0 users agree
12:49 AM, Tuesday June 24th 2025

Jumping right in with the form intersections, this exercise is one of those that grows along with the student throughout the full length of the course. Initially our focus is on just ensuring that students are thinking about the intersections in the right general direction, not necessarily whether or not they're applying it correctly (along with testing their ability to apply the methodologies we've introduced prior to that point under duress). At this point, we're still not expecting perfect work (we never truly do), but we do expect to see that students are generally more comfortable with intersections involving only flat surfaces, while still struggling when curving surfaces are added to the mix.

You certainly meet that standard, and so I think some additional advice can help you deal with the issues that arise when tackling those curving surfaces (like these I've marked out here. Ultimately a lot of it comes down to ensuring that you're always thinking about the surfaces in question. Curving surfaces will sometimes curve in one direction (like a cylinder which is curved around its lengthwise axis, but down that axis it's straight), or in many (like a sphere which curves in infinite directions), and identifying which direction is relevant to you.

This diagram illustrates the concept. When dealing with a rounded surface and a flat surface, it's easier to think of the flat surface as a knife cutting through the other - it can tell you which curving cross-sections are relevant. Things get considerably more difficult when dealing with two rounded surfaces, but a good first step to solving them is identifying which ways they curve in space, and then stitching them together.

Anyway, moving onto your object constructions, by the end of the set I think you demonstrate a good grasp of how to employ the techniques in this course to increase the overall precision with which your objects are constructed, which is at the core of what this lesson seeks to impart. By the end you do this quite well and confidently, although I will say that there were a few bumps in the road.

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.

Looking over your work, it seems that early on, especially with the swisslion krem container and the dumbell, you did a phenomenal job laying out your orthographic plans (although the dumbell being filled in with black undermined that considerably - more broadly avoid using filled areas of solid black, we want to reserve those for cast shadows only, leaving anything with a dark local/surface colour as being blank, since we're not actually attempting to capture any other local colours), but that did not seem to be applied to the 3D construction itself.

Your orthographic plans got more confident and more thorough getting into the can and the mason jar mug, but there were still elements that were left out when elements were transferred from the orthographic plan to the construction. Here I think I'm starting to get a better sense of what's going on - it's not necessarily that you're leaving things out so much as you're trying to minimize how much linework ends up present on the construction to avoid creating a forest of lines that may become difficult to track. That is unfortunately not the right call.

Eventually, you're going to reach constructions (especially in Lesson 7) that are complex enough that such forests of lines are unavoidable, but in having avoided them up until that point, you'll have missed out on the opportunity to acclimatize yourself to them. Most students do complain about such problems back at Lesson 1's plotted perspective exercise, which at this point would probably appear to be of little challenge. But that's because you're made to face those circumstances and get used to them, as the course gradually makes it more and more complex.

So, while throughout this lesson I think you clearly demonstrate your capacity to use those orthographic plans, I would strongly recommend against attempting to curate how you apply them to your construction. Instead, get used to applying them exactly as they are in their orthographic form, so that the process of 3D construction is one of simply repeating steps you've already performed. This will prepare you far better for the admitted nightmare that you'll face in Lesson 7.

Anyway, all in all, your work is still quite solid, so 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.
10:04 PM, Tuesday June 24th 2025

I also noticed that I started to leave out parts from my orthographic plan when i finished all my drawing homework,and that my construction was a bit weaker than in the dumbbell and krem drawings which was one of the reasons I wanted to re-do most of them but I decided to push trough.While I do agree and will incorporate thins that you've said I think the main reason ,that I've notice, for the change of construction is the slight mindset shift that I head that I think I got from my orthographic drawings where i would use edges of my corners to defy ends of an object and transported that line of thinking to the original box that I would use as an outline for my object leaving important parts of the drawings behind in that process.This wasn't done intentionally and I fell very dumb(bell) lol.

The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something we've used ourselves, or know to be of impeccable quality. If you're interested, here is a full list.
PureRef

PureRef

This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.

When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.

Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.