Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

8:57 AM, Sunday December 1st 2024

Drawabox Lesson 6 Submission - Album on Imgur

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Thank you in advance for the feedback! I had a few questions while I was doing this lesson:

  • I’m usually not confident that I’ve executed the intersections of the forms correctly, do you have any advice on how I could check the intersections exercise independently (e.g. if I want to do this exercise as practice in the future)? Would you recommend using 3D software like Blender to do this checking?

  • I saw some methods on how to divide a curved surface, how to draw rotated planes in perspective (when the horizon line is vertical rather than horizontal), alternative methods to subdivide a plane, etc. I tried the last one out for the watercolour drawing (5 of 8, dividing into 14ths) as I thought it would reduce the clutter of lines significantly, but would you recommend these methods for this course?

  • I found it quite challenging to add details to drawing using construction (e.g. the buttons and joystick on the gaming console (7 of 8)) because of the number of intersecting lines on the page and thickness of my pen. Do you have any advice on how to handle this, without drawing lighter since it is discouraged?

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11:06 PM, Wednesday December 4th 2024

To quickly go over your questions before I get into the critique proper:

  • While I don't see anything inherently bad or wrong about checking in Blender after the fact, the thing about this exercise is that unlike the box and cylinder challenges, which allow us to analyze our work directly (in terms of the line extensions being based off the work itself, and allows us to gauge how close/far off they were in ways that can more clearly be connected back to specific adjustments we can make to account for them), form intersections have so many variables at play that while you can identify whether something was roughly correct or not, it's not going to tell you much about what is wrong when things are off. For this reason the exercise is a lot less about the results, and more about how it forces us to think about the relationships between the forms as they exist in 3D space.

  • One of the reasons Drawabox, and more specifically the official critique program, works is that by functionally excluding everything outside of the stated instructions, we can work vastly more efficiently in terms of providing feedback, which keeps that price point low. So, while outside of this course it is absolutely valid to use such techniques (assuming they're correct), we aren't in a position to double check that they are in fact reliable for you, and so they should be left out of the work you do for this course, and stay within the bounds of what is referenced in our material. As far as the subdivision into 7/14ths (I assume you meant dividing into 7ths and 14ths, not 7/14ths which reduces to one half), in the last section addressing subdivision, at the very end I reference a blog post from Andreas Aronsson that covers subdivisions up to 25ths - and so that could be used to divide into 7ths, which then can be halved if necessary.

  • One thing I noticed you didn't opt to do was use a ballpoint pen. One of the reasons we allow students to use them in this lesson, as well as the wheel challenge and Lesson 7, is because it's a lot easier to work in tight spaces with them, to build up hierarchies for your subdivisions (making some lines darker and others fainter), and so on. Yes, we very much value drawing in full black and white, but by this point in the course you've already gotten a ton of that, and so you've likely built up the good habits that is meant to impart. Switching to a ballpoint pen now isn't going to undo that - it'll simply make use of it with the same pattern of conscientiously thinking through your choices rather than rushing in thoughtlessly. That said, dealing with the forest of subdivisions is still just part of this end of the course, and it's something that demands more time from the student. It's just another skill that you'll develop over time - often students complain about having to draw through their boxes back in Lesson 1's plotted perspective exercise, and how it confuses them. Those same students may have just as much trouble when they reach this lesson, but not realize that having the same struggles with a vastly more complex manifestation of the problem means that their capacity to deal with it has improved immensely.

Anyway, it's fortunate that you had questions, as the rest of this critique is unlikely to be all that long. You've done a fantastic job.

Starting with your form intersections, your work here is largely demonstrated a very strong understanding of the relationships between these forms as they exist in 3D space. At this stage we actually only expect students to be comfortable with those intersections involving flat surfaces, while still struggling with curving surfaces, but for the most part you've nailed those as well. This was the only mistake I could find (it's on the first page), where your intersection line either cut straight across or curved in the opposite direction of the cylinder's own curvature. As a whole though, it's very clear that you have developed a strong understanding of how these forms relate to one another, and so I really wouldn't be worried about double checking your work in Blender, it's unlikely to give you much additional benefit.

Continuing onto the object constructions, you've knocked this out of the park, most of all with your sheer conscientiousness and attention to detail which has allowed you to really take the core focus of this lesson - which is precision - and run with it. 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. Your use of orthographic plans throughout this lesson has been thorough and extensive, and it has reflected in the solidity and consistency of your 3D constructions.

Yes, you may have had difficulty as the subdivisions got more and more dense, but I'm less concerned with what we find challenging now, and more concerned with how we face those challenges.

I have only a couple points to call out:

  • For this power strip, I noticed that while you employed the "branches" method for the cord itself, you may not have actually gone back and reviewed specifically how that technique is employed in the instructions here. The main things I'm noticing missing is the absence of a "flow line" to help in aligning your ellipses along the way, and perhaps less attention to having those individual line segments flow into one another smoothly (although this may well be something you just need to practice more).

  • The watercolor set, where you employed the alternative approach for subdivision that you'd referenced in your question, doesn't appear to actually have consistent widths for the various pans. The second last (second from the right) appears to be considerably wider than those to its left, even though it's further back in space. While this does not necessarily mean that the methodology you employed isn't reliable, it does mean that there was an issue somewhere - possibly in your application of it. I didn't actually intend to do this initially but I ended up exploring the problem myself, and documented how I would approach it here. First few steps are just a rough plan to identify what kinds of different spacings, and I do rely on making a decision that the gap along the outer edges is equal to half of the gap between the pairs of paint pans, but that all falls in line with what we talk about here in regards to using the orthographic plans to make decisions, rather than only pursuing a hyper-accurate reproduction of the reference object. For the most part, my solution involves creating groupings of the different space measurements, and finding places I can mirror them across some central axis to copy those measurements to other places.

Anyway, I will go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

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.
8:38 AM, Sunday December 8th 2024
edited at 3:32 PM, Dec 9th 2024

Hi Uncomfortable, thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions on top of reviewing my work, and sharing your thought process for the watercolour pans.

I also went and checked again on the alternative method I tried; it was introduced in Scott Robertson's book (pg 33), and I had definitely misunderstood it, hence the inconsistent widths of the pans

edited at 3:32 PM, Dec 9th 2024
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