Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects
4:04 PM, Wednesday September 15th 2021
Hi,
Thanks again for your time and your very helpful critiques.
Best regards.
As a whole, your work throughout this lesson is exceptionally well done.
Starting with your form intersections, you've done a great job of constructing these forms such that they individually feel solid and three dimensional, and you've gone on to establish the intersections themselves in a fashion that demonstrates a strong development of your understanding of how these forms relate to one another in 3D space. I have just one small suggestion - when it comes to adding line weight to help clarify how a sphere or other ellipse-based form overlaps something else, you may end up wondering which line to follow (in the case that we've drawn through our ellipses). In this circumstance, try to follow the outermost edge of the elliptical shape - even if it means jumping from one line to another in order to maintain the edge that falls furthest outside. This will ensure that as you re-emphasize its existence as a 3D form, any of the sphere's own internal lines will remain inside of its silhouette, where they won't undermine its solidity. Ending up with lines outside our form's silhouette can interfere with how they're interpreted as being solid and 3D.
Continuing onto your object constructions, you've done an incredible job at approaching this lesson with considerable patience and care. This is the first one where we really force students to work with any real degree of precision - that is, where we require students to actually do a sort of measuring (even if it's not with rulers), subdividing through structures to find more appropriate proportions and locations for their smaller elements. It's common for students, not being too familiar with this kind of approach, to play along for a while, before deciding at some arbitrary point that they're done, and that anything they add thereafter will be approximated instead.
You did no such thing - you pushed through the subdivision throughout the entire process for each and every construction. You took great care in wrapping your head around the 3D space in which you were working, and in building directly upon the scaffoldings in place, never jumping too far ahead. Whenever you added something, it was always with enough structure in place to support it.
We can see this most clearly in examples like this charging block - specifically in how you approached the rounded corners, first blocking them out as simple boxes, and then rounding them off towards the end of the process. There are more complex examples as well, like this electric razor. The subject matter here was especially complex, with things being set at a variety of angles, along with including all of the subtler curves along the body of the handle. This takes us closer to what we explore in the very last lesson, which this handle being particularly similar to the subtle, specific design of a sports car. You've handled it extremely well.
It's worth mentioning that there are a number of cases where you had to deal a fair bit with ellipses - especially larger ones that forced you to work freehand. While you handled these fairly well, it's inevitable that there would be some unevenness to the shapes. It's not a big deal here, but I still strongly encourage you to pick up an ellipse guide for the wheel challenge and Lesson 7, where their use becomes more significant. Full ellipse guide sets are pretty expensive, but most students handle this last chunk of the course with a "master" ellipse template, which is just one piece with ellipses of a variety of degrees cut out of it. The main limitation is that they're on the smaller end, but it's adequate for our purposes here.
So! All in all, your work is very well done, and I'm very pleased with how your skills have been coming along. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 7.
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