Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles

3:51 PM, Friday October 28th 2022

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Hey!

First of all, thank you so much for sharing the video that I made about Drawabox about two weeks ago, it really gave my new channel some exposure, really appreciate that and I am very glad that you liked the video!

So here is my submission for lesson 7, this one really took a while! It was very painful and fun at the same time (not sure how that works).

I've attached some additional photos with my references and ortographic proportion sketches that I did digitally on top of photo references.

While doing the first pages of vehicles (Mercedes ones) I really really struggled. Proportions were off because when doing ortographic sketches I just drew a box on top and just subdivided it. But after that I tried doing the ortographics based on wheel size like you said in the mustang demo. That really helped, but another problem still persisted - if I draw the starting ellipse of the box wrong (so I can get a perfect square) - the whole drawing won't look right, especially the wheels.

When I say "drawing the ellipse wrong" I mean not getting the right degree - which is especially difficult when I only have a few ellipse guides and limited choices of degrees (I only have 20 degrees, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 60 and full circle)

But before doing page 6 I watched your video about ellipses again and reminded myself that minor axis line has to go into the vanishing points which then I tried to do after. I think it kind of worked, page 7 and 8 looks more right to me as far as ellipse degrees go.

I had to draw some drawings super small, because that was the biggest size of that particular degree in my ellipse guide. (especially page 6 where I drew Kaneda's bike from Akira movie) That's why I kind of wish there was an option to do lesson 7 digitally, because I wouldn't be limited to my ellipse guides. But I understand that if that would be an option, lot's of other problems like pressing undo would arise.

Also what about the degree shift on the same line that goes into the same vanishing point? Is there a degree shift on the same side of the wheels? I know that degree shifts on the other side of the wheels (meaning left wheel will have a different degree compared to right one), but what about the front wheel and back wheel on the same side? They are on the same plane, so they have same ellipse degree? Sorry that I wrote super this in a super confusing way when the question is pretty simple.

Anyway sorry for writing so much and basically giving feedback to myself when you are the one who should do it, but the ellipse degree question was super confusing to me and I want to make sure I understand this and also I just wanted to give some proper context on how I did this lesson.

Looking forward to get the feedback!

Best,

Saulius (MEANDI)

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6:48 PM, Monday October 31st 2022

As to the one question I was able to identify, logically I believe that as you slide along the side of a car from the front wheel to the rear, that farther end will get narrower as it slides further away from the viewer, as shown here using the same kind of top-down view we use to explain the degree shift when moving along the minor axis.

Anyway, jumping right in with the form intersections, your work here is by and large very well done - just keep an eye on little places where you may feel tempted to double up your marks or correct mistakes, as we see here on this box's lower edges. Aside from a few instances of that however, your work shows a well developed understanding of how these forms relate to one another in 3D space.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, overall you're handling this well, but I am noticing a slight tendency to have ellipses that do not fit against all four edges of the plane enclosing them. This was of course present when you used the ellipse guide, simply because you wouldn't necessarily find one in your template that fits perfectly, but I did notice a gap here towards the upper left corner of the page, and just wanted to remind you that having the ellipse touch all four edges (even if that means having to freehand it) is important.

Moving onto your vehicle constructions, as a whole you have certainly done a great job, although I did notice that you appear to have gone back over your drawings with additional passes to more arbitrarily reinforce the thickness of your lines, which we did discuss as something to avoid in my critique of your Lesson 6 work. Remember that throughout this course, we use line weight in a very limited fashion, focused only on capturing how the various forms overlap one another, and being limited only to the areas where those overlaps occur, as explained here. Remember that at no point in this course are we focused on decorating our drawings, or making them more visually pleasing for its own sake - everything we do comes back to the core focus of spatial reasoning, of pushing our brains to think through the relationships between different forms in space. Getting carried away with decoration can diminish that value from the exercise - not always, but it's best to leave that out of the exercises we do in this course. Even texture - which many students mistakenly treat as an opportunity to indulge in such decorative activities is focused on laying down cast shadows to define the relationship between the forms casting them and the surfaces receiving them.

To be fair, while the drawings feel like you may have started with a ballpoint and gone back over them with fineliner afterwards (which would ignore the instructions from this section which stay to stick to the same kind of pen, except when filling in cast shadow shapes), I'm not entirely sure if that's what you were doing here - but it does seem like whether or not that's what you did, it was that direction that you were pushing yourself, to do what you could to get a nice drawing at the end (instead of only focusing on its purpose as a spatial reasoning exercise).

All that said, when it comes to building out your constructions, from what I can see (the heavy use of ink is somewhat distracting), you have done quite well. That said, there are a couple things that I feel you may have forgotten from the feedback I provided in Lesson 6 - specifically focusing on the use of orthographic plans.

Looking at the orthographic plan you used for the bike from Akira, it appears that you went about it by taking the side view of your bike and overlaying a consistent grid over it - but this grid doesn't actually give us any specific information as to the positioning of each major landmark. You actually mentioned this yourself ("I just drew a box on top and just subdivided it") but while you noticed the issue, you still seem unaware of why it was an issue. It seems your goal here was to create a general framework in which to construct your drawing, but that you didn't leverage any of the additional points I raised in that previous critique, about laying out how far along each given dimension every major landmark would actually be positioned.

The approach you employed here does look somewhat more thorough, though there are still many notable landmarks missing - for example, the black stripe/ridge going across from one wheel to the other sits a little under 2 wheels from the ground, but the specific positioning is unclear.

Another point I wanted to clarify - though I did mention this in Lesson 6's critique as well - is that the goal here is not to "find" the correct proportions, but rather to decide what proportions you're going to use. Being specific in this way with all of the major landmarks allows us to declare how we're going to build the structure, without having to make additional decisions as we build it up.

I strongly urge you to go back to my feedback on your Lesson 6 work, as right now it seems you may have left it behind, instead of reviewing it periodically to help inform how you tackled the work here. Ultimately right now, the critiques you receive are very important, because they help to close the gap between the older state of the demo material, and the various changes being introduced by the overhaul. Of course, the overhaul is a very gradual thing - I'm only able to make small steps forward with it due to the continuous flow of homework submissions, but when it's done, all of the demos will be updated to be consistent with how I'm explaining the material here. In the meantime however, those signed up for official critique get what is effectively a sneak-peak of what the material will eventually convey, but that's only useful if you actually... well, put it to use. If however we rely purely on the lesson material and don't review the feedback we receive, there's a lot of concepts that may simply be forgotten.

Ideally this wouldn't be the case (at least not as much, reviewing past feedback is always going to be important of course) - but there's not much that can be done about it until I'm able to complete the overhaul.

Fortunately though, you are still demonstrating a very strong grasp of 3D space, and I feel that the issues I've outlined here can be addressed by simply reviewing that past feedback. You've definitely grown a great deal over the last eight or nine months, and so I'm still very happy to mark this lesson - and the course with it - as complete. Congratulations!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
9:54 AM, Tuesday November 1st 2022

Thank you so much for the feedback! I will take a way closer look to feedback of lesson 6 like you said and see how I can improve things.

I am so happy that I found your course around 8-9 months ago, I have improved more in this period then in around 8 years of drawing (I drew mostly as a hobby, but still :D)

Again, thank you so much!

Saulius

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