole, the points I raised at the end there are fairly small and nitpicky. You are still doing a great job with this lesson's work, and so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 7.
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We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
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