25 Wheel Challenge
12:05 AM, Tuesday January 21st 2025
Took a while and a lot of looking at tyres, but the deed is done. Thank you so much! :D
Jumping right in with the structural aspect of the challenge, your work here is quite well done. You've been consistent and conscientious in the use of your ellipse guide to build out the core cylindrical structure, making clear choices as to whether the physical width of the wheel merits jumping to the next degree in the template or sticking with the same one, to achieve what accuracy you can within the limitations of your tools. I'm pleased to see that you've taken into consideration cases where the tires are more inflated (as opposed to being really thick and solid), widening the midsections appropriately to create the impression that they'd land when dropped with more of a bounce rather than a solid thud.
Before we move onto the textural aspect of the challenge, I want to mention one thing. You've put a lot of effort into these wheels, and taken a lot of care to observe your references carefully and copy over what you saw, outlining and constructing everything in its entirety. I don't want anything I say next to undermine or disregard the effort and attention to detail that has gone into these.
The reason I'm saying that is that the textural aspect of this challenge is itself, by necessity, something of a trap. It's very common, being as far removed as we are from Lesson 2 and the concepts relating to texture and implicit markmaking that it presents, for students to forget about those things either entirely (resulting in the student attempting to focus on capturing textural forms just as they would more structural elements, by drawing them with explicit markmaking) or to forget the specifics of what implicit markmaking entails.
When floating in the void, outlining every textural form and approaching them more constructionally actually works pretty decently, because the wheel is the only element present. Where things get dicey however is when that wheel is only a component of a larger illustration - this density of detail can become quite distracting, drawing the viewer's eye to it whether you want it to or not. It becomes what is called a focal point - something that is more related to composition, therefore outside of the scope of this course, but we still try to arm students with tools and understanding that will help them when they get to those out-of-scope topics, where they do fit into the course's areas of focus.
The issue arises when we want to figure out how to make our wheels less detail-dense (and therefore less of a focal point), but without actually telling the viewer that the textural forms we remove to achieve this have been physically removed from the object we're conveying to them. In other words, we want the freedom not to have to draw every textural form in its entirety, while still telling the viewer that all of those textural forms are present.
When it comes to texture - at least, how we handle it in this course, which is very specific to this course - we are ultimately looking at the same kind of problem that the course as a whole explores: spatial reasoning. We imply the marks we draw (you can refer to the implicit vs explicit markmaking section for more specific information on this) by drawing the shadows our textural forms cast on their surroundings, not by drawing the forms themselves (in terms of outlining them, or otherwise drawing anything about the form itself). It's the shape of the shadow itself, which is designed based on our understanding of the relationship in 3D space between the form casting it and the surface receiving it. And so, as stressed in these reminders, in this course we're never just drawing what we see. We're looking at our references, and understanding what they tell us about the forms in question, and then deciding on how to convey the relationships between them in space.
The reason we use implicit markmaking instead of explicit is fairly simple, although it's not always obvious. For example, looking at any of your wheels, for example number 15 on this page, it looks excellent floating in the void, all full of detail. But when it becomes part of an existing drawing, all of that packed detail can actually work against you by drawing the viewer's eye to it whether you want it to or not. This interferes with our ability to control composition (which is all about dictating how the viewer experiences a piece, what they look at and in which order), which while outside of the scope of this course, is still something I want to give students the tools to engage with more easily.
Explicit markmaking basically locks us into an agreement with the viewer: whatever is drawn is present, and whatever has not been drawn, is not present. And therefore to convey each textural form, we have to declare its presence explicitly. Implicit markmaking on the other hand gives us more freedom by disconnecting the marks we draw from the specifics of what is present.
Implicit markmaking however, in its focus on cast shadows, works differently. As shown in this diagram, depending on how far the form is from the light source, the angle of the light rays will hit the object at shallower angles the farther away they are, resulting in the shadow itself being projected farther. What this means is that even if the textural forms in question are the same in different parts of an object, their differing relationships with the light source can result in the shadows they cast being very different. The specifics of where the light source, while worth being aware of in general so as to maintain consistency in a piece, doesn't actually concern us for our purposes here. It's just the fact that the same textural form could cast a massive shadow, all the way to virtually no shadow at all, that gives us control over how densely we want to pack areas of high contrast (where there's lots of jumping between light and dark).
All that said, drawing the cast shadows of forms you haven't actually drawn is not easy, and it takes practice to get used to. Fortunately as your spatial reasoning skills will have developed throughout the course, that will help - but it's important that we give ourselves opportunities to practice those concepts.
The last thing I wanted to share is that when it comes to those tires with shallow grooves, or really any texture consisting of holes, cracks, etc. it's very common for us to view these named things (the grooves, the cracks, etc.) as being the textural forms in question - but of course they're not forms at all. They're empty, negative space, and it's the structures that surround these empty spaces that are the actual forms for us to consider when designing the shadows they'll cast. This is demonstrated in this diagram. This doesn't always actually result in a different result at the end of the day, but as these are all exercises, how we think about them and how we come to that result is just as important - if not moreso.
So! As noted before, this was very much an intentional trap to help students recognize that there may be things that they allowed to slip through the cracks - and so this should simply serve as a reminder to go back and reflect upon what those areas might be (texture being one, but perhaps there are others), and then reviewing that material accordingly.
Be sure to do that, but I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so you'll be free to move onto Lesson 7.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto Lesson 7 once you've spent some time reviewing any concepts from the course that may have fallen through the cracks.
I am so sorry i accidentally sent a report instead of a reply, this was extremely helpful.
Hahaha, no worries.
Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.
The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.
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