25 Wheel Challenge
10:28 PM, Monday August 9th 2021
Looks like I did 26 wheels, whoops!
26?! I only asked for 25. Take it back, and do it again!
As a whole, you've done a pretty great job here. I'm very pleased to see that you're making good use of an ellipse guide, and that throughout the challenge you've paid a great deal of attention to the careful construction of these structures - both in capturing the gently inflated impression of the wheels themselves through the use of several ellipses rather than just defining both ends and calling it a day, and in the rims/spokes themselves, where you did a great job of creating solid, complex structures. The patience and care you've demonstrated throughout this exercise is notable.
Now, one purpose this exercise serves, specifically at this stage in the course, is as a bit of a trap - and unfortunately for me, it seems you've kind of sidestepped my trap. The thing is, by the time most students reach this point, they're far enough removed from Lesson 2 that most of them forget about the principles of implicit markmaking that we use when capturing textures. As a result, they end up drawing their tire tread textures - and they are textures, given that they are composed of forms that rest along the surface of another larger form - using explicit markmaking and constructional techniques.
When you've got tires that have shallower grooves to them, it actually doesn't really make a notable difference, at least not for the most part. Where it stands out are the chunkier tractor-type tires that have big protrusions. In those areas, students will sometimes tackle them through strict construction - outlining them, drawing all the internal edges of those textural forms, etc. or by attempting to fill in the side planes of those forms (using form shading).
Now in your case, you didn't actually end up exploring anything of the sort - though that's certainly not your fault. I can however see that your tire textures were pretty densely packed, so you didn't end up with much control over how densely you could choose to lay out those textures. That is itself, normally a sign that the student isn't thinking implicitly, and instead is focusing on pinning down all of the visual information there is.
As such, I do think it would be beneficial for you to just review the Texture material from Lesson 2, just to refresh your memory on how texture is all about understanding the nature of these little forms, and implying their presence only by drawing the shadows they cast. Doing so gives us a lot of flexibility - it allows us to separate the forms that are present in the world we're drawing from the marks we use to draw them. There may be a ton of little textural forms, but we may opt only to capture a few of their shadows, allowing the rest to be blasted away by the light source.
While this is not itself a tire texture, I feel sharing this bush viper scale texture helps convey this concept.
So! I'll leave you to review those notes, but I am still pleased with your work here in this challenge. I'll go ahead and mark it as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 7.
Michael Hampton is one of my favourite figure drawing teachers, specifically because of how he approaches things from a basis of structure, which as you have probably noted from Drawabox, is a big priority for me. Gesture however is the opposite of structure however - they both exist at opposite ends of a spectrum, where structure promotes solidity and structure (and can on its own result in stiffness and rigidity), gesture focuses on motion and fluidity, which can result in things that are ephemeral, not quite feeling solid and stable.
With structure and spatial reasoning in his very bones, he still provides an excellent exploration of gesture, but in a visual language in something that we here appreciate greatly, and that's not something you can find everywhere.
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