Hello Chieftang,

I saw boxbot's post in #lesson-6 and wanted to give you a prompt response. You've certainly gotten plenty of feedback over on discord as well as given plenty of valuable feedback yourself. Therefore, there's no doubt in my mind that you've expertly understood what this lesson is getting at (spoilers). So instead of a lengthy breakdown of each specific object, we'll be focusing on what you've done well for this lesson and how you can apply these concepts to your drawings going forward. Accordingly, I'll try to keep this brief! (EDIT: I was not, in fact, brief)

Starting with your form intersections, there's nothing about your decisions that strike me here as wrong, or at least wrong enough to warrant a draw-over. This is something you can expect to continuously improve on as you keep doing this exercise for your warmups. The feedback you've given others on this exercise is similarly great, so it's safe to say you understand this concept. One note on the readability of the image is lineweight. You've used very thick lines for the intersections, but did you know you can also use these for form edges that overlap? Like the arrows in lesson2, if an edge goes over another edge, you can draw over that edge once of twice to give it more weight and signify that it is in front of the other edge. There are some cases, usually for the circles or cylinders, where you've gone over those forms a few more times than the boxes covering them. Because of this, the thicker edge of the circle or cylinder (specifically the ellipse) look like it should be in front of the thinner edge of the box.

This technique is really handy for those especially cluttered bits of your form intersections where you have a lot of forms overlapping. I find this technique helpful for understanding where everything sits in relation to one another, but it's not a strict requirement. In fact, you've done a good job of giving your constructed objects a stronger outline over the background detail which really reinforces its solidity. Applying this technique to form intersections can aid in that solidity too. Overall this could also be interpreted as an aesthetic consideration as the purpose of this exercise is primarily to decide where the forms intersect. Adding lineweight outside of that is part, yes, but not where the meat of this exercise is.

tldr; line weight cool, not required.

Now for the real part of the lesson, the objects! Breaking down the intent of this lesson (as I understand it at least), what we focus on here is organizing, planing, and understanding. It is in these three areas that your efforts really shine through, so let's zero in on what you've done so well.

Organizing is, admittedly, not an official part of lesson 6. However, I give out so much pointers about organizing that I might as well indulge this topic. Organizational skills are important here because of the nature of the lesson's subject. Man made objects nowadays are often manufactured by machines, thus they have very precise proportions and features that need to be accounted for when constructing. If you don't keep these features in order, you'll veer into the uncanny valley for objects. This is something that comes up in lesson 7 moreso than in lesson 6 because the design language of cars is much less varied (to an extent), and so it's beneficial to start acquiring these skills here in lesson 6. Furthermore, organizational skill, I find, help us be more conscious about the lines we put down by making us think about them in context with everything else in the drawing beforehand. You end up thinking not just about what you're doing but why you're doing it.

Ultimately, this leads to a lot of subdividing which can very quickly turn into line salad with a line vinaigrette dressing. You've done a good job of using labels and different pen colors in your later constructions to keep track of everything, especially for your radio and iron constructions. Going forward, using these techniques in an explicit manner will help ingrain them into your thought processes. Eventually, you'll be able to keep track of things more easily and the speed at which you construct will increase. It's kind of like the extension lines for the box challenge when you think about it: making a deliberate correction choice in order to internalize a concept over time.

Moving on, planning and understanding are the two most important aspects of this lesson, and perhaps drawabox as a whole. Starting with planning, you've done an excellent job of utilizing your orthographic studies. Not only do you use your orthos to decide how the object is constructed, but you also do great acting on your orthos. Orthos are like a more complicated form of the two dots you place on the page for the ghosted lines exercise. They are a statement of your intention before you act and function to spread out the drawing process over as many steps as possible. Essentially, you offload all the hard thinking and measuring to your orthos, freeing up your brain to tackle the construction later. It's very tempting to want to adjust after observing your reference and believe me, I'm guilty of this too. However, acting on the plan we set out beforehand and seeing it through to completion will yield more for our confidence, rather than second guessing ourselves at every step of the process.

This is something I have no doubt you understand well. You don't get it perfectly all the time (for example, you missed the indent on top of you fabreeze plug-in that was in your orthos), but you've shown a good commitment to your decisions that should be spotlighted here. For the cars, I would definitely recommend putting the orthos on a separate page. I know you had some trouble keeping everything on one page, so spreading the orthos out onto a second page will give you more room to breathe.

Finally, we arrive at understanding. This boils down to our knowledge of how the objects exists in 3d space and how much this sense has developed over the course of drawabox. Your work here shows a strong understanding of how your objects exist in 3d space. By drawing through the objects, even for the parts we can't see, we craft a more complete picture of the object in our head and more thoroughly develop our sense of spatial reasoning. I'm especially pleased to see you drawing through your forms in the bluetooth speaker, coffee machine, chair, and oil diffuser! I think the iron, as messy as you think it might be, demonstrates a great understanding of how a curvy object is constructed. There's no doubt that you understand how these objects sit in 3d space, and it shows. Honestly, there's not much more I can say on this topic that you don't already know, so I guess I'll wrap it up here.

Overall, the work you've shown here and the feedback you've given for this lesson over on discord show an outstanding grasp of this lesson and its contents. I look forward to seeing what you come up with for the cars. But first, you must tackle the rubber cylinders upon which they stand. If you need me, I'll be in the corner looking up the definition of "brief." Congratulations!