Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

1:22 AM, Sunday October 27th 2024

Drawabox lesson 6 :D - Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/YhfOfL1

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered enterta...

made sure to take my time and stick to my excercises. my links have been a bit buggy though so if the submission one doesn't work here it is again: https://imgur.com/a/YhfOfL1

Thank you so much :D

0 users agree
7:02 PM, Wednesday October 30th 2024

Jumping right in with the form intersections, honestly my biggest concern here is that your intersection lines appear to have been drawn without consideration to the principles of markmaking as outlined in Lesson 1. Most notably, you're going back over your lines repeatedly, whilst also drawing them fairly slowly and hesitantly throughout. You should absolutely go back and review that material, and perhaps consider whether there is anything else that may have fallen through the cracks as you moved forwards through the course. Another point that stood out in that regard was just how much you were drawing through your ellipses - the lesson material from Lesson 1 recommends two full turns of the ellipse ideally, three maximum.

Looking at the intersections themselves, overall your understanding of the relationships between the forms is coming along well. At this stage we expect students to be fairly comfortable with intersections involving flat surfaces, while still having some trouble with those that incorporate curving surfaces as well. By and large you meet this standard, and the main point I marked out directly on your work here and here relate more to ensuring that the intersection lines you're drawing stay on the both intersecting surfaces simultaneously. As noted in the first one, you oriented the intersection line to go up and to the left, but as that end of the cylinder was slanting down and to the left, this would not have allowed the intersection line to stay on that surface.

Thinking of our intersections as occurring between pairs of surfaces is an important part of the exercise, and for the most part you are doing that - but there are cases here and there where you may be less attentive to exactly how those surfaces are behaving. This diagram is one that I often share at this stage (since students are familiar enough with the main challenges of the exercise to make use of it at this point, where they weren't necessarily earlier on), as it demonstrates how we can think about the orientation of our intersection lines. In the diagram, it shows how while the sphere may have many possible cross-sections for us to pay attention to (basically you can slice it in any direction), it's the planes of the box that determine which ones are relevant to our intersections here. It also goes further to help us think about curving surfaces by framing one in how the role such a curving surface might play doesn't differ that much from a hard edge - it's just a more gradual transition from one orientation to another, instead of a sharp and sudden one.

Anyway, keep working at your form intersections and we'll revisit these in Lesson 7 as well - but absolutely be sure to mind those principles of markmaking.

Continuing onto your object constructions, there's a lot you're doing well here, but there are also a few points that I will call out that I think will help you reconsider how you're approaching aspects of these constructions to ultimately get more out of them.

Before all that however, just to beat a dead horse, while it's not nearly as bad as it was with your intersection lines, I can still see a lot of places where you're demonstrating a lack of consideration for those principles of markmaking, and generally the way in which this course approaches its most basic elements. While this course isn't one on markmaking, it is something we start with (along with other concepts) because they are necessary in making this course as effective as possible. As noted earlier in the course, as well as in this lesson's material, every mark we draw freehand must be executed using the ghosting method, which forces us to think through the purpose of the mark and how to approach it to execute it best.

While the ghosting method does help us execute better linework, its most important role in this course is forcing students to think before they draw, and breaking them out of the habit of putting marks down first, then considering how well it worked out, and redrawing it if it didn't work out well. Every mark you make needs to be considered and thought through, and ultimately if after doing this it doesn't come out as intended, don't correct or redraw it. Furthermore, if you choose to apply hatching (which in most cases isn't necessary, more info on that here), you still need to take your time in executing each mark to the best of your ability.

Looking at this goblet, there are a number of areas where you made choices that went firmly against the directions of this course. You're building up curves with separate strokes (not in the manner the lesson material specifically discusses about handling curves which involves building up more constructional scaffolding, but rather more in the vein of chicken-scratching), and you also appear to be building up some kind of hatching or shading here, though as noted here in Lesson 2, form shading is not something we want to be concerning ourselves with for our drawings in this course).

One point that may have led to a bit of confusion on this matter that I'd like to preemptively clarify is that you do see me using using hatching at the rounding corners of the bluetooth speaker demo, and so generally when I see some degree of hatching in these constructions I don't highlight them as a mistake, but rather explain that hatching can be useful in cases where the viewer might not immediately assume part of a form to be rounded (especially in the case that it's not a basic primitive like a cylinder or sphere where that assumption is the default), and so adding hatching on things like rounded corners can help. Mixed with their haphazard application and the other linework concerns however, it does seem here that this is more a matter of forgetting the earlier points raised in the course, and potentially a tendency not to think every step through in its entirety.

The last thing I'm going to say about this topic is that I'm harping on it because it's important. It's less about ensuring that all your linework is as clean as possible, and more about ensuring that you're thinking through each decision you make and considering the role it's meant to play in your construction. This can help avoid marks that contribute little to the construction, but add a lot to the general clutter (which in turn makes it really easy to make those same mistakes of not thinking everything through, resulting in more clutter - a self-feeding cycle that erodes the usefulness of the exercise).

