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4:40 PM, Thursday August 6th 2020
Starting on your form intersections, these are largely very well done - a strong sense of confidence behind how you've approached all of your linework, and how you've thought through the construction each form. They're well done, though not perfect:
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You're leaning more into foreshortening than you ought to, and it's throwing off the sense of scale across the set. Not a huge deal, but it is why the instructions state to stick to forms that are roughly the same size in all three dimensions, avoiding those that are more stretched like many of your longer cylinders. Keeping the foreshortening shallow is a good idea when dealing with a large collection of forms like this.
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Just a few small issues in the intersections themselves - most specifically how you handle sphere-box intersections at the boxes' edges. I've outlined a few corrections here.
Moving onto your everyday object constructions, I am largely very impressed with your work. As a whole I'm confident that you understand the principles covered in the lesson, and that you're demonstrating a good grasp of how to think about the manipulation and combination of these forms in 3D space. There are a few small issues I'll address here and there, but all in all you're doing very well and should be proud of your results.
Looking at your computer mouse, it seems that you fell into some of the issues I ran into myself when doing that demo. Most notably, when laying out your container box, you vastly underestimated the height of of the box, resulting in a mouse that came out much more squat. This is something we'll learn to address more directly in lesson 7, where we go over how to actually construct those boxes to a particular measured scale, rather than purely through estimation. That said, I am largely pleased with the fact that you worked within the mistake and accepted it rather than trying to push too hard to correct it. Construction is very much about accepting the decisions we've made earlier on, and keeping in line with them rather than attempting to overwrite them, and while we ultimately decided that pushing outside of the container box to get the curvature of the back part of the mouse, I think it was wise to stay within the box's own proportions for everything else.
I think by far your most impressive construction here is the lamp, specifically because of the heavy dependence on ellipses of this kind of structure. Ellipses and cylinders are notably challenging, and you handled them quite well here. Not perfectly, and I think relying on some of the ellipses-in-planes/cylinders-in-boxes you practiced in the previous challenge would have come in quite handy here when dealing with some of the more exaggerated angles, but all in all it came out pretty well.
An issue I am noticing in your drawings from this point however is that you are purposely bringing the vanishing points in very close, keeping them right on the page. This unfortunately a dependency you will not be able to rely upon in certain cases - these kinds of smaller objects being among them. I can see that later into the lesson you abandoned this approach, but I figure I should explain precisely why having the vanishing points so close together is not ideal in all cases.
The closer the vanishing points, the more dramatic the foreshortening. Dramatic foreshortening tells us something about the relationship between the viewer and the object - specifically relating to the object's proximity to the viewer, and its overall scale. When foreshortening is dramatic, with rapid convergences towards a nearby vanishing point, it gives the impression that the object is either very close to the viewer, or very large. While it is absolutely possible to have a lamp, or a shoe, close enough to the viewer to get that kind of convergence, it's not the sort of thing that'll work out well when dealing with a larger scene, and is still somewhat unnatural even in isolation. So always be sure to consider this when you feel inclined to bring your vanishing point in closer.
Ultimately we don't need vanishing points to be visible and concrete. If you have a handful of lines that you know are converging towards a shared vanishing point, you should be able to infer its position purely based on them - by striving to get the additional lines you add to your drawing to follow the pattern set out by that handful of lines, you can keep things converging roughly towards the VP without having the vanishing point pinned down with any real specificity. Then the more lines added in the scene that converge towards that VP, the easier it becomes to infer the orientation of any new lines you wish to add. This is largely how we learn to approach things in the box challenge, as well as in the more advanded version of that exercise.
Now, this sort of thing certainly isn't easy, especially when estimating the convergence of lines that are not close to one another. We can see a bit of a hiccup in your stapler at the end, where the round knob ends up misaligned due to the misalignment of the planes. I think here you ended up foregoing convergence altogether, and focused on keeping lines parallel on the page itself.
While we will not be working with actual vanishing points on the page in most cases, it is extremely important that you always think about sets of lines that are parallel in 3D space, as converging in 2D space. Focus on how they're all meant to converge together, even if it's a very gradual, slow thing. Don't let yourself fall into the trap of just drawing a bunch of lines that are parallel on the page, because that's how we end up with unintentional divergences. There is definitely a large range between having the vanishing point on the page, and having the vanishing point at infinity - so don't just jump between extremes.
Aside from that, as I mentioned you're largely doing very well and are approaching your subdivisions with a lot of conscientious planning and patience. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the good work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 7.
7:12 AM, Friday August 7th 2020
Thanks for the advices, I will work on that !
PureRef
This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.