Well here it is. My original brush pen finally began to die, I had to start using a different one on the last vehicle. I also had to get past scrapping the whole thing if I made an error, and just trying to correct as best I could later on. Hopefully, it was enough. It's been a long journey.
Jumping right in with your form intersections, your work here is largely well done, with three points I want you to keep in mind:
Firstly - and this is really the most significant of the three - is that you're not employing the ghosting method when drawing your linework, or at least not applying it in full. While many of your lines are still fairly smooth (which may have led you to drop off the wagon a bit when it comes to applying the ghosting method's steps as intentionally as possible), there are some subtle signs of hesitation in most of them, with some more noticeable signs towards the upper left of the page. Remember that throughout this course, we apply these steps in a painfully intentional and tedious manner so that those habits get planted so deeply within us that we have no choice but to apply them (at a much smaller, faster scale) when drawing without thinking about it.
Secondly, be sure to draw your cylinders around minor axis lines. You're using them effectively in your cones, but they can provide us plenty of benefit for the cylinders as well.
Thirdly, here I've marked out where one of your sphere-cylinder intersections is incorrect, as it passes over the cylinder's edge without adding a sharp corner to lead into following along a very differently oriented surface. You did this more correctly in the other example of sphere-cylinder intersections, however.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is generally well done, although don't forget to extend your minor axis lines back in space, along with the rest of your green lines. It appears you're only extending the edges of the box in that direction.
Onto your form intersection vehicles, here you've largely done well and have avoided a pitfall many students fall into - for the most part, anyway - where they push the exercise much farther than just the usual form intersections following the layout of a particular vehicle. You did go a little farther here than was required, but you still did a good job of focusing on keeping things simple. The main goal here is to ensure that students don't get too caught up in thinking of their constructions as a series of individual edges that are being stitched together. We want them to continue recognizing that they're combining solid, complete forms together - so instead of piecing a whole car together from a bunch of edges within a grid, we're still building boxes, cylinders, etc. within that grid, and then carving them down further.
One thing I did notice was missing however, was the minor axes of your cylinders - much like your form intersections. The minor axis line is integral to help us in orienting a given cylinder's orientation relative to other forms, so its absence here definitely did have a negative impact on some of your vehicles, like this one where many of those cylinders were, to varying degrees, not aligning to the core boxes of the truck.
Finally, looking at your more detailed vehicle constructions, I think there's a lot you've done well here, but I do feel that some of the advice I provided in your Lesson 6 critique - specifically discussing the use of your orthographic studies, and being more specific with as much of it as you can. This issue manifests in two ways I want to talk about individually.
The first of these has to do with ensuring that either the bounding box itself encloses the object as snugly as possible (not leaving any void spaces on any side, as such things would be of some arbitrary size we can't transfer directly to our 3D construction), or that the void space itself be defined specifically so that even if the object isn't fitting snugly within the whole box, that there is an established subsection of it that does wrap around it snugly. So for example, you can see what I mean here where I've shown that the side edges of your orthographic studies' bounding boxes are not right up against the vehicle, leaving you to estimate an arbitrary distance from those sides when applying the rest of your subdivisions and identifying other landmarks.
The second is that, as discussed in that Lesson 6 critique (this was one of those "sneak peaks" I provide in feedback to cover areas that will eventually be updated in the lesson material as part of the overhaul), these orthographic studies are most effective when we're actually making decisions about where along the length of a given dimension a particular landmark should fall, using subdivisions. This allows us to identify that, for example, for this one we might decide that the top of the windshield will sit at the 2/6ths mark, and the bottom of the windshield will sit at the 1/4 mark. This gives us clear landmarks we can identify in our 3D construction, so we're not eyeballing/approximating, as shown here.
Furthermore, you'll notice that this doesn't perfectly match your drawing - you had the crest of the windshield a bit further beyond 2/6ths. The goal is not to identify everything accurately, but rather to make decisions so we can build up our object with precision. That's where the orthographic studies really show their usefulness, by giving us an isolated step in which to make our decisions, so that when we build the object in 3 dimensions, we're mostly just following the recipe we've already established - thus leaving ourselves only to focus on that which is tedious and time consuming, rather than further burdening ourselves with the mental gymnastics of figuring out where everything should go.
The last thing I wanted to call out is a fairly minor point. Remember that we're reserving our filled areas of solid black for cast shadows only, so refrain from filling in existing spaces (which are not themselves purposely defined cast shadow shapes, designed by considering the relationship between the form casting the shadow and the surface receiving it). For example, avoid filling in the spaces between the grills and the space of the wheelwells as you did on this truck.
You'll notice that I'm not saying not to fill in the forms inside the cab - that's fine, although we do go out on a bit of a limb in order to argue as to why that's OK but the wheelwells/grills aren't. To put it simply, we argue that because the forms inside of the car are ostensibly having the cab structure casting shadows into it, they're technically cast shadows - but in truth, it's just because it helps us avoid all of the visual clutter that comes from also constructing the interior and having its lines present amongst the rest.
Now, all in all you've done reasonably well, but have allowed a few things to slip your mind. Normally this isn't an issue, but because this is the last lesson, I am going to ask you to do one more construction (specifically of another car), to show that you can leverage the orthographic studies as I explained here and in Lesson 6's critique. Looking at your work, I expect that while this will be time consuming, you will knock it out of the park.
Next Steps:
Please submit one more vehicle construction - specifically of a car, truck, or other civilian automobile - and leverage the orthographic studies as explained in this critique.
