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10:48 AM, Monday December 19th 2022
Congrats on finishing lesson 6! I'll do my best to give you useful feedback so that you can improve.
Starting with your form intersections, your work here is quite well done. I only found one intersection which felt off and it looks like the intersection ignores the angle of the top plane ( I could be wrong as this is my first time critiquing form intersections). I expect based on your work you already largely understand this, but I have found that sharing this diagram at this stage in the game can help students further solidify their understanding of how to think through these kinds of spatial relationships.
For your object constructions I've taken some text from uncomfortable which nicely explains precision and the nature of this lesson.
So! Getting into your object constructions, you've done very well, and have held really nicely to the overall core focus of "precision" that we push throughout the lesson. Where lessons 3-5 have us operating in a much less precise, more inside-out approach - that is, one where we can kind of build upon the previous stage, no matter how it turned out. If the head of an animal started out too big, we can keep building upon it without undermining the solidity of the structure (so long as we accept that the head is going to end up being proportionally larger than whatever's in our reference). Here however, we learn to work in more of an outside-in approach, where much more of our decision making needs to be separated out, with those choices being made separately from the marks that actually build up those structures.
Precision is often conflated with accuracy, but they're actually two different things (at least insofar as I use the terms here). Where accuracy speaks to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, precision actually has nothing to do with putting the mark down on the page. It's about the steps you take beforehand to declare those intentions.
So for example, if we look at the ghosting method, when going through the planning phase of a straight line, we can place a start/end point down. This increases the precision of our drawing, by declaring what we intend to do. From there the mark may miss those points, or it may nail them, it may overshoot, or whatever else - but prior to any of that, we have declared our intent, explaining our thought process, and in so doing, ensuring that we ourselves are acting on that clearly defined intent, rather than just putting marks down and then figuring things out as we go.
Throughout your constructions here you focus heavily on achieving high precision primarily through your use of subdivision, effectively allowing yourself to separate the decision of the nature of the mark you wish to execute, from the step at which you actually make the mark. And so, you're able to focus all of your attention on executing a mark whose specific requirements have already been determined.
In uncomfortable's mouse demo he introduces the concept of an orthographic plan. He uses it to loosely define the curves and edges of the mouse but it can be taken to much greater levels to define specific points on the object in fractions. So for example, if we were constructing the front of a drawer, there's value in identifying specifically where that handle starts and ends along the width of that drawer's front face, and doing so ahead of time so that when we go to actually construct the object in three dimensions, we've already figured out all of these "answers", leaving us to merely apply them in three dimensions rather than having to worry about making decisions while we draw.
Note that what we're talking about here is not simply identifying those proportions, but rather it's really about making decisions. So for example, if we identified that the handle of the drawer sits between the 19/50ths and 31/50ths positions along its width, but that would be incredibly annoying to subdivide and build out. Instead, in most cases we'd be able to round these to 2/5ths and 3/5ths respectively, without any noticeable loss of accuracy.
You have done this with object 5 onwards which is great, however, you can leverage them even further. If we take a look at your stapler for example, I've highlighted a few areas which are seem to be decided based purely on observation. You should subdivide to decide where the bottom metal bit actually protrudes from (which would look like this ) because that can be transferred to the side plane on the object. If we don't do that we are essentially guessing where it would be which takes away from the exercise as we want to try to think about 3d space as much as possible. It may seem tedious and unnecessary to do so but it really allows you to get the most out of the exercise by doing so. Also we want to define curves as straight lines first like you've done in object 8.
This will come in very handy as we tackle more complex subject matter in Lesson 7, where you'll want to leverage this kind of approach to a great degree. It certainly is more time consuming, but given how well you've demonstrated patience and care throughout the rest of this lesson, I expect you are entirely capable of meeting that requirement.
With that being said you've done a great job with this lesson so I'll go ahead and mark it complete.
Next Steps:
25 Wheel Challenge
Staedtler Pigment Liners
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).