Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles

12:22 AM, Friday January 2nd 2026

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Hey I just want to say thank you so much for this course. I really learned a lot from this and my drawing skills and discipline increased greatly from this!

Just a quick question. What do people usually do after completing the course? I already have an idea of what to do but just want to hear your input.

(Also sorry for some pages for being a bit dirty from ink)

Thank you for the critique!

8:18 PM, Monday January 5th 2026

Starting with your form intersections, there's a lot here that shows that your grasp of the relationships between these forms is developing well, but there are some key issues that I noticed - primarily relating to intersections involving curving surfaces, but rather than being specifically in regards to those curving surfaces, the issues seemed more to be out of sloppiness, or perhaps confusion from all of the marks on the page. I've marked in some corrections here, where you can see issues called out where multiple intersections are drawn for the same pair of forms, where on the big sphere towards the bottom of the page you've got an arbitrary intersection line that seems to just sit on the sphere and doesn't relate to any particular other form (it might have been intended to be an intersection for the cylinder below it but the line goes up beyond the cylinder into the box above as well), and where you've got intersection lines crossing hard edges that would result in a sharp corner in the intersection (allowing it to turn to follow the new surface). All in all, I think you just need to take a bit more time in thinking through the intersections, as you are otherwise demonstrating a good grasp of how they relate to one another, but you're perhaps rushing into things and making some sloppy mistakes.

Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes, your work here appears to apply the line extensions correctly and consistently, so no concerns there. Similarly, your form intersection vehicles are coming along very well - you've held closely to assignment. Many students get caught up in subdivision and whatnot, whereas the goal of this exercise is simply to remind us that even as we do delve more deeply into what can result in a forest of subdivision lines, the goal is still to build up volumes, working from simple to complex, big to small. Or in other words, the idea that we're still carving things out of boxes, rather than building them up out of toothpicks. You've demonstrated this understanding quite well here, and I find the way in which you've leveraged additional points, similarly to the "negotiating your corners" from the Y method, to be quite interesting and effective for maintaining the consistency of your convergences. Nice work.

And of course, getting to the meat of the lesson with the detailed vehicle constructions, I'm very pleased to see how thoroughly you've applied the orthographic plans to make your decisions ahead of time, before delving into the far more complex matter of bringing them into three dimensions. By having those decisions outlined beforehand, you're compartmentalizing the individual problems you're dealing with, which helps to ensure that as much of your cognitive resources can be focused on each problem individually, rather than spreading it across many all at once.

As a whole you're doing very well, and are clearly demonstrating an excellent grasp of the concepts espoused in this lesson, and from throughout the course, but I do have a few quick points to draw to your attention:

  • While you do generally start your structures out with straight edges and boxy structures, I find that in some cases like the lamborghini construction, that you might benefit from breaking them down further - for example, here you went from taking a single straight edge into a curve, whereas breaking it into two (or more) straight edges as shown in red, would allow for more landmarks in your orthographic study to better control the curve as it comes out, and would allow you to better maintain the relationship between this curve, and its matching sibling on the other side of the windshield. More info on that here.

  • When dealing with structures like the nose cone in your helicopter construction, there are ways to add intermediary steps there that will help you define that structure more easily - specifically by laying out cross-sections through the middle, first as rectangular planes, then defining the actual cross-section of the intended form as shown here. You could even go as far as adding a further intermediary step per the previous point, where you break up the curving cross-section into a chain of flat edges, then round them out.

  • There is definitely a threshold in your approach where past a certain point, you stopped including certain kinds of ancillary details in your orthographic plan, resulting in them being positioned by eye in your construction (like the door handles, and the lights at the top of the cab of your 1970s F100. It is entirely fine to leave those things out of your orthographic plan, but for the purpose of these constructional drawing exercises, if you do choose to do that, it's probably best to leave those elements out of your final construction as well. And of course, vice versa - if you do want to include them, you'll be better off including them in the orthographic plan with appropriate subdivision to ensure their positioning and footprint is established with greater precision, and take your time with those marks (as you also tend to be a lot sloppier with them, adding them more as an afterthought which suggests that it's more decorative than actually working towards the goal of the exercise, which itself might imply split objectives).

Anyway, as a whole you're doing very well, and are making solid use of these exercises. You're also demonstrating a well developed grasp of 3D space. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson - and the course as a whole - as complete. Congratulations!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:53 PM, Monday January 5th 2026

Thank you so much for this course I have learned a lot from you! I wish you the very best!

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