25 Wheel Challenge

5:44 PM, Wednesday December 18th 2024

Drawabox - 25 cylinders challenge - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/eU6wS2G

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I started with this being my most unsure challenge yet. Mainly because of the ellipse template. The instructions were perfectly clear for the tires themselves. I overcame it by trying some wheels with the ellipses and then enjoyed doing each wheel!

Where I found the ellipses limiting was when I couldn't use a smaller but more open ellipse for the edge of the tire that's farther away from in perspective and ended up using ellipses of same degree but smaller size.

Thanks to this challenge, all I notice when walking around is wheels! Where I failed terribly was trying to use some textures to do the tires' tread! I couldn't for the life of me figure how to do it. Although I know that I can use the technique of making the texture sparse as it gets far off so that our brains can fill it, I for some reason couldn't get it. I ended up using marks all the way around I guess. If you can point to a few examples of doing that on a few different treads than just one, I'd enjoy doing such stuff, the next time I go around doing DAB after a few months or years or may be on my drawings that I do after DAB or when doing the 50/50! Thanks in advance!

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4:06 PM, Thursday December 19th 2024

Starting with the structural aspect of the challenge, you've handled this pretty well, even considering the limitations and additional considerations imposed by your ellipse template. I know a master ellipse template doesn't allow for the most freedom and comfort, but when it comes to the price difference between that and a full set of ellipse guides, it's well worth it, and still entirely serviceable for our purposes in this course. The other place it will come in handy is in Lesson 7, when applying the "constructing to scale" methodology to create three dimensional unit grids for our vehicles.

I'm pleased to see that you were mindful not only of creating solid cylinders, but also of widening them through their midsection to help ensure a sense of "inflation", that the wheel would land with a bounce rather than a heavy thud, where appropriate - that is, this is something you'd see more or less from different styles of wheels, and you captured this variation well. I'm also pleased to see that you were mindful of not just the outward faces of your wheels' rims/spokes, but also of capturing their side planes to make them appear more solid. This was somewhat undermined where you filled those side planes in with solid black - generally we want to reserve our filled black shapes for cast shadows only (given the limitations in the tools we're using here, and the priorities of this course). This helps to make our textures read more clearly by ensuring that the same visual component (a filled area of solid black) always represents the same thing (a cast shadow) instead of making it a potential mixture of things like form shading (where a surface gets lighter/darker based on its orientation, which is essentially what you're doing by filling in the side planes).

Moving onto the textural aspect of the challenge, this is where it becomes something of an intentional trap. Being as far removed as we are from Lesson 2 and the concepts it espouses on texture and implicit markmaking (all of which is critical to our work here), it's very common for students to simply forget about those concepts altogether, or at least not to really bother going back and reviewing that material, opting instead to rely on their recollection of how to handle such cases. This results in what you experienced - not being exactly sure of how to tackle the problem, and running into issues like those you described, especially when it comes to having difficulty controlling the detail density of what you're drawing.

It all comes back to the concepts of explicit vs implicit markmaking. The approaches you used - using marks "all the way around" as you put it - becomes unavoidable when you think about the marks you're drawing as being outlines of the textural form itself (leaving yourself to try and find the "right" point at which to leave those outlines out). Implicit markmaking however operates on an entirely different set of goals. In implicit markmaking, we aren't drawing the textural forms themselves. Not their outlines, not their constructions, not their surface/local colour. What we are drawing are the shadows they cast on their surroundings, in order to imply the presence of the form casting it.

Not only does this align very well with the principles behind this course as a whole (being focused on spatial reasoning), since cast shadows themselves define the relationship between the form casting them and the surface receiving them, through the specific way in which those shapes are designed, it also allows us to apply a manner of thinking about the relationship between the marks we draw and the things they represent that isn't quite as tightly bound to one another as explicit markmaking is. In explicit markmaking, if you draw something, you're telling the viewer it's there in the scene, and if you don't draw something, you're telling them it's not there. That's why you couldn't find a "right" place to stop outlining your forms - there simply wasn't one.

In implicit markmaking, we're working by a different set of rules. As shown in this diagram, depending on how far the form is from the light source, the angle of the light rays will hit the object at shallower angles the farther away they are, resulting in the shadow itself being projected farther. It's on this basis that we can allow ourselves to work by different rules - it shows that there is a logical reason that the same form might be represented in two different ways (with cast shadows that are larger or smaller), and so we can leverage that (even without necessarily thinking about where the light source itself is) to choose where we want to pack in more densely visible detail (where there's lots of black and white concentrated in the same spot, which will draw the viewer's eye to it), and where we want to leave it more sparse, on the basis that we get more detail density at a middling distance from a light source, whereas things too far from a light source so as to end up with big merging shadows, or things too close to a light source so as to end up with cast shadows so small many are obscured by the textural form itself, or just not visible at all, give us much sparser areas of detail.

What is difficult about this, and what makes the texture section from Lesson 2 such a frustrating concept to have introduced, is that drawing the shadows forms cast without first drawing the forms themselves is really difficult - and so we leverage this challenge to remind students (most of whom have probably not been including those textural exercises in their warmups) that they have forgotten something, and should definitely go back and review that material, while also considering whether there is anything else they left behind, so they can review it prior to moving onto the last lesson.

