Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

1:05 PM, Thursday January 2nd 2025

Draw-a-Box Lesson 6 - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/i9HzKJL

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It took a lot of time (I'd go so far as to say that it took too much), and I'm finally done with the Lesson 6!

Thanks in advance for taking time to review the work and give out the critique for it!

And Happy New Year!

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11:29 PM, Friday January 3rd 2025

Jumping right in with your form intersections, from what I can see you appear to be demonstrating a solid grasp of how your forms intersect with one another, but there's one way in which you deviated from the example of the exercise that I would not recommend - both because it makes it a lot harder to assess whether your intersections are correct or not, and because it demands more of you as you work through it while providing little additional benefit: drawing "through" your intersections.

While this is undoubtedly similar to another thing we certainly encourage - drawing through our forms - that doesn't mean that this applies in every case, where the more you attempt to draw through things, the better off you are. It's always a trade-off. When drawing through forms, it makes the activity more complex, but it rewards us by adding a ton to our understanding of how those forms relate to one another in 3D space, rather than just how they exist as flat shapes on a page.

Drawing through our intersections however increases the complexity of the exercise considerably by giving us way more clutter on the page - which could be worth it, but from what I've seen from students it really doesn't accelerate their understanding of those spatial relationships. So, when doing this exercise, stick to just drawing the portion of the intersection that is visible to the viewer.

Now as I said, your work appears to demonstrate a strong grasp of those spatial relationships, but just in case I wanted to provide this diagram, which I generally share to students at this stage. At this point we actually only expect students to be comfortable with intersections involving flat surfaces, and while many do exceed that (as you appear to here), that diagram helps with pinning down one's understanding of how the intersections behave when curving surfaces are incorporated by reminding us to focus on the individual pairs of surfaces that are intersecting at any given point.

Moving onto your object constructions... I don't think there's really anything to be said other than wow. And maybe holy crap. While you're not the only one I've seen in the fullness of my ten years of critiquing drawabox homework to push things this far, you are probably among a few that could be counted off on one hand.

This lesson is all about precision, and the processes we can use to help increase it for a given construction. Precision 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 with an orthographic study, then apply those same proportions to the object in three dimensions. And needless to say, you did that... and then some, and then some more. You pushed your orthographic plans to the extreme, and demonstrated an inordinate amount of care and patience in doing so. None of that is by any means a bad thing.

That said, whether or not it was strictly necessary is another story. Looking at orthographic plans like the one on this page shows a lot of awkward fractions, which suggests to me that you set out with the intention of nailing everything down as accurately as possible. In the section from the lesson notes on orthographic plans, I mention the following:

We are not finding the accurate locations for each landmark. Rather, we are deciding where they will go. The reference image is a source of information, but how we ultimately use it is up to us to decide, so we do have the freedom to say "I'm going to go with 2/5ths instead of 19/50ths". Of course the more of this we use, the further we may drift from the actual reference, but for our purposes in this course that is fine. What matters is that the plan we create here, and the construction we ultimately create in 3D space match up and follow the same process.

Always remember that your reference images are sources of information - they are not a plan of action handed down by on high. You get to choose what aspects of that reference are relevant to what you're constructing and what isn't, and by working in 3D space, constructionally as we do here, you have all of the tools you need to make modifications based on your own judgment. You decide what it is you're drawing, and to what specifications.

That is not at all to say that approaching it as you did is wrong in any measure - but making those decisions is a skill of its own, and one you'll want to get comfortable with. As far as the actual methodology you applied, I see no issues. You applied subdivision very effectively, and your constructions came out feeling solid and tangible. How you managed to keep everything straight in such a forest of construction however, is beyond me.

So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work, but... maybe take a break, as you have certainly earned it.

PS - I had a bit of a chuckle when I saw the comment "This was not a good object to start with to be honest" on this page, and made me think of something I'd written in the critique before this one, in response to the student thinking that they may have "cheated" by choosing overly simplistic objects in some cases. Here's what I told them, in case it provides you with additional insight:

Many students have the impression that they have to be working on complex objects, otherwise they're just cheating - but this is actually not the case at all, and there are lots of situations where students do themselves a disservice by actively trying to bite off more than they can chew. At the end of the day, the lesson isn't about creating an impressive body of work - it's about applying the concepts and working through the process of each exercise (the exercise in this case being constructional drawing).

Where a simple object may not be all that demanding, that means that you have more of your cognitive resources available to focus on the focus of the lesson and how it applies to those exercises. On the flipside, when we pick something that is intentionally over our head, we force ourselves to allocate more of those cognitive resources to dealing with that complexity, and therefore less is focused on the principles of the lesson.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for Lesson 7.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:15 PM, Sunday January 5th 2025

Wow! I'm very flustered and honored by such a good critique.

I'll make sure to not draw through the forms in the future while doing the exercise on form intersections. It does make sense, and it always a trade off, so I did that, and it would do good to do another variant of that "trade" (which is not drawing through forms) to balance it out :D

Thank you very much for your kind words about my constructions! I really appreciate them!

As you rightly said sometimes it becomes a mess, which is a case for the page 2 and the head of the perfume flask, so I should have probably subdivided less.

I've actually tried by the end with the printer and the iron to be less "precise" and rounded up some measurements, after re-reading the notes on imgur with the subdivision example. They were very helpful.

Glad the comment made you chuckle. And there is a lot of truth in the reply to the student. It might be a hard challenge at first just to do a simple object, but if you can somehow manage to do a more complex one, the process and everything would feel easier, when you switch to some easier objects (like a perfume flask or a mug (which I messed up badly, although placing 12 points for each ellipse in preliminary work (all measured), but sometimes that happens, so I moved on as you always said to do so)

I might take a little break after this :D

If it's fine, I have a quick question about the wheel challenge, can I do some with the ellipse and some without (Like 10-15 with an ellipse guide and others without, to try and do both of those on a small scale with ellipse guides, and on bigger scale freehanding it) or should I stick to doing one type only?

Once again, thank you very much for your critique!

7:41 PM, Monday January 6th 2025

Honestly I would not recommend doing the wheel challenge without an ellipse guide. I totally understand the inclination to want to work big (which lines up with everything we've pushed students to do), but in this case - speaking of another tradeoff as with the form intersections - here it would only be detrimental. Setting up with those clean ellipses gives you a solid base to work off, and as long as you take your time (and use a ballpoint pen rather than a fineliner) you'll be able to work within that size just fine. Rushing is generally what causes students trouble there, because it's easy to feel like smaller marks deserve less time, but I'm not really concerned that'll be an issue for you.

9:21 PM, Tuesday January 7th 2025

Okay, I got that, thank you very much for your reply!

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I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.

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Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.

Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.

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