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9:01 PM, Friday April 15th 2022

Starting with your form intersections, while I caught a couple very minor mistakes, as a whole you're doing a great job and are demonstrating a well developed understanding of how these forms relate to one another in 3D space. The issues I noted were all of the same sort, and they occur in the more difficult round-on-round intersections. You'll find them marked out here.

It largely comes down to the fact that when you've got two curving surfaces intersecting with one another, the intersection will generally transition from following the curvature of one, to following the curvature of the other. Each individual surface's curve is simple, like a C curve - but once we merge them together, we generally end up with a sort of S curve (although one half of the S will take up the majority of the intersection, with the last little reversal occurring at the end). You had a tendency to skip that little reversal, instead maintaining the first curve all the way through, as though one of the surfaces had been flat rather than curved.

So, be sure to keep that in mind.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is coming along well, so no complaints. There's certainly room for plenty of continued improvement, but you're applying the exercise and its analyses correctly, so all's well there.

Looking over your actual vehicle constructions, I have a couple little things to call out, but as a whole you've done a great job here as well. You've demonstrated throughout many of these constructions a great deal of respect for the precision behind each choice and decision made, supporting the complexities you build up to with appropriate preceding structures, so as to avoid jumping ahead through any steps. There are a few where you were more lax in this regard, and I'll address them, but overall you're doing quite well.

The first point I wanted to call out is actually something I addressed in my critique of your Lesson 6 work two months ago - in some of your constructions, like this pickup, you are continuing to reach for a different pen in order to separate your construction from the "final drawing", which similarly to lesson 6, is stressed in Lesson 7's instructions as something to avoid. Unfortunately you may have missed it, or simply forgotten. Ultimately it is up to you to do whatever it is you need (take notes, read through my feedback again periodically, etc.) to ensure that you address these issues going forward.

The other thing I addressed in my critique of your Lesson 6 work (in the two paragraphs that follow the previous section) was that the areas of filled black should be reserved only for cast shadows, and that you should avoid filling in the side planes of your forms (which is more akin to form shading), among other things.

I will leave you to review my previous feedback to get more information on that point, but I did want to point out that "filling in" the interior of your vehicles as you did was not incorrect, because this can ostensibly pass for the exterior shell of the car casting shadows upon the interior surfaces, and filling them all in with black. As long as you only fill in the interior forms (and continue to leave the opposite windows cut out from the filled area), then what you did there was fine.

What you want to avoid however are the gaps that you filled in here on the front of the pickup between the head lights and the grill sections, and really anywhere on the exterior where you've filled in something with black where it wasn't due to a different form casting a shadow upon that surface. Another example would be how you filled in some of the planes on these forms on the back of your submarine.

Again - review the feedback from Lesson 6 to get more information on this.

The other point I wanted to call out is that while you definitely showed a strong willingness to work step by step through your constructions in a lot of these (not least of all this locomotive which came out really well), you unfortunately did not invest as much into your cars, and as a result skipped quite a few steps, relying instead on your existing spatial reasoning skills to fill in the gaps. Remember that every drawing we do throughout this course is itself an exercise, specifically geared towards developing those spatial skills, and so it is important that you take every step purposefully and intentionally (as you did through many of your other constructions - I feel like I should stress that point). If we allow ourselves to skip steps, working from the spatial reasoning skill we're trying to develop, then we're not actually going to see nearly as much growth and improvement. Instead, we're really just showing off what we can do, rather than working to keep pushing that boundary.

To explain what I mean by skipping steps, if we look at your pickup trucks' cab (where the passengers sit), it's made up from a lot of smooth, organic curves. As discussed back in Lesson 6 (which I also addressed in my feedback for you in Lesson 6) we need to first build up those structures with solid, boxy forms, representing each curve as a chain of straight lines. These boxier forms are much easier to place with specificity, and we can round out the corners once they're in place.

In general there are definitely a lot more little things that you've added in without necessarily establishing how they sit in 3D space in a simpler form - another example would be how you modified the silhouette of the front of your car in order to add the little bumps/profile information here - this was an action taken in 2D space, rather than in three dimensions.

So! As a whole, you have done really well, but there are enough points that I feel you did not address that were raised in Lesson 6 that I am going to assign one page of revisions. You'll find it assigned below.

Next Steps:

I want you to do just one more vehicle construction. I'd like it to specifically be a car - so a sedan, a truck, a minivan, whatever you like, but some sort of everyday consumer transport that you'd find out in traffic.

Focus on the following:

  • Skipping no steps. Build up every single form, in 3D space, from simple to complex, laying down boxy forms and straight edges in order to work your way up to rounded curves.

  • I can see that you're no stranger to investing your time (again, that locomotive was fantastic and must have taken a great deal of time). I'd like to see the same kind of energy here. I don't usually like to share other students' work, but I have found that sharing VeeDraws' Lesson 7 work helps because she included a little time card showing just how much time she invested in every single construction. I do not necessary expect every student to produce work of that quality (though I do feel you're capable of it, if you invest enough time), but I do want students to keep in mind just how demanding this work really is.

So! "Just" one more vehicle construction - but be sure to review the feedback I gave you in Lesson 6 first, so you can apply what I shared there and here to the best of your current ability.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
9:26 AM, Sunday April 17th 2022
8:13 PM, Monday April 18th 2022

Nicely done! This is definitely more in line with the level of precision I was looking for. There are issues - the car looks really long, and I'm fairly certain that 9.5 wheel lengths is abnormally so for a sedan, but you laid down your structure and followed every assertion laid down by the previous stages of construction.

So! You've done as I asked, you did a solid job, and you've earned your completion. Congratulations!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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How to Draw by Scott Robertson

How to Draw by Scott Robertson

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