Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects
5:43 PM, Wednesday July 5th 2023
Thank you for taking a look!
Starting with your form intersections, overall these are really, really well done, with just one issue I noticed come up in a few spots. I've identified them here, and also noted a spot to the left where you did the same thing more correctly. Basically, you tend to have the intersections between two curved surfaces end in a sharp corner, when it should transition back to following the opposite surface. This diagram may help in how to think about this (by first starting out with an intersection across a hard edge that would result in a sharp corner, then showing how it would change by turning the edge into a more rounded transition). That said, I suspect based on the rest of your work here that this is something that is not far out of your reach, as everything else suggests a very strong, well developing understanding of the relationships between these forms in 3D space.
Continuing onto your object constructions, overall you've done a pretty great job. There are a few spots where I have a couple of things to offer, but by and large you're demonstrating strong adherence to the concept of precision that is really emphasized throughout this lesson and how we approach it. Where in the previous lessons - specifically 3 to 5, we worked in an inside-out manner that allowed us to account for cases where proportions may not have been entirely correct (by simply changing the way we'd draw subsequent forms attaching to the structure, so that the end result may not be 100% accurate, but would still adhere to our priorities of solidity). Here however, we start by defining the bounding box and work in from there, requiring us to be considerably more patient, careful, and fastidious with our planning.
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 your constructions here, you've built up precision primarily through the use of the subdivisions, and you've used them extremely effectively to that end in most cases. When combined with the orthographic plans we see in examples like this webcam, it allow us to meaningfully study the proportions of our intended object in two dimensions, then apply those same proportions to the object in three dimensions.
The main things to keep an eye on would just be to ensure that we avoid having elements of our construction ignore or disregard the structure we've put down already - at least, not without yet additional structure. For example, with this water bottle, the two spherical portions extend beyond the original cylinder of the structure, but not to any specific point. In this case it would have been better to have another cylinder or even a bounding box that extended beyond the core cylinder in order to ensure those spheres would still maintain a consistent size.
Additionally, for its cap, you appear to have jumped straight from its smaller bounding box to the individual curves. For this, the notes go into detail with how these curves should first be defined more specifically using straight edges or flat surfaces, with the curves later being built upon that. Be sure to review that section, along with the demonstration included within it.
Aside from those points, 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.
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