Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

3:43 PM, Wednesday January 13th 2021

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Hello boss,

There's 3 objects which I specifically want to talk about.

  • the gaming mouse: It's a experiment of constructing by using 3d curves in perspective. It turned out to be a total mess and I completly lost myself in all the clutter. The proportion turned out to be a fail, too. In fact, when I think about it now, it would definitely be better if I used the ortho method.

  • the mild jug: the initial box was a bad one. It was supposed to be a square for the top face and the bottom face, but as the construction went on, I quickly discovered that it was far from that. Also, the method I choosed to simplify the structure turned out to be pretty dumb. Orthos would be a better choice on this, too.

  • the lantern: the initial box was a also a bad one. The vp on the left side is signifigantly higher than the right one, which made the box not really a box. So when I moved on to the ellipses and the hexegon, things very quickly fell apart.

I think the keycap was my best construction. The black rectangle behind the charger was supposed to make the object more popped to the foreground, which turned out to be a bad choice, it hide a fair amount of construction in the right side.

For the form intersection, although things started to pop a bit in the third page, the first two pages are petty bad, I'm doing these in my warmups to try to understand them better.

That's all of what I want to say. Thanks in advance for the critique!

0 users agree
8:34 AM, Friday January 15th 2021

All in all, your work throughout this lesson is quite good. I do have some thoughts about a number of these, including some of the ones you highlighted yourself, but it seems my opinions may differ from yours in some ways.

To get started, your form intersections are looking very solidly done. Your linework is exceptionally confident, your forms are solid and well defined, and the relationships you've established between them with the intersection lines all appear to be quite correct. Great work!

Moving onto the constructions, I honestly think you've knocked this one out of the park. As a whole, just about every one of your constructions feel solid and carry a strong illusion of weight. Your proportions may not be perfect - I'll expand on that in a bit - but the constructions themselves feel strong and well grounded. You've demonstrated considerable patience and care in subdividing each construction precisely as much as was needed - you never jumped the gun and decided to wing it or approximate where more subdivision could have been done to reach a more precise result. Your patience carried each construction through to the end, and it paid off.

Now, when it comes to proportions, this course doesn't treat it with the same kind of weight of focus as some others might. More specifically, our goal in each of these drawings is not really to reproduce the object we're studying perfectly. It is instead to take our source of reference, and to treat it as information that we can use to construct something solid and believable on the page. Sometimes that means our proportions will be off, but as long as the construction itself remains consistent and cohesive, then it will fool a viewer into seeing a real object, rather than a series of lines and shapes.

Looking at your own gaming mouse experiment, your result was still entirely solid and believable. The hatching you added did confuse matters somewhat, making it a little unclear which parts of the construction were scaffolding (and thus seethrough) and which were solid, but as a whole the entire piece felt like something I could lift in my hand. I did notice that on the far end, you purposely cut off some of your original enclosing box - normally this is something I discourage, simply because once we've put down our enclosing box, our proportions should be accepted, and we should move on. But the way in which you cut it off here - with complete respect for 3D space - did not harm the end result at all. Instead, you simply separated that box into two pieces, and opted to use one of them and cast aside the other. No reason that isn't an entirely valid approach, especially when applied early on in a construction.

Even the milk jug - although I suppose the neck went a little underdeveloped - felt structurally cohesive and while the proportions were off, it did still end up feeling believable. The lantern, admittedly, wasn't quite so lucky. It definitely feels off, with different faces that ought to have been parallel to the ground plane sitting at an apparent angle. These are really just areas where perhaps you jumped into drawing a line too quickly, and found yourself committed before really thinking through whether it was aligned correctly. All in all, these things happen, and despite your own labelling as various drawings as "fail", I'd say this one was the only one that didn't quite stand up to the test of "does this read as being solid and believable as an object that exists in 3D space". The rest do a great job.

Moving forward, I have just one minor point for you to keep in mind. Don't forget that in general, we're saving our filled areas of solid black to capture cast shadow shapes, not form shading. And so in your charger drawing, those little nubs have form shading along their side planes, and should not (as discussed back in lesson 2). This may sometimes be a bit confusing compared to, say, the use of straight lines along the rounded edges of forms like the key cap and shampoo bottle. In truth, these lines are somewhat overzealous contour lines, and serve to help convey the curvature of that surface, rather than describing their relation to actual light.

Anyway! All in all your work here is extremely well done, and I'm excited to see what you'll produce in lesson 7. But we're not there yet - you've still got one more step before you hit the big boss. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 7.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
0 users agree
6:36 PM, Thursday March 3rd 2022

Why would you be so judgemental about your mouse? I have a pretty similar one. I really like the drawing, and it actually looks like I can touch it and feel the buttons. It's comfortable to play and aim, and as a person who plays cs go most of the time to profit on selling skins like https://dmarket.com/csgo-skins/product-card/gut-knife-tiger-tooth, I can say that it's really important, and I think you managed to capture the right details.

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