Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles

4:22 PM, Wednesday March 19th 2025

Imgur: The magic of the Internet

Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/MudG2u3

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https://imgur.com/a/OIsN8ij (link to most of the refs I used)

This was tough but really enjoyable i feel like i learnt a lot from the mistakes i made in this exercise (as well as through the full course)

Once this Lesson is validated I'll attempt the 100 chests challenge but slowly... so no idea on when i'll finish it

In any case this Lesson marks the end of the first big chapter in my art journey so on a personal note thank you so much for all this excellent material that you choose to make available to everyone for free. It's truly things like that that make me think the internet is a good thing in the end.

Thanks again and I'll be coming back to drawabox for the promptathon (and probably when the lessons get an overhaul update to keep those exercises fresh!)

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11:10 PM, Thursday March 20th 2025

Jumping right in with the form intersections, overall you're doing quite well, but I did take some time to be a bit nitpicky with the notes I've written here on your work. Ultimately it can be a bit tempting to be vague or less intentional with the individual marks we make, especially when we're not 100% confident about how the intersection should be defined, but it's important to always go back to thinking about the specific surfaces that are intersecting, and how that is occurring. So for example on the cone-box intersection to the far right, the portion running down the length of the cone is fine (could actually even be straighter) but the second section of the intersection is also fairly straight despite needing to wrap around the rounded portion of the cone. Similarly, for the cone-sphere intersection to the far right, considering which cross-sections are relevant to the intersection (you can also refer to the diagram I shared with you back in Lesson 6 for this) will help you break a complex intersection down into separate parts and solve them individually, to create the whole.

Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes, your work here is looking good - you're adhering to the core elements of the exercise and are applying the line extensions correctly so as to get the most out of it going forward.

Looking at your form intersection vehicles, you've done a great job with these - many students really end up overestimating how much complexity this exercise demands, but you've done an excellent job of sticking to exactly what is requested: simple primitive forms, just like the form intersections exercise, but arranged in such a way that they follow the plan of a vehicle. The main purpose of this is to remind students that despite the later more detailed demos can feel at times like we're only really stitching a bunch of lines together into an object at the very end, that we are indeed still thinking in terms of big and simple to small and complex. Or in other words, rather than building an object out of toothpicks, we're carving it out of a block of wood.

Moving onto your detailed vehicle constructions, by and large your work here is very well done, and there's visible improvement throughout the set, as you get into the groove of working with these tools. In particular, this car came out very well, although it is a little unfortunate that you didn't apply the concepts relating to curves (in the sense of breaking them down into chains of flat edges), especially considering that I called this out to you in your Lesson 6 feedback. This does suggest that there is room for improvement in how you're leveraging the feedback you're receiving (in terms of reviewing it to ensure you continue to apply it going forward), so do be sure to keep that in mind - especially as you move onto other courses, where if feedback is offered, it's generally much more expensive than ours, and you won't want to end up missing out on that value.

One of these points in which you visibly improved is in taking more care in applying the subdivisions, mirroring, and so forth to build out the initial unit grids to define the overall proportions of your vehicles. Looking at this bus, it very quickly jumped out to me that while the front portion of the longer side looked correct, it almost seemed to bend suddenly outwards, so that more of that long side would be visible to the viewer. Digging in more deeply, I did find a number of areas where your application of the subdivisions and so forth was not quite as meticulous as it could have been, as shown here. While those little areas where our diagonals don't quite cross the center at the right point, or where we might accidentally extend a diagonal too far up or down beyond the upper/lower bounds, definitely will accumulate and contribute to the proportions being more and more off, what I think really threw things off was switching from mirroring your unit (as determined by the ellipse at the front) back one at a time, to doing so in groupings of 4, then subdividing some of those. Continuing to go one by one, probably would have been better, and the length of the bus would have been closer to this, pushing more of the bus's actual length into the unseen dimension of depth, which would also better match the difference in degree of the two ellipses used to identify the size of one unit (where one was 30 degrees, and the other was 60).

One last minor point - in this course, due to our limitations in working with ink, and therefore strictly black and white, we generally want to avoid using filled areas of solid black for anything other than cast shadows. Admittedly the demos being older don't always adhere to this (as the overhaul progresses that's something we'll be working to correct and standardize), but basically the reason is that it adds an additional moment where the viewer has to consider whether the filled black shape they're looking at is a cast shadow, or whether it is meant to represent something else (like a void space, or form shading, etc). If every use of a particular visual element always conveys the same kind of spatial information, then the viewer is able to understand what they're looking at that much quicker. A delay of a few milliseconds seems inconsequential to us, but when it comes to things we do on a subconscious level, they can really matter.

And so, I would avoid using it for filling in wheel wells or the space in between a tank's wheels, as well as using it to separate faces that are oriented in different directions (as we can see in the akira bike). One exception is with the internals of the car (specifically as shown here where the internal structures are still visible and windows are cut out). We generally get away with this because ostensibly the external structure of the car is casting shadows into the interior - not technically accurate since light would still come in through the windows, but it's enough for our purposes. Filling in the window's surfaces themselves however, as we see here should still be avoided.

Of course, all of that applies not as global and generalized rules, but specific to the limitations we work under in this course.

Anyway! All in all, very nice work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson, and the course as a whole, as complete. Congratulations!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:12 AM, Friday March 21st 2025

Thank you very much for the considerate review. I'll be more careful to implement all of this!

Thanks again :)

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