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8:46 PM, Monday June 24th 2024
Jumping right in with your form intersections, at this stage we assign this exercise with the expectation that while students may still continue to have some difficulties with this exercise, that they've grown relatively comfortable thinking through the relationships between different flat surfaces. That is to say, at this point in the course it's still normal for students to run into issues with intersections involving curving surfaces.
That said, I think your work by and large demonstrates a pretty solid grasp of both. I only really noticed one notable mistake, which I've marked out here, and I think that may have been less of an issue with what you understand, and more a fact that sometimes we make the odd mistake. That is to say, I'm not seeing a pattern here, so I expect it's just a one-off. That said, this diagram may help in further solidifying your understanding of how these intersections work, if that is needed at all.
One other point to keep in mind - your linework is often just a little bit hesitant, resulting in a bit of wavering and wobbling. Be sure to apply the ghosting method as instructed there, applying all three stages to every mark you freehand. It's pretty common for students to get a little lax when it comes to that process - they'll invest less time in the planning and preparation phases due to that subconscious desire to work faster, and in order to compensate they'll put more time into the execution of the mark, and as a result, ultimately move away from the methodology of the ghosting method altogether. The most important part of that technique is that it separates the process into these stages, allowing that final step to focus only on committing to the prepared motion and executing it without hesitation, executing a mark that is confident and smooth - even if it ends up being inaccurate.
Continuing onto your object constructions, you're definitely making some good headway here. I can see that you are attempting to leverage the orthographic plans we demonstrate in the lesson material, although I did notice that your actual application of those plans to your 3D constructions is more limited than it could be.
For example, looking at your watering can, your plans are excellent and fully fleshed out - but you don't actually end up using them to construct the object in three dimensions. Based on some of the earlier constructions (like the water tap) it's pretty clear that you weren't entirely comfortable with how to approach translating them into three dimensions.
There's certainly nothing wrong with having a tough time applying a concept, although it's important to keep in mind that running into trouble with something you're not familiar with, the solution is not always to find an alternative route. There are cases where a mountain in your path must be circumnavigated, sure, but there are also cases where the specific path you take is what's important - and thus, we have no choice but to climb the mountain. This - and really anything within this course - is one such case, and so while our attempts may fall flat as a result, continuing to try and figure out how to apply that approach carries a lot of value in terms of teaching us how to deal with constructions that require more proportional precision.
It is completely understandable that you struggled with it though, and I suspect that some of that difficulty comes from the fact that our orthographic plans can very easily look like just a mess of lines, all with equal value. What can help is remembering that while the way in which we're dealing with these outer bounding boxes may be a little different, these grids/bounding boxes only serve to provide us with additional information as we go through the same general constructional approaches. That is, building our objects with large simple forms first, and gradually breaking them down into smaller forms. It's all about hierarchy, and identifying what our "major forms" are can help a great deal.
So for example, looking at the attempt at the water tap that was left unfinished, we can look at establishing the major forms of the base and the main shaft as shown here. We want to figure out where the points on the left side intersect with the points on the right side, and as shown along the top of the shaft, we can actually just draw those lines out, according to perspective, and literally see where they intersect.
You definitely did a better job of this with the vintage gas stove, so I'm pleased to see that you are demonstrating the ability to apply this approach, although seeing cases like this watering can where you started with the orthographic plan but ended up approaching it differently does suggest that you may have a ways to go before you're really comfortable with it. It's not that deciding to approach the watering can in a less rigid fashion is incorrect, just that it seems to be a case where you were going to go about it one way, and decided to change the approach, perhaps to give yourself better chances of producing a better result. Ultimately, these are all exercises - the end results don't matter, it's the process we employ (and where they highlight misunderstandings or other issues which can be addressed in the critique) that matter.
In addition to that, I also noticed that while you employed the material about how to deal with curves on the orthographics, you didn't end up employing it in the watering can's handle. Whether or not you work with the big bounding boxes imposed by the orthographic plan approach, you can (and should) still build up your curving surfaces first with straight edges/flat planes the define the desired structure first, only rounding them out towards the end as shown here on this coffee mug demo which was linked from the section on handling curves.
