9:33 PM, Wednesday November 3rd 2021
Starting with your form intersections, as a whole you're doing quite well, and are demonstrating a grasp of 3D space that is developing quite nicely. I did make some notes here where I noticed some discrepancies with a few of the more difficult intersections, but your progress here is still looking quite solid. The forms themselves are drawn in a manner that establishes a believable structure in shared space, and the bulk of your intersections define strong relationships between those forms. It's just a few of the particularly tricky cases that are still progressing.
One thing I always find helpful when dealing with curving surfaces intersecting with one another is to actually think about the specific direction of that curve as it moves through space. Cylinders intersecting with spheres can be particularly challenging, because they tend to have two opposite curves working against one another, usually resulting in some variation of an S. Figuring out what the specific S would be is always tricky. As a whole, it is worth mentioning that your second page of intersections is even better than your first, and you're tackling many of those complex curving intersections quite well there.
Continuing onto your object constructions, your work here is fantastic, and it is perhaps the confidence with which you've tackled each of these drawings that really puts them over the edge. I have a couple things to call out in critique, but they're fairly minor. What's more important is the fact that you have done a great job, and have demonstrated considerable patience and care as you've built up each structure, pinning down all the necessary subdivisions and scaffolding structure to do so with precision. As a result, each construction feels solid and tangible.
One thing that caught my eye was the fact that you managed to pull off some really nice constructions with an excellent sense of space, form, and volume, despite in many cases needlessly limiting how much space you actually had to work with. For example, your xbox controller on this page came out beautifully, but you basically stuffed it in the corner of a page in a way that really made it vastly more difficult to pull off. While it's certainly impressive that you did, this isn't something I would encourage through the rest of this course - always make sure you give your drawings as much room as they require, and while making good use of a page by packing it full of drawings is great, it's always more important to ensure that each of those drawings are given ample space for your brain to optimally engage its spatial reasoning skills, and to keep your arm moving from your shoulder.
Deeefinitely don't look at my praise as encouragement to continue drawing small - even though you're good at it, there's really no benefit to doing so in the context of this course.
This next point is almost not worth mentioning, simply because it's more of an outlier than a trend, but I'm going to call it out anyway. While in most of your constructions you've been very thorough in laying down all the appropriate structural marks/subdivisions to support each step of construction, you did skip some steps on this toilet. As I marked out there, the top surface of the toilet lid wasn't actually laid out, and instead appeared to be the result of guesswork. Good, solid guesswork, fueled by spatial reasoning skills that are already developing very nicely, but still guesswork. Ultimately that's important on the context of this course because its entire goal is to teach you how to continue improving your spatial reasoning skills, and so it's important that we don't rely on our instincts here, and lay everything out as completely as we can.
The last thing I wanted to mention is relatively simple - right now there are cases where you're kind of blurring the line between cast shadow and form shading, and it's slightly diminishing the impact of your drawings. In the drawings we do for this course, we largely try to stick to using filled black shapes for cast shadows only, since that's what the viewer's eye is going to expect first and foremost. By leaning into what their eyes are expecting, we can convey the relationship between different forms more strongly. That's ultimately what a shadow does - it's an independent shape that exists independently of shapes already present in your drawing (in most cases), and defines the relationship between the form casting it and the surface receiving it.
What you want to avoid doing instead, however, is filling in an existing shape from your construction, as this will often times actually be more along the lines of form shading. On this page, I've marked out cases where you were working with form shading, cast shadows, or where you were close to correct.
Anyway! Overall, fantastic work. 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.