I look forward to receiving this critique. I have a lot to learn with this method of drawing. Very difficult. My brain could could not find switching from using forms like we have up until now to using a box to draw within. I feel the ruler made it more difficult, and trying to darken the lines just made my work more messy.
Starting with your form intersections, I can definitely see a lot of improvement between the first page and the third, but there is still a fair bit of room for growth - especially when it comes to intersections between curving surfaces, which are admittedly quite difficult. I've marked out some corrections here - note how I'm considering the specific curvature of the given forms on specific axes (depending on the form we're intersecting with). So for example, a sphere will have infinite directions of curvature, but if we're intersecting that sphere with the edge of a box, then all of a sudden we're only looking at two specific curves, those defined by the two planes that share the given edge. You can see an example of this with the box/sphere intersection on the middle of the page.
I also noticed that based on where you placed the hatching on the base of your pyramid (suggesting that the base is facing towards the viewer), your line convergences are off - so either that's wrong, or the hatching was used to suggest the wrong side was facing the viewer. Either way, it resulted in a rather difficult arrangement to visually parse.
Now, while your form intersections certainly have room for improvement (which isn't abnormal by any stretch, but I do recommend that you give them more attention in your warmup routine), your object constructions throughout this lesson are really quite well done. What stands out most to me is the fact that you're very patient and careful as you work through your subdivisions, generally being sure to lay down as much structure and scaffolding to help inform the specific positioning of any subsequent elements or features, rather than hitting an arbitrary threshold where you've put "enough" care into it, and decided to eyeball or approximate the rest. This manner of working, with its focus on precision, is definitely a new introduction at this point, and many students do still struggle with the idea of taking it as far as it will go. So, I'm pleased to see your results.
That word - precision - is sometimes misunderstood as a synonym for accuracy, but that would be incorrect. Rather, where accuracy speaks to how close you were to nailing the specific mark you wished to make, precision speaks to the actual act of defining what that mark ought ot be, prior to actually making it. So in a sense, the ghosting method's planning phase, especially marking out the start and end point of a mark, gives us greater precision (regardless of whether or not our mark connects them cleanly). So in this sense, whether or not we achieve enough precision is a matter of choice, not a matter of skill.
Again - your work is excellent in this regard, I just feel it's worth defining why your work is good, and to speak about the good qualities students exhibit when they come up. After all, I can't very well just say "you did great" and call it a day, as much as I'd like to (this is my 9th critique out of 10 today, it's 2am and I wanna go to beddddd).
I'm especially fond of your jars and bottles - you're handling things like beveled edges and corners very well, specifically in how you're building the structure out with as many straight edges as you can, before rounding them out right at the end. The result is very structurally solid, and those curves end up with the support of a lot of precision, which helps break away from the risk of vagueness described here.
Admittedly, I did find this one quite intriguing. The clipper's body itself is all kinds of complex, and you handled that really well, but what stands out as interesting to me is the fact that the clipper ended up sitting in the middle of a considerably wider box. Rather than constructing the bounding box such that it snugly fit the object on all sides, you seem to have planned around the extra space along the sides. Normally this would throw things all out of whack, but yours turned out just fine - suggesting you knew exactly what you were doing, and that your spatial reasoning skills here are developing very nicely.
So! I'll leave it at that, and will go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 7.
If you do end up picking up an ellipse guide for this (and I highly recommend it), note that the master ellipse template (which is basically a bunch of different degrees on the same sheet) most students use does limit the size of your ellipses a fair bit. This is fine (though it'll feel weird at first). The next step up is to get a full set of ellipse guides, and when you see how much that costs compared to a single master template, you'll see why most students stick to the small ellipses. The smaller ones are also entirely suitable for Lesson 7's vehicle drawings.
Thank you so much for looking at my submission, and staying up so late! (sorry about the lack of sleep provided!)
You are 100% correct that I hatched the pyramids wrongly now that I am looking them.
Something I wanted to ask, and maybe on a critique it isn,t the right place to ask, (feel free to tell me to move this question to discord or something). How long should a warm up session be/ how does one curate a good warm up regiment with such a wide variety of exercises to choose from on DaB. I tend to want to get my arm used to the movements I will be doing to draw and select table of ellipses, super imposed lines( I,C,S lines), and ellipses in planes in pretty much the same manner in which a pitcher throws a ball over and over before stepping to the plate("this is what I am going to do, let me get the kinks out of my arm now.") But with more involved warm ups (like form intersections of even applying construction to in insects) I could spend an hr warming up byt way of finishing the exercise,so I do typically pick those for warm ups and more as full exercises that will be my drawing session for the day (about once every 2 weeks- a month) but by not warm up with them I lose something to be learned (disguised as a warm up so it is a double benefit to do them!)
"This manner of working, with its focus on precision, is definitely a new introduction at this point, and many students do still struggle with the idea of taking it as far as it will go." Truer words have never been said. I struggled a lot with drawing like this and to be honest felt very un-confident with this submission. Specifically, I struggled with building a bounding box. I could not once building a box that I liked. Drawing the base first and then everything gave me such a headache (and I tried other planes first and building off it as well, and the normal box methods as well) A LOT of the crumpled paper sitting in my trash are whacky boxes. I just could not visualize a box the objects would fit it, or where the front to side plane of that box would shift. So i had to find a way to compensate for that portion that just was not clicking in my head, thus the clippers with its much bigger box, which I am very happy it worked out in the end. But you can see in the orthos that I made the planes too big there, and I did try to fix it in the actual drawing, but after many attempts I settled for the one submitted.
Thank you again, on to 25 wheels!
There are a couple things to keep in mind when it comes to the warmups:
Firstly, is that the goal is not to get stuck repeating the same exercises over and over. This leads us to ignore and abandon important exercises, and to get rusty on those fronts. In turn, this results in an unpleasant surprise when those particular skills come into the fore once again. So, always keep those exercises on rotation - ensuring that none get left behind.
You do not need to complete each exercise in the quantity or manner in which they were assigned in the lessons. Having demonstrated understanding of the purpose and intent behind each exercise, you should be well equipped to, say, understand that the rotated boxes is really about positioning boxes relative to their neighbours, maintaining tight gaps and structure for many boxes together, or how the form intersections are about defining the relationship between different forms that occupy in some part the same space in the world. These are all things that can be done with just a few forms, in the space of 5-10 minutes, rather than needing to hammer out several hours worth each.
You are certainly allowed to tip the balance of your warmups towards something you may be struggling with - for example if you have trouble with your bounding boxes, then it's likely that you've not given the kind of freely rotated boxes from the box challenge enough attention, and so perhapas that needs to take up a slot in your warmup sessions for a while, whilst still leaving the other slots open for a normal rotation of other exercises.
I hope that clarifies things.
This makes loads of sense! I think I am going to use a random choice generator, along with paying attention to what I need to work on so I choice what is right when I need it.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
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