Thank you for the kind words - and let's jump right into it.

I will of course admit to already knowing that your work is well done - I have been glancing at it as you've been posting it on the Discord, but I did largely keep quiet as you were doing fine, and I didn't want to leave myself with nothing to actually say in the critique itself.

Starting with the form intersections, as a whole you're doing a great job of demonstrating a strong grasp of how these forms relate to one another, and how you can define the joint between them. If we look back to the work you did for this exercise in Lesson 2, I could certainly see an amount of that understanding present there as well (perhaps moreso than most students), but there are still considerable ways in which your work here has improved - not least of which in the confidence and control of your linework. It's practically night and day, you're demonstrating considerably more forethought and planning behind each stroke, as well as far more self control.

That said, while I think you probably noticed this yourself, or would have at a glance, I did want to point out this sphere-cylinder intersection. I've coloured it so that we can see how we're passing from the sphere's curvature being most dominant along the outsides of the intersection, to following along with the cylinder's curvature more prominently in the middle. Technically we are always following along both surfaces at the same time, but thinking about jumping from one to the other, then back to the first, can help us better understand how to piece the intersection line together.

Continuing on, your cylinders in boxes are looking solid. Not much to say here, I mainly just check if the student is applying their line extension analysis correctly, and you most certainly are.

Jumping into the 'form intersection vehicles', I will point out that you technically did take this further than was intended. It's a common mistake and is no doubt due to how this part of the assignment is described in the notes, but ultimately the exercise is really just meant to be the same as the form intersections, but with a more specific arrangement of forms. There is absolutely no harm in what you've done here however. This approach still had you work through the same problems, simply with more precision. Both approaches give you a clear understanding of how to think about these complex objects in a simpler manner, so we can build upon it in the more detailed constructions.

Needless to say, the level of precision in your constructions, and the time you've invested into analyzing each orthographic view has been substantial, and you've definitely pushed yourself to the boundaries of "the best of which you are currently capable". That doesn't mean your work is perfect - there are cases where for example this car ended up seeming quite wide (perhaps because you didn't apply the 3D grid technique there) - but as a whole I still feel you have generally done what was asked of you. And more importantly, you made no attempt to adjust or fix any proportional issues. You've held fast to the decisions from previous stages of construction, only ever building upon those previous choices and solutions, without introducing any contradictions in the process.

This locomotive and train car honestly must have been really painful, and for all of that, it came out great. You were extremely precise and specific with every element, and I can see that you did have to freehand some of your ellipses, and did so quite well all considered. It definitely would have been preferable had you been able to work with a larger overall bounding box as a starting point - you probably could have nearly doubled the footprint of the drawing itself, giving you far more room to work through the spatial problems at play, but all things considered you still did a fantastic job.

I ended up having to go through your reference album when I hit the US Navy vessel - your construction looks entirely solid and superbly constructed, but I couldn't quite wrap my head around what in the hell I was looking at. Skipping over to the reference showed that you were nothing but faithful to the original object, but I'm still baffled by how adorable and cute it is. I know that some of the refs are from a toy, but I'm... not really convinced that the full size photos are of a real ship.

Before I finish up, I wanted to share with you one thing that you might find interesting. I wouldn't normally share this with students, simply because I'm not entirely sure if it's correct, but you understand the concept of a hypothesis well enough. Another student recently commented on the "Constructing to Scale" video asking if the two ellipses representing circles which are perpendicular to one another (which we use to create the 3D grid) would logically, if you take the sum of their individual degrees, add up to 90.

This does make sense, and when I went over a screenshot of the video with a digital ellipse tool to find the specific degree, they did in fact add up to 90 (it was something like 37 and 53 degrees, it was so accurate that it was eerie). Of course, I'm not sure if that's a coincidence, or if it is a more consistent rule that we can apply, and I haven't yet done the legwork to figure it out.

That said, it could definitely be an interesting possibility. I was testing it out on your beetle here, because I noticed the numbers you'd written down didn't add up to 90 (you can ignore my numbers, they're slightly different but I think that's more from me not matching up the ellipses perfectly, your ellipse template will obviously be more reliable there). The thing is, at a glance your proportions for the beetle were definitely wider on the front side, which suggested that your ellipses should have added up to more than 90 - in fact, I was hoping this would explain your mistake and give you a more actionable solution.

But the mystery doesn't end there - looking at your drawing more closely, I realized that the reason it felt super wide was the windshield, which actually went beyond the depth of the bounding box (not a mistake to really worry about, you're balancing so many different lines there, it's already a very challenging situation). So, it's possible that the bounding box itself was still a little narrower on that front section - but again, I'm not sure.

So, I'll leave you with that, and with a big congratulations. It was a bit of a bumpy road at first, but as you pushed through the constructional drawing lessons, you have continually delivered excellent work. I am proud to mark this lesson, and with it, the entire course, as complete!