1:02 AM, Tuesday August 3rd 2021
Starting with your form intersections, as a whole you're doing a good job of both constructing these forms such that they feel consistent and cohesive within the same space, and such that the intersections themselves demonstrate a well developing understanding of 3D space. My only issue is really with the manner in which you're drawing the intersections themselves.
I kind of touched on this in my critique for your lesson 6 work - I talked about how your use of line weight was rather heavy handed, and kind of arbitrary, not really focusing on establishing how different forms would overlap one another - but for some reason it didn't occur to me that there was a very simple reason at least for the heavyhandedness. I suppose I could be wrong, but it definitely looks like you're using a thicker pen for the line weight, and you most definitely should not be. Your original linework and any further line weight should be drawn using the same kind of pen.
Line weight itself, is a tool that is focused on clarifying how one form overlaps another - but you appear to be applying it to both the intersection line itself, and the part of the form that exists inside of its neighbour, creating the opposite effect of what you'd want. You're making it seem like the piece stuck inside the other form is in front of it, by giving it thicker lines.
In the future:
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Draw all line weight with the same pen
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Apply line weight to clarify overlaps, as shown in this example of two overlapping leaves. Definitely don't draw further attention to pieces of form that aren't even supposed to be visible.
Anyway, continuing on, your cylinders in boxes are looking pretty good, though you tend to focus the convergences on only one set of lines, and seem to be keeping the others fairly parallel. Definitely play with more convergence on all three sets of lines.
Now, onto the meat of the lesson - the vehicles. You are definitely right in your observation that in some cases, an orthographic study of just the side view of a given vehicle is not going to be enough. It comes down to thinking about what kind of information you need, what gaps exist in your understanding of the proportions, and what you need to look at in order to fill in those gaps. In many of the vehicles we studied, the side view is sufficient because that's where the majority of the information lays, with the front being relatively straightforward. But that isn't always the case, and you'll note that I did analyze the proportions of the front of the shelby mustang demo.
There are definitely a lot of these constructions that I think you handled very well. The tank was especially well done, as you paid a lot of careful attention to the subdivisions of that bounding box, and adhered closely to it, the coast guard boat came out well despite its proportions (as far as this course is concerned, proportions are only important insofar as our ability to make things look plausible), and the cab-over truck came out quite solidly too, despite a few edges along the top of the cab not quite converging towards their intended vanishing point.
Looking at the shelby mustang drawing, I think this is one of those cases where you probably underestimated just how complex this was going to be, and how much patience and time it would really demand of you. I myself spent nearly two hours when doing that drawing in the first place, and it's likely that my own experience had helped quicken things along by a great deal. While I don't know how long you spent on it, I can see that you opted to skip certain steps - like any and all of the structure for the cab of the car. You ended up eyeballing the roof and windshield, and your drawing definitely suffered for it.
The camaro came out a fair bit better - drawing it as small as you did (probably because you wanted to fit the proportional study onto the same page, but perhaps you were limited by your ellipse guide as well) did result in it being a much more crowded affair, which I imagine made things challenging. Still, you did adhere more closely to the bounding box and minded your sets of parallel lines, which helped you to achieve a more solid result.
That's actually an important point - much later, in this jet ski, you asked in the comments whether adhering to the bounding box hurt you there. Remember above all else that every single drawing in this course is just an exercise - and if you decided to stop following the bounding box and drew more by eye, you would have focused more on what would get you a pleasing end result and would have undermined the purpose of the exercise itself. Construction is about making choices, and sticking to them all the way through - that bounding box is the choice you start with, and you need to adhere to it even if the box itself is way off the mark (which it wasn't here).
So to put it simply - as far as this course goes, adhering to the box is never wrong. While it may hurt your end result, that is still more in line with our goals for these drawings. That is precisely why crossing things out or scratching them out as you tried to in this wagon won't achieve anything. Once the marks are on the page, you can't get rid of them - you can't unmake those decisions. You have to stick with them, because the alternative is to end up losing all structure entirely. Scratching them out doesn't make them go away, either.
There are circumstances where you can still work within the existing framework, and make alterations. For example, in this one you decided early on that the box you'd started with was too tall, so you separated it into two boxes - a shorter bounding box, and the piece that was cut out of the original. This is fine, because you were still working within the confines of construction, and you merely broke the 3D space into two spaces, and constructed your car within one. You didn't attempt to undo any of your marks, or change the nature of the illusion you were creating. You worked within the rules of the construction you'd laid out yourself.
The last thing I wanted to talk about is this car. It's definitely one that went pretty awry, as you noted yourself, but since it's the only drawing you attempted of your own of a car, it is definitely something of note (since the little tykes doesn't technically count).
One of the main reasons it went off the rails, so to speak, was because when drawing the various sets of parallel lines that the construction would follow, you did not make any attempt to have them converge. You effectively placed those vanishing points at infinity, even though none of those sets of lines were actually running perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight. Given their orientation, they definitely should have been converging towards their own vanishing points.
This went on to kind of throw off the ellipse method of creating the grid as well, since it does rely on there being a valid arrangement that follows the rules of perspective. Here you fell more into axonometric projection (the umbrella term under which isometric projection exists, which follows totally different rules).
Now, as a whole I do feel like you're very much moving in the right direction with many of these, but I do want to see you try your hand at a few more car drawings. When doing so, I want you to adhere to a few rules:
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Do not scratch things out. It doesn't make them go away, it doesn't fix your drawing. It just makes your page a lot messier than it otherwise would have been.
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Make sure you're considering how the sets of lines that are parallel in 3D space converge towards a vanishing point when drawn on a flat page. The only situation where the vanishing point goes to infinity is when that set of lines runs perpendicular to the viewer's angle of view.
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Do proportional studies of whatever orthographics are necessary to give you the information you'll need.
Also, if I understand it correctly, you've spent several hours on many of these drawings, and splitting them across multiple sittings. These are very good things, and I'm glad to hear it. As you can see in VeeDraws' work (she included a little timetable in her album), this lesson is one that is very time consuming. It comes down both to investing lots of time into each drawing, and also spending that time well.
One area that often goes overlooked is the investment of time in observing our references, in order to derive the information necessary to perform these constructions. You do a really good job of following along with most of the demonstrations, where that information is already distilled for you. You've also done a pretty good job working from some of your references (the moped for instance shows a lot of care and attention), but I do suspect that when things go awry - like the oldsmobile - not observing your references as actively while drawing may have been a contributing factor.
So, as I mentioned, I'm assigning some revisions for you to complete below.
Next Steps:
Please submit 3 additional drawings of cars. These of course can't be any of the demonstrations, and must be from your own references. Really take your time with these. I can see your capacity and potential throughout your work, but this is really the last big boss of the course.