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9:53 PM, Monday August 1st 2022

Nice work overall! As a whole you've definitely done a great job here. In the interest of time, I'm going to do my best to focus on the few suggestions I have to keep you improving and growing.

Jumping right into the form intersections, great work - your intersections are demonstrating a very well developed understanding of the manner in which these forms relate to one another in 3D space. Your cylinders in boxes are quite well done too, although I did notice one issue that is impacting how effectively the line extensions are being applied. It comes down to identifying those contact points - right now it seems like you're picking somewhat more arbitrary points that make contact with the edge of the enclosing plane, but there's a bit more to be considered.

I've made some notes here. When the ellipse touches an edge - especially when that ellipse is quite narrow - it can seem like a lot of it is touching the edge. In the example I showed there, on the edge higher up on the page, you picked where the ellipse started to make contact. It would make more sense to identify where that contact starts and ends, and pick a point in centered between them. Conversely, for the case along the bottom edge of that plane, the ellipse goes beyond the edge of the plane itself. In this case, we'd be picking the point furthest out (despite this beyond outside of the plane and beyond its edge) because we can understand that if the ellipse were squeezed down just enough to fit snugly within the plane, it would bring this furthest point in to be the part that makes contact.

Continuing onto your vehicle constructions, you've really knocked it out of the park in terms of constructing solid, three dimensional structures, and taking great care in always thinking in 3D space as you gradually whittled your structures down, increasing their complexity. Admittedly as far as the ellipse guide goes, there is definitely a ton of variety in the wheels we may need to construct here - but the biggest reason for me to recommend even getting a master ellipse template is to establish the initial ellipses used in the constructing-to-scale approach (to achieve a unit cube). Since those ellipses are essentially drawn towards the beginning, and everything else is based off them, the more limited selection becomes less of an issue.

In terms of issues, I have just a couple things to call out:

  • Try to push the threshold at which you allow yourself to just eyeball the positioning of elements further and further, making more of those decisions in your orthographic plans (which I assume you did, but simply didn't include - since your work does suggest that kind of decision-making and preplanning). So for example, if we take a look at this car - its door handle is not positioned according to any specific subdivision or distance along the length of the car. Sure, a door handle is pretty inconsequential, but the more we push ourselves to first decide how far along the elements starts, and how far along it'll end, the more we train ourselves to make decisions ahead of time, separately from the action being taken.

  • On this boat, you ended up delving more into decorative form shading, along the ends of the hull. Remember that as discussed here in Lesson 2, form shading is not to play a role in our drawings for this course.

  • Similarly to the previous point, I noticed that you took to filling in your windows with solid black. Admittedly I did the same in my coast guard demo, although in retrospect I do not believe it to be the best of choices. It is best to stick to the consistent application of filled areas of solid black being used to represent cast shadows. That generally means that the shapes of filled, solid black need to be their own newly designed shapes (which themselves define the relationship between the form casting them and the surface receiving them), rather than simply filling in shapes that already exist n the construction (like filling in windows).

  • The one exception to the previous point - and it's not really an exception, as I'll explain in a moment - is when you've got objects on the interior of the object, that would be visible through the windows. Reason being, those objects are surfaces of their own, but because they're inside the car, we can argue that the exterior of the car casts shadows onto all the interior (even though that's technically not correct, given that light would get in through the windows). So we can fill in all of those internal elements with black, and it'll read correctly, as long as we're considering the design of those black shapes to suggest actual 3D forms, as shown here. The attempt's pretty rough and quick there, but you can see how it implies a bit of a dashboard, as well as some seats. Anywhere we see straight through one window and out the other, we leave blank, but anywhere we look in through a window and see an object, we fill it with black.

And that about covers it! As a whole, you've really done a fantastic job. I'm proud to mark this lesson, and the course with it, as complete. Congratulations!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:48 AM, Tuesday August 2nd 2022

Holy crap! That is so exciting! Months of work, so many empty pens, and one giant pile of filled printer paper later. Wooooooooooo!

Just wanted to say THANK YOU, both for these critiques specifically and for drawabox generally. Probably goes without saying at this point, but you've created an amazing resource and an amazing community to go along with it. I love (and am a little dumbfounded by) the fact that something like this can exist on the internet today.

Meanwhile, I'm excited to figure out the next steps on my journey! Probably going to sign up for NMA tomorrow :D

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