Now, onto those points that I think could help you get a great deal more out of the exercise, and generally find your constructions more successful:

  • In this lesson, we allow (and encourage) students to use a ruler, and based on what I'm seeing here, you certainly do appear to have taken advantage of that, which is good to see. A ruler however is not just for making consistently straight lines without too much difficulty, there is another valuable role they can play if you let them. As we line up a ruler with the stroke we wish to execute, the ruler itself - especially if it's longer - shows us the extended trajectory of that stroke, giving us something we can compare to the other edges in the scene with which the edge we're drawing now runs parallel (in 3D space). Put a bit simpler, if the line we're drawing is meant to converge towards the same VP as other lines in the construction, having an extension of it before committing to that stroke allows us to better gauge how our line should be oriented so that it does converge more consistently with those other lines. Looking at your constructions, you do frequently end up with issues - especially with your initial bounding boxes - where you end up with some divergence (this pencil sharpener is a good example as is the body of this bottle, where the "height" lines diverge as they extend downwards, away from the viewer). Paying more attention to the "free" extension the ruler gives you may help you avoid this in the future.

  • Don't skip steps - for your baseball cap I noticed that you jumped straight into a bounding "box" whose top face was considerably smaller than the base. Meaning, not a box, but more of a pyramid with its top cut off. While you're on the right track there, that would be your second step, and that cut-off pyramid should still be constructed inside of a box, because a box is the simplest way to define and encapsulate the 3D space in which the hat will exist. You don't have to build it all out inside of a single box (you can, as you did there, extend a separate box out for the brim), but you should not be jumping into more complex forms so early in the process. Similarly in the bottle I referenced in the last point, you've built in rounded corners from the beginning, instead of working up to that step by step.

By and large you do appear to be leveraging orthographic plans and subdivision and these highly precision-focused techniques that we introduced in this lesson fairly well. This perfume bottle is an especially good example of this, although it appears that you may have made changes to your intent when you realized that your bounding box was thicker than you intended. Part of that is simply because this lesson doesn't yet give you the tools necessary to build out bounding boxes of specific proportions - that's something we get into in Lesson 7, as it relies on somewhat complex mechanics that we didn't want to burden students with just yet.

I can see one example of an orthographic plan for your cellphone's side - I'm assuming that you used them for your other constructions as well, per what's explained here. If I'm incorrect in that assumption, then do be sure to employ them going forward. Orthographic plans give us an excellent opportunity to focus on making all of our decisions in one place, so that when we move onto the 3D construction, we can focus primarily on reproducing the choices we've already made, instead of having to actively think through them once again.

With that, I will be assigning some revisions as you didn't really give yourself the opportunity here to do the work to the best of your current ability (meaning, adhering to those principles of markmaking, avoiding skipping steps, etc). The revisions will give you an opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of the points I've raised here, so that we don't risk having them persist as you continue forwards. You will find the revisions assigned below.

Next Steps:

Please submit the following:

  • 1 page of form intersections (if you used a ruler for this last time, which isn't an issue or anything, do be sure to freehand all your linework for this using the ghosting method).

  • 3 pages of object constructions. Be sure to include the orthographic plans as well, and avoid skipping any steps. You may want to review the section about handling curves from the lesson material as well, so you can demonstrate that in your work.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
11:34 PM, Tuesday November 5th 2024

Thank you so much!

https://imgur.com/a/Q1XKZ0C

3:35 PM, Thursday November 7th 2024

Starting with the form intersections, there are a few notes I've added to your page here. The most important thing you can do with these is to take more time in assessing exactly which surfaces from each form are relevant for each section of the intersection line - in the sense of the intersections being made up of "pairs of surfaces" as I described in my original critique. I would also pay more attention to this diagram which I had linked previously - I noticed that the sphere/box intersection you did on your page is a direct match for this, but that you ended up reversing the intersection lines. This suggests fairly strongly to me that you may not have taken the diagram into consideration as much as you could have, and that you may have more room to make use of the information being provided.

As for the object constructions, your work here is making excellent use of orthographic plans, subdivision, mirroring, and so forth, so it's coming along great. Just a couple notes:

  • You will find these kinds of constructions easier if you use ballpoint, which as noted in the lesson material is encouraged here, in the 25 wheel challenge, and in Lesson 7.

  • There are a number of places where you went back over marks a number of times. I'm guessing this was to correct mistakes (which you should not be doing - let your mistakes stand for themselves, attempting to correct them will lessen their educational value while also making the construction itself much more cluttered and harder for you to navigate), but if this was an attempt at applying line weight, I recommend you review the material on line weight from here in Lesson 1. The video from that section goes into detail on how we employ line weight in this course, and why.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - the object constructions are coming along well, and while the form intersections have their issues, these are things you will want to continue practicing, and we will revisit them as part of Lesson 7.

Next Steps:

Move onto the 25 wheel challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:19 PM, Thursday November 7th 2024

thank you so much! You're critiques were incredibly helpful and I will make sure to pay much more attention to the diagram and how the surfaces intersect next time, they were very dumb mistakes. I'm going to also go back through all of part one a couple of times to make sure this doesn't happen again. Thank you again! :D

The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something we've used ourselves, or know to be of impeccable quality. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Steven Zapata's Secrets of Shading

Steven Zapata's Secrets of Shading

Some of you will have noticed that Drawabox doesn't teach shading at all. Rather, we focus on the understanding of the spatial relationships between the form we're drawing, which feeds into how one might go about applying shading. When it comes time to learn about shading though, you're going to want to learn it from Steven Zapata, hands down.

Take a look at his portfolio, and you'll immediately see why.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.