For honesties sake, there's a few iterations of failed tank because I was frustrated with my first attempts at vehicle construction going wrong - but I do feel I benefitted from it ultimately.
Disproportionate amount of Warhammer vehicles in there for someone who doesn't play Warhammer, just found them interesting!
Starting with your form intersections, there are a couple points I want to call out:
Firstly, you appear to be quite purposely eliminating all foreshortening altogether, resulting in boxes that aren't really drawn in perspective, but rather according to isometric or axonometric projection. Some students are prone to thinking of this as "0 point perspective" (where all your parallel edges are represented with lines that are parallel to one another on the page - you can also think of it as having all your vanishing points forced to infinity). This all falls under an entirely different approach for representing 3D space on a flat page, separate from perspective projection. For more information on this, read the first point in these reminders from the box challenge.
When constructing anything with an ellipse, be sure to do so around a central minor axis line. You've done this in most cases, but I did see at least one cone where that was skipped, and some places where the minor axis line didn't quite penetrate all the way through the ellipses.
Aside from that, the intersections themselves are coming along well and do demonstrate a well developing grasp of how these forms relate to one another in space. I would just encourage you to focus only on the visible portion of the intersection line in any case where the intersection line is anything more complex than an ellipse. So for example, here you're OK to draw through the intersection line because it's a simple ellipse and the ellipse will help you maintain the correct curvature. Here however I'd recommend just drawing the visible portion, as it helps us keep focused on the specific relationship we're defining. I often find that students will struggle more when drawing all the way through it, so while normally it's something I encourage, for this exercise it can become a little overwhelming.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, you're doing well here overall, although don't forget to apply the ghosting method with any freehanded linework - including the ellipses. That focuses on maintaining a confident stroke, resulting in an even shape. Your ellipses here tend to be a little hesitant, suggesting that you're not quite leaning into the ghosting method's emphasis on a confident execution. And of course, be sure to use the ghosting method for your side edges as well, being sure to execute each stroke with full confidence, allocating all your time to the planning and preparation phases instead.
Moving onto your form intersection vehicles, by and large you've approached these well, with the main issues being those I called out in regards to your form intersections - incorporate a bit more foreshortening to ensure some convergences (you actually have some boxes here that end up with divergences as seen here), and make consistent use of minor axes when building cylinders.
Finally, looking at your more detailed vehicle constructions, I think there are some really solid examples here, along with some where steps could have been taken to minimize the amount of guesswork needed.
Starting with your strongest example, I think with this one you certainly demonstrated a lot of care in laying out the orthographic study, and while it wasn't applied as directly to the legs/feet as it could have been, the initial steps were well done, and they did translate better to the main body of the structure. I know there was a mistake in that translation as well - these things happen, but as with all things throughout this course, our focus is on how you're applying the information. Mistakes happen, and they do not invalidate the steps you've taken otherwise. All we're doing here is determining whether you understand the process well enough to continue applying it and working at it on your own going forwards.
Given that cars are probably the hardest and most time consuming thing to tackle in this lesson, I think it is best to look at your chevy impala. Here there are simply way too many things being eyeballed/approximated, rather than defined in specificity first in an orthographic plan, then directly translated to your 3D construction. As I've shown here there are many specific elements whose positions and proportions are not specifically established relative to the overall bounding box. This leaves you to have to guess at where they should be positioned as you built it out in 3D space.
This basically leaves us solving a lot of different problems all at the same time - where the lines goes, how it relates to other elements of the construction, where that element should sit towards the front relative to the back, how things like headlights should be arranged, and so on. There's a lot of decisions that need to be made, and the biggest value of the orthographic study is that it allows us to make those decisions without having to worry about a ton of other things at the same time. Even just having to worry about convergences while making those decisions can be incredibly taxing, and cause us to make more mistakes.
On the flipside, I will say that in approaching it as you did, you did demonstrate a strong understanding of 3D space, a good sense of how the different elements relate to one another in space, and so on - but what we're gauging here is not what you know and where your skills are. We're gauging whether or not you're comfortable enough with the specifics of the exercises to continue making optimal use of them going forwards - so while the result was still quite lovely, it's the approach that we're focused on here.
So, I'm going to assign one more car construction. Beforehand, I want you to read through this section from Lesson 6. The demonstration linked there goes over how orthographic plans can be used, and how detailed they can be - those same steps would then be replicated one-to-one to build up the object in three dimensions.
