This was not easy on me. In fact, it may have been beyond me at this moment. I often lost where I was in my construction. Im not sure, but i feel as though maybe my construction was too rigid but idk, I tried my best.
It may not have been easy on you, and it may have pushed you beyond your limits, but in a lot of ways that's the point - and you met that challenge head-on, and really knocked it out of the park.
Starting with your form intersections, I can definitely see that you're putting a lot of thought into how these forms relate to one another, and while there is room for improvement, you are in line with what I'd expect. While we introduce this exercise in Lesson 2, it's with the expectation that most students will be pretty confused and lost. From there, we work through the combination of simpler organic forms as we build up plants, insects, and animals, ultimately taking that seed planted in Lesson 2 and developing it in the background. That brings us to this point, where we're ready to discuss the theory behind the intersections a little more.
I noted some points down on this first page. The issues fell into three main categories:
Towards the bottom right we look at a cone-sphere intersection, where the lower S-curve intersection line is spot on - but you drew it on the other side of the sphere as well, which would only occur if the sphere were big enough to engulf that cone. Or alternatively, if the cone were skinny enough to pass through the sphere, as shown here. We also have a case of this same issue in the top left, with the sphere/cylinder.
Form intersections often confuse the shit out of students - that in itself is not a problem, but there are many students who respond to uncertainty and confusion by panicking and making arbitrary decisions. When you ask for their reasoning however, there is no reason, because in the moment they just kinda flailed and drew whatever. If you take a look at the intersection between the cylinder and box towards the bottom left, where the corner of the box is just peeking through the cylinder, you opted to have the box suddenly stop. I would ask why (as I did on the page), but I expect that this was an instance of uncertainty and panic. Remember - making a mistake is not bad. It's part of the process. But a mistake made without reasoning behind it isn't particularly useful. Always make sure that when you put a mark down, you have a reason for it - even if the reason itself is totally wrong. A wrong reason will still hold some logical consistency, and thus can be discussed and corrected, but an arbitrary choice can't really be corrected, since there was no reason for it in the first place.
And lastly, towards the upper right, where you've got a cylinder and a pyramid intersecting with a box, I think you just happened to forget to draw those intersections.
In addition to those notes I drew on the page, I want you to look over this diagram. Based on what you've drawn, I think a lot of this may already make sense to you - but it shows how intersections themselves change as the forms intersecting change.
Don't worry too much though - I'm very pleased with the fact that you're clearly understanding the manner in which rounded forms intersect with one another (with those S-curve type things), and it's showing that your spatial reasoning skills are developing nicely. We'll have another opportunity to look at your progress with this exercise in Lesson 7, so keep at it.
Continuing onto your object constructions, you've really done a great job. This lesson focuses very heavily on the concept of precision, and you've held tightly to it throughout your work. This one is quite different in a lot of ways from the last three lessons where we've been able to work in a reactive fashion - that being, a fashion where we simply deal with the results of the previous step. If the cranial ball for the head was accidentally drawn too big, we simply end up with a bigger head than the reference shows, but it still feels solid and believable, because there were no clear boundaries set out within the construction itself to establish right/wrong as far as proportion goes.
Here however, we're working more outside-in rather than inside-out, and so we end up establishing those outer boundaries, and then working within them, gradually breaking the bounding box down to kind of carve out our result.
Precision - which as I mentioned is our focus here - 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.
In our constructions here, we build up precision primarily through the use of the subdivisions. These allow us to meaningfully study the proportions of our intended object in two dimensions, then apply those same proportions to the object in three dimensions - and most importantly, it allows us to decide the nature of a given element or structure ahead of time, choosing from which point along a given dimension it will start and end - like starting from 1/4th down the span of a surface's width and stopping at the 3/4ths mark. Like with the ghosting method, this breaks the process of drawing those structures down into bite-sized steps. Instead of figuring it all out at the same time, as you're drawing it, at any given time you're either focused only on observing, on calculating, on subdividing, or on executing a mark.
Now, most students will stop at this point, and so I'll explain that we can benefit even more from separating out those steps further with the use of an orthographic plan. The way these were introduced in the computer mouse demo are pretty limited, but they can be taken much farther by identifying the specific positioning of each major land mark (whereas the computer mouse really just subdivided into quadrants or whatever and called it done - something I'll surely be updating when my overhaul of the course material gets this far). You, however, made excellent use of those orthographic plans, taking them beyond what the demonstration showed and making as many of those decisions as you could manage up-front.
To put it simply, I have no complaints. You've done an excellent job, and you should be extremely proud of what you've achieved here. So, I'll happily mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the fantastic work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for Lesson 7.
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).
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