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9:20 PM, Thursday April 20th 2023

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.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
2:49 PM, Monday April 24th 2023
edited at 2:52 PM, Apr 24th 2023

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?

edited at 2:52 PM, Apr 24th 2023
6:39 PM, Monday April 24th 2023

Unfortunately I'm not really the one to ask about where to go next, as it is heavily dependent on what it is you specifically are looking to explore. For that, what you've been doing to adhere to the 50% rule is the best compass to follow - it shows what it is you're interested in pursuing, and can highlight areas in which you may ultimately wish to grow and improve.

When it comes to recommendations however, I simply haven't had the time myself to go through many other courses and resources. The main ones I've looked at were on New Masters Academy, and that was specifically to evaluate the viability of a partnership between Drawabox and them. For those topics, each lesson includes suggestions for courses on NMA that would help explore those topics further (usually on the first page of lessons 3-7 in a grey box), and there are some on the first page of Lesson 0 that suggest courses pertaining to things like figure drawing as well.

Beyond that though, you can ask over on reddit (/r/ArtistLounge and /r/learnart are good choices, whereas our subreddit is focused primarily on Drawabox itself so that would give you a more limited set of responses), and you can ask over on our discord chat server.

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