Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles
11:30 PM, Tuesday October 24th 2023
This is hard!
Thank you for taking a look.
Jumping right in with your form intersections, your work here is by and large very well done, and your intersections demonstrate a pretty solid understanding of the relationships between these forms as they exist in 3D space. I did catch a couple cases where your intersections didn't quite follow the surfaces of the given forms, as I've marked out here, but these are just a couple mistakes amongst many others that were done correctly. Similarly, your cylinders in boxes were well done, and I'm pleased to see the continued and thorough use of the line extensions. One thing I would recommend is increasing the convergences/rate of foreshortening of your boxes a little more though to avoid getting too close to your edges running parallel in space.
Continuing onto your form intersection vehicles, you've done a great job with these. Many students end up overestimating what's being asked for, but you've hit the nail on the head here. Ultimately the purpose of this part of the lesson is to help remind students that while the process of setting up a grid, identifying landmarks, etc. is one that can appear as though we're just placing a bunch of lines or edges in space, and then the object comes together in the end, that is not the case. Rather, as you've done here, we're still defining clear volumes one at a time, and gradually refining them to achieve the final result - it's just that we're using the grid to help establish our proportions with greater precision.
Carrying onto your more detailed vehicle constructions, as a whole I'm very pleased with your results. There's definitely growth over the set as well - earlier on your orthographic plans were a little more vague, where you'd leave out certain landmarks and rely more on markings/notes rather than actual subdivision lines that could be transferred/reproduced by following the same process in 3D space. You still managed solid results with those, but as you pushed on through you started relying more on concrete subdivisions, and on identifying more specific landmarks. This boat's orthographic plan for instance is very, very well done, and I'm especially pleased with how you broke your edges into straight lines, rather than worrying about the curves so early in the process.
There's really just one minor, superficial issue I want to call out - and given that we're at the end of the course, it really isn't that significant, but I'll mention it anyway. Remember that in this course, when it comes to the filled areas of black, hatching, etc. we try to put them all towards a use that echoes the course's core priorities. So, as discussed in Lesson 2, we don't worry about form shading, and we're not worrying about local/surface colour as well. So for example, filling in sections of your wheels here](https://i.imgur.com/pgk3FJy.jpeg) as well as the wheel wells behind them, would be examples of form shading where we're making surfaces darker where they are turned away from the light, and leaving them light where they face the light.
Instead, by focusing our filled areas of solid black on cast shadows only - that is, where we design a completely new shadow shape that captures the relationship between the form casting it and the surface receiving it - we're able to leverage this tool to further enforce the spatial reasoning that these exercises are ultimately designed to address.
This is something that we've implemented more strictly in recent times, so a lot of the demos don't entirely line up with it all of the time. There's also cases where hatching can be used to help describe aspects of a form that are not immediately obvious - so for example, if we go back to Lesson 6 and look at the bluetooth speaker demo, I use hatching on the rounded edges of the structure to further convey to the viewer that this is not a hard corner, but rather a gradual transition. If however the form was already a cylinder, I'd probably be less inclined to use the hatching because the elliptical ends are generally enough to clearly establish the nature of the form - although that isn't immediately a given, so some of it certainly falls to your judgment.
Anyway, again - that's a fairly minor point, but I really didn't have anything else to fuss over. Your work is very well done, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson - and the course with it - as complete. Congratulations!
Thank you so much for the critique and for the course, i'm glad i took the time to make it.
You're a amazing teacher, thank you!
I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.
Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.
Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.
Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.
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