The last thing on the topic I wanted to share has to do with dealing with cases where it comes to those tires with shallow grooves, or really any texture consisting of holes, cracks, etc. it's very common for us to view these named things (the grooves, the cracks, etc.) as being the textural forms in question - but of course they're not forms at all. They're empty, negative space, and it's the structures that surround these empty spaces that are the actual forms for us to consider when designing the shadows they'll cast. This is demonstrated in this diagram. This doesn't always actually result in a different result at the end of the day, but as these are all exercises, how we think about them and how we come to that result is just as important - if not moreso.

Remember above all else - this is an exercise, as is everything else we do throughout this course. The purpose of an exercise is the process it has you work through, not the end result. I noticed that a number of your tires were left bare (18, 19, 20, 22). Skipping out on the parts of exercises that give you trouble is the opposite of what you would be doing in order to work through that trouble and come out on the other side of it.

Now, I will still be marking this challenge as complete as the textural aspect is an intentional trap to provide students with a bit of an unpleasant reminder. Be sure to review the textural material from Lesson 2 - I'd recommend starting with these reminders, and also take some time to consider whether there might be anything else in the course that you may have allowed to slip through the cracks (whether on the basis of it being unpleasant or giving you too much difficulty at the time, or for any other reason), so you can review those areas as well.

Once you've done that, you can go ahead and move onto Lesson 7.

Next Steps:

Move onto Lesson 7 when you're done reviewing sections that may have fallen through the cracks in your practice.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
4:57 PM, Thursday December 19th 2024

Hello,

Thanks for the detailed critique. About the tires 18, 19, 20, 22. They weren't left bare because of the mark making challenge I faced. They didn't have any tread on them. They were like the one linked here: https://www.casterwheelsco.com/product_6251_Shopping_trolley_cart_wheels.html

I did go through lesson 2 before embarking on this tires exercise but still had trouble with implicit part of mark making. Would it be possible for you to demonstrate a couple of different tires and share it with us? (may be after the student has completed the challenge so you can still leave the intentional trap still be in place :-) ?) I will work through the 25 texture challenge and have a go at drawing tires again.

About the reason why I shaded some of the tires' side planes... it was not to do the form shadow but because I tried the approach we had in texture exercise. Start all dark and go sparse towards the end. I tried starting all dark in the center and going sparse towards the ends of the curved surface, as it curves away from us.

I guess I failed but learnt one way of not doing it. :-D

Thanks in advance!

8:41 PM, Thursday December 19th 2024

Ah, I see. In that case if there was no functional texture, then no harm done.

I'm unfortunately not in a position to create a demo for you (we're trying to get things wrapped up so we can take a bit of a break during the holidays), but I do have a couple demos from critiques in the past that I pull up on occasion to help explain those concepts which I can share.

Before that though, I did want to address this:

About the reason why I shaded some of the tires' side planes... it was not to do the form shadow but because I tried the approach we had in texture exercise.

You were right to try and apply the concepts from that exercise, but unfortunately you're not remembering what the exercise specifically focuses on. That exercise entirely focuses on using cast shadow shapes to create a gradient from light to dark. As explained in the reminders section I referred you to, this is not something we do strictly by observing the reference and then transferring what we see. We have to understand the forms that we identify in our reference, and how they sit in 3D space, and then design cast shadows based on that understanding.

This diagram may help. It explains how it is we think when we tackle the texture analysis exercise:

  • First in the traceover of the reference image, we're identifying the kinds of forms that are present and how they vary/how they're similar.

  • Then in the first rectangle labeled "the forms we're transferring" this is more of an idea of how we would, in our heads, think about arranging those textural forms on our surface based on what we saw in the reference.

  • Next in the rectangle labeled "how we're thinking about the cast shadows" are the actual lines we'd be drawing to design those cast shadow shapes, based on our understanding of the relationship between each textural form and the surfaces around it. The forms from the previous step are faded out here, because again - they weren't drawn. This is definitely the most challenging part, because working implicitly requires us to think about multiple forms simultaneously without drawing them - though not all at once, more a small handful including the one whose shadow you wish to design, and those whose surfaces that shadow might touch.

  • And finally, we'd fill in those shadow shapes.

Here's a diagram I drew based on another student's work to illustrate the difference between working in cast shadows and simply filling in the side planes of your forms, which can certainly be quite subtle (as noted previously when talking about cracks and grooves).

In the top, we've got the structural outlines for the given form - of course, since we want to work implicitly, we cannot use outlines. In the second row, we've got two options for conveying that textural form through the use of filled black shapes. On the left, they fill in the side planes, placing those shapes on the surface of the form itself, and actually filling in areas that are already enclosed and defined on the form and leaving its "top" face empty. This would be incorrect, more similar to form shading and not a cast shadow. On the right, we have an actual cast shadow - they look similar, but the key point to pay attention to is shown in the third row - it is the actual silhouette of the form itself which is implied. We've removed all of the internal edges of the form, and so while it looks kind of like the top face, but if you look more closely, it has certain subtle elements that are much more nuanced - instead of just using purely horizontal and vertical edges, we have some diagonals that come from the edges of the textural form that exist in the "depth" dimension of space (so if your horizontals were X and your verticals were Y, those diagonals come from that which exists in the Z dimension).

And lastly, I find this example of african bush viper scales can help illustrate the difference working in this manner can achieve, in terms of how it allows us to control the detail density of the outcome.

I hope that helps, although I still strongly encourage you to go back over the texture and texture analysis material again (given your quick response I'm assuming that wasn't something you'd done prior to your reply), and give yourself ample opportunity to apply the concepts in your warmups, as this is only something you're going to get comfortable with by trying to apply it over and over.

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Ellipse Master Template

Ellipse Master Template

This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.

I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.

No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.

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