This is definitely time consuming - despite being just one drawing, it's likely going to take you many hours spread out across multiple days, so I'd like you to write down the dates during which you worked on it, along with a rough estimate of how many hours were spent in each session. Push yourself to the limit here, be as fastidious and specific with every step. Don't skip anything, and allow yourself to take as much time as you require to do this to the best of your ability.
Next Steps:
One more car construction, as described at the end of my critique.
Your submission here is a bit tricky, for the simple reason that you are moving in the right direction, but that you could have taken this much further. It is not at all uncommon for students to end up spending many hours on a single construction for this lesson (4 or 5 hours is pretty common, while some students have spent upwards of a dozen hours really pushing themselves to do the work to the best of their current ability. Much of that time comes from using their orthographic plan to pin down the specific positioning of anything they feel to be worth adding to the 3D construction at all.
You certainly have made greater use here of your orthographic plans, which was the main issue I wanted to see addressed here. I do feel it could be pushed further, but as it stands you're demonstrating a good understanding of how to use the tool, even if you didn't take the use of that tool as far as you could have.
A couple things that you may consider when practicing this kind of exercise on your own in the future include:
Ensuring that any curved structure is built up using straight edges/flat surfaces as explained here - I'm a lot of cases where you're jumping straight into curves, which suggests that you're skipping some of these smaller steps.
Taking more care to make sure that the landmarks you're defining in your orthographic plans are consistent - for example, I noticed that for the main headlights in your front orthographic plan, on the right side you've got the headlight right up against one of your vertical lines, but on the left side there's a gap between the line and the headlight itself, as shown here. This suggests a lack of symmetry in the plan itself, which would then be transferred to your construction (although in general you shouldn't have any gaps as we see on the left side, everything should be very tightly defined).
Another concern I had was that throughout the construction you're going back over your lines quite a bit, approaching it in a rather sketchy manner, which goes against much of what we'd learned about approaching linework earlier in the course. If you're freehanding your lines, you need to be employing the ghosting method, which means executing each mark one at a time, and not taking any reflexive/automatic action.
That said, in this lesson in particular, you have full permission to use a ruler - not just for the bounding box, or the lines we get from subdividing it, but for any line that may benefit from it. Furthermore, this is not intended to be a kindness to students that they can choose to follow, or not - it's specifically to ensure that as much of your mental resources can be committed to the specific decisions being made throughout the process, rather than having more of it allocated to simpler things like basic markmaking, which we have other exercises to help us improve upon.
So to put it simply, using the ruler for everything that can ostensibly benefit from it will help us apply the concepts in this lesson more effectively, without distraction. This helps us avoid being sloppy. Conversely, when we break away from the overall principles of markmaking from the course and allow ourselves to draw in a manner that is less careful and less intentional, that carries into how we approach everything else in the given task - so I do quite strongly believe that the way in which you chose to approach that linework did influence the choices you made when laying out your orthographic plans and choosing which elements to specifically define within them (and which to leave out), and how you ultimately transferred that to your 3D construction.
Ultimately, you know how to use these tools and how to apply these exercises, and have everything you need to make use of them going forward to push your skills forward. As such, while I feel you have it in you to do the work that was assigned far more completely and thoroughly than you did, I am going to mark this lesson, and the course as a whole as complete.
My intent in assigning these revisions was to give you the opportunity to have a somewhat more satisfying end to the course (I imagine being finished with the course to be a good feeling, but to have it so with many issues called out as I have done here to be somewhat bitter sweet), but it does seem that didn't pan out as I intended.
That is unfortunate, but what matters is that you clearly have learned a great deal, and you have still earned every bit of your course completion. You may simply want to take more care with how you tackle such tasks in the future, as you go on to take other courses and learn from other resources.
Honestly, the critique doesn't add any bitterness to the sweet of finishing - there's always going to be things to improve and reaching the end of the course doesn't change that!
Just wanted to say thanks for all your work on the course and patient feedback. It's much appreciated (if not always easy to hear!).
Do you have any suggestions on where to go from here or what to do to build on this course? I appreciate there are even more fundamentals I could stand to learn!
Preferably in a similar format/pricepoint as I found that was good at motivating me to keep going.
I found the organic entities hardest and would be keen to learn about drawing figures/people/anatomy and know you used to cover this but felt it was done better elsewhere. More work on colour and detail would also be of interest. Any suggestions?
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.
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