25 Wheel Challenge
4:07 PM, Sunday August 16th 2020
Hello hello! This challenge was difficult and very frustrating at points for me.
Under most images i put in my opinions and thoughts on how it went.
Thanks!
Whew, it's pretty normal to end up with an ellipse guide that's particularly tiny - pretty much everyone deals with that. That said, based on your first handful of wheels, I get the feeling that maybe your ellipse guide is particularly smaller than the ones I'm used to seeing. For what it's worth, the construction applied on them (on wheels like #3 for instance) is entirely solid. You had to work at a ridiculously small scale there, but it came out really well.
Others, however, start to get a little hairy and clumsy. #5 for instance definitely suffers from the issues of freehanding the rest of your marks at such a small scale that you're not necessarily able to control those marks as well as we'd certainly like. Again, based on the scale, if that's really the biggest your ellipse guide goes, then it's unfortunate, and was definitely hamstringing you quite a bit.
Now, I'm going to ignore the hairiness/unevenness of the ellipses in your larger, freehanded wheels, simply because I accept that students still need a good deal of practice with ellipses to be able to nail this sort of thing. So with construction of the main wheel form set aside, the next thing I want to look at is how you tackle the actual tread texture - and I think in that regard, you've actually done a really good job in a number of cases, with a small adjustment I'd offer.
I'm really happy with 17 - with a tread that packed with big chunky forms, all you can really hope for is some arrangement of solid black shapes as you've done here, and I think it came out great. Looking at #20 however, it's a similar kind of problem but with a bit more leeway, and one thing that I noticed is that while you worked with those kinds of clear shadow shapes, you were actually filling in the side plane of the 'chunky' tread forms. Instead of filling in a face of a form, I want you to always think about the marks you're drawing as being the shadows cast by those textural forms. You can see the difference depicted in this diagram.
It's all just a matter of going back to the lesson 2 concepts about texture - we're not drawing the forms themselves, we're drawing the shadows they cast on their surroundings. Technically with #20, you drew the form shading on those textural forms - again, drawing on the form itself, not the shadows it casts. Just something to keep in mind.
Aside from that, your work is coming along fairly well. As such, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 7.
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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