Before I call this critique done, there are two other points I wanted to call out in terms of how you've gone about approaching this lesson's homework:
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In the tools section of the lesson, we explain that you can opt to use ballpoint pens for your drawings instead of fineliners, but that you should not be changing the type of pen you use to create a clean-up pass. Unfortunately that appears to be exactly what you ended up doing - laying down your construction lines in a different colour, then fully redrawing your object on top of it. While I understand the separation of colours to keep the different construction lines straight in your head, performing an entirely separate pass for your object creates the impression in our brains - whether consciously or subconsciously - that the scaffolding is somehow separate from the end result. In truth, what we really want students to get used to is that whether they're drawing an object or just random lines or planes in space, it's all the same thing. Everything is just made up of these simple considerations of how forms and surfaces exist in 3D space, and how they relate to one another within it. The more we realize how every step is just performing the same kinds of actions and consideration, that the arbitrary separations between "phases" are things we just make up ourselves, the more we unlock the true depth of what spatial reasoning as a skill is. Long story short - it definitely makes things harder, but it also helps keep us running towards the intended goal more directly.
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This lesson also allows us to use rulers for any and all straight edges, although it seems you opted to use it for the scaffolding (again, another separation between how we approach one part, vs. how we approach another). Some students get the impression that they should always be practicing their freehanding skills, and so they may determine for themselves that using a ruler for the actual object is somehow "cheating" - but that is not the case. Exercises are ultimately just a matter of what it is they're intended to train in the student, and how they go about doing so. We have lots of exercises from Lesson 1 that delve into linework, and so those are the exercises we should be using to practice and improve our linework. Here however, our focus is on different matters, and so we want to be able to concentrate our cognitive resources on those problems specifically. Each lesson prescribes recommendations for how they should be approached - whether linework should be freehanded, or whether you can use tools to make that easier - not on the basis of being kind, but in order to only keep the level of difficulty commensurate with what it gives us in return. Here, because we're dealing with all of these orthographic plans, subdivisions, and so forth, which are already quite mentally taxing (as you noted yourself), we don't want students making it needlessly more challenging by also having to worry about everything that goes into freehanding their marks. This may also play a role in why you struggled with those concepts.
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Rulers are also extremely useful when it comes to constructing our bounding boxes - if we take advantage of them. With the initial attempt at the water tap, the bounding box was admittedly pretty wonky. Where a ruler can come in handy here is by essentially providing us with a visible extension of the line we're about to draw, before we actually commit to it. This allows us to better gauge exactly how the next line behaves, whether it converges with or diverges from the other lines you've already drawn. In other words, it gives us extra information which can help us construct better boxes, if we consider this additional information it provides. Once our bounding box is constructed, all we can do is abide by it - so a wonky box will result in a wonky object, and that's fine for our purposes in this lesson - but ultimately it does help reduce the distractions if we can do everything in our power to work towards a better starting point.
Anyway, that about covers it. I think you're demonstrating the understanding here that you require to move forwards, but I do think that taking some time to continue practicing the use of these orthographic plans will be beneficial, as Lesson 7 (which we're not at just yet, but will be soon) takes the same concepts and steps up that complexity by a great deal. So, being comfortable with it on these kinds of objects will help a lot when you get to the vehicles.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but I do recommend that you continue spending some time applying those orthographic plan techniques to their completion.
Next Steps:
Move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for Lesson 7.
Wescott Grid Ruler
Every now and then I'll get someone asking me about which ruler I use in my videos. It's this Wescott grid ruler that I picked up ages ago. While having a transparent grid is useful for figuring out spacing and perpendicularity, it ultimately not something that you can't achieve with any old ruler (or a piece of paper you've folded into a hard edge). Might require a little more attention, a little more focus, but you don't need a fancy tool for this.
But hey, if you want one, who am I to stop you?