Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles
7:17 AM, Tuesday November 8th 2022
Hi, here's my submission for lesson 7. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Jumping right in with your form intersections, overall very nice work. I did catch this little hiccup where you treated the box-cylinder intersection as though it were an intersection between two curving surfaces (resulting in the S-curve you went with). As shown in my overdrawing, we've got two distinct intersections each involving one flat surface (from the box) and one rounded surface (from the cylinder's length). As such, we would have two simple curves, meeting at the edge with a sharp corner.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is looking good! Still applying the line extensions correctly, so you've got the information you need to continue making steps forward as you practice this exercise and refine those instincts.
Moving onto your vehicle constructions, as a whole you're doing reasonable well, although there are definitely meaningful ways in which you can take your work here much farther to really push yourself to the limit. It does largely come down to time however - you're demonstrating a good understanding of the material, but before you finish up with the course, I think it's a good idea to give you the chance to demonstrate to yourself just how far you are able to push yourself, when all the limits are removed. Being able to demonstrate that to yourself is going to have a significant impact, although it will admittedly be a little painful in the moment.
Now as far as your spatial reasoning skills go, you're doing great. You're demonstrating fairly strong instincts for maintaining consistent convergences, and your constructions come out feeling very solid as a result. There are certainly some inconsistencies at times - like the front grill of this SUV slanting off to the left somewhat - but all in all I'm seeing an internal sense of space that is coming along well, and a good grasp of how to approach capturing these complex structures. What you're doing here would be really solid in any of the specific situations one might need to draw a vehicle (in terms of professional applications), but our focus in this course is on arming ourselves with exercises and approaches that will keep us improving - and so for that, we actually don't want to be leveraging those instincts when doing our work here. We want to be very particular with every step, thinking through every mark, every convergence, etc. Being intentional and taking the time to do so here will help rewire our brains in as effective a manner as possible.
To that end, I do think there are quite a few areas where introducing further lines/subdivisions and more depth to your orthographic plans would definitely have helped - that is, in the manner we discussed such things in the feedback I provided for your Lesson 6 work. For example, if we take a look at this pickup truck, we can see that the upper section of your bounding box has no actual subdivision whatsoever - you've effectively just kind of drawn the cab from observation, placed the windows and other major landmarks by eye, rather than based on specific breakdown of your references, laying out orthographic plans, etc. This severely diminishes the precision of the result. That's the main thing I want to see you push farther.
Now, while I generally avoid sharing other students' work because my intent is not for students to compare the quality of their results (although they always undoubtedly do), I have found it to be useful to share this work from a student from some years ago. Specifically because, setting the quality aside, it is very clear the means by which she achieved her strong results - by investing a ton of time (as shown by her time cards) and being extremely explicit on the page with every decision being made. Approaching it similarly will yield similar results for you, and I think putting them into practice will yield a meaningful return that you can carry forward as you depart from our halls.
So, I will be assigning one revision for you to apply what I've explained thus far. Before that however, I have a couple quick points to mention:
For the cast shadows on the ground, it's probably better (both for the drawing and for your ink supply) not to fill them in, as they can be a bit distracting from the vehicle itself. Not a huge concern, but since it'd save on ink, it's probably worth mentioning.
Also in regards to those ground cast shadows, while you by no means need to be perfectly accurate with these, taking a bit more time to consider the general forms casting them and having them reflect to some degree in the shadow's shape design is going to be worthwhile - so with the pickup, you've got a very flat, rectangular shadow which negates the raised height of the cab altogether, which does look a little off. Similarly in the SUV, the shadow itself seems to only sit between the wheels, which makes the front section of the car feel as though it's not casting a shadow at all, which again makes things feel off.
I did want to mention that this construction is definitely a good example of you investing a lot more time into the task than the others, and really solidifies my sense that you are indeed capable of exceptional work when you put the time in.
So! One more drawing, and we'll call it done. Just be sure to invest everything you've got into it.
Next Steps:
Please submit one more vehicle construction. For this, I'd like it to be a car/truck/suv of some sort.
Thanks for pointing this out! I think I didn't fully understand the subdivision method last time so I drew those vehicles in a wrong way(not breaking down/subdividing enough and drawing most of the upper parts by eye?) but now I think it makes more sense to me. Here's my revision: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NeE_AiE7szr_vJEicrHbQBe43dcu96kr?usp=share_link
Much better! You've definitely met the expectations I had in my previous critique, and have certainly proven that I was right to expect vastly more from you. I'm happy to mark this lesson as complete - and with it, the course as well. Congratulations!
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