This has been a week with a lot of guesswork and a small mountain of scrapped paper. This is as good as it's likely going to get. Tried to use shadows only as cast to the ground within the box by overhead light, which included tight wheelwells and had the vehicle as tightly bound by the construction box as possible. The not very box-like shape of modern cars makes applying the example techniques extremely difficult. Found myself unable to take a mostly box-like chassis and 'stack' upwards from there. Had to figure out how to take 1 wheel width, divide down to 3/4, then continue to extend backwards from 3/4 since there wasn't 1 wheel of width in front of the first wheel. There was a lot of conflicting advice in the Lesson 7 channel but I mostly cobbled it together from there and some other student's completed lessons.
This is by and large an improvement over your previous work, and shows a clear step in the right direction. There is certainly room for improvement, and some of your decisions in how you tackled the challenge did reduce what you were able to get out of the exercise (and what I'm able to provide you in my feedback - or at least, what I'm able to provide you in the time that would generally be allocated to revisions), but I will be marking this lesson - and the course with it - as complete, as you have certainly earned that. Congratulations!
What stood out to me in your comment was this:
Found myself unable to take a mostly box-like chassis and 'stack' upwards from there.
I may not be interpreting this correctly, but I believe this is in reference to the concept I pointed you to when you were struggling with dealing with curves, as described in Lesson 6's notes. Given that you did not appear to apply those concepts in your drawing here (it seems you jumped straight into the curves without an underlying, boxier structure), I can only infer that you had trouble with the approach and decided to go a different route.
As you continue onto other courses, there's one thing you need to take away from this: courses, exercises, etc. exist to present a measured bit of adversity, so that we may stumble and fall in an environment where the nature of that stumbling is intentional, and where there is a support structure to help you work through that stumbling to better learn from it. When a student stumbles, it provides a direct example of their attempt that reflects what they understand, and what they might be misunderstanding, so it can be addressed directly. Avoiding that stumbling however upon finding it to provide resistance, and then submitting work that does not apply that technique, doesn't give me much to work with, and instead I need to extrapolate that and address it blind.
There are two main things that interfere with a student's ability to get all they can from a given resource:
The conflation of practice/training with performance, where they apply the pressures that only come up in performance (where we need that end result to be as pretty as it can be, which often will set aside the very tactics and strategies that are used for learning in favour of that which can get the job done where only the end result matters), to the circumstances of learning (where the end result is only a means of communicating what you do and don't understand to the person instructing you and providing feedback). That means that the very mistakes one might seek to avoid (due to the interference of the 'performance') are the things that are valuable for the purposes of learning.
The need to get to the next milestone. That is to say, where the idea of getting to the next lesson may interfere with our willingness to follow the exercise as directed, to use certain approaches, or to commit time to going back over what information has been imparted in order to determine the desired course of action.
Both of these are natural, human compulsions. To prioritize the performance to diminish embarrassment (which isn't just about what other people think, but just as much to chase our next dopamine hit from producing something we can be proud of), and to prioritize approaches that get us to that dopamine hit more quickly.
For the course of action you chose (I know you certainly struggled with the idea of building up fractional additions on either end where a full wheel's length wasn't suitable, but you appear to have applied the concepts for handling fractional measurements from Lesson 6's extensive notes on that topic quite well here), you committed a lot of time, and you worked through the problems patiently. But you did choose a different course of action from the one I recommended. Perhaps that was because it was too frustrating and was taking too much time, taking you further from that next "achievement" (a big one no doubt, given that it was the completion of the course). Or, perhaps you were concerned about how that end result would turn out, and so because starting with boxier structures and rounding them out afterwards was steering you in a direction that resulted in something that was undesirable to you, you fell back on something more familiar and comfortable, though one that did not teach the same lesson I intended for you to learn. In all likelihood, it was a bit of both, but only you can know that for sure.
Now, to touch upon building things up with boxy structures, it tends to be an excruciatingly time consuming process. The more we rely on eyeballing/approximating things from observation, the less we're actually thinking about how the marks we're drawing exist in 3D space in relation to the other forms/elements that exist within the space. Conversely, approaching it as shown here - which took me upwards of half an hour just for that front section of the car - forced me at every turn to consider how each corner of every plane I was defining projected down onto the ground, how that position could be transferred in different dimensions.
Even I hate it. Even I made plenty of mistakes, and even I decided to eyeball a few things - but even in that, I wasn't eyeballing the actual edges that would make up the final object, I was eyeballing their relationships to other structures as I laid down more perspective lines. It's that - the act of working through the spatial relationships as we work on the exercise - that matters. And while the lesson in its current state doesn't stress that (and again, that's something we're working on, as these priorities are things that have revealed themselves in reviewing this material countless times in every critique I give, making this course an eternally evolving resource), which makes the exercises useful. And that's why I offer this additional information in my critiques - so that while those only using the free side of the resource will eventually also see the benefits of it, it is important that the students who are paying for it are given that information. There are still many students who don't pay enough attention to the feedback, setting it aside as irrelevant as they move forwards onto the next lesson, but there's only so much I can do about the choices they make.
The work we do throughout this course is not about finishing a beautiful drawing, it's not about avoiding revisions, it's not about ticking off a lesson as complete. It's about solving the puzzle. Every constructional drawing we do challenges us to consider how 3D eleme,nts relate to one another in space. That's really all it is - from the box challenge where we consider the convergences of the lines representing edges that are meant to be parallel in three dimensions, to the intersectional contour lines we use to define the relationship between sausages when constructing legs, to the way our additional masses wrap around the structures to which they're attaching, and how they fit together to create a puzzle of interlocking elements.
All of it comes down to the same thing: making our brains solve that puzzle. So, as you go forwards and apply these exercises on your own to whatever extent you see fit, keep that in mind. Don't just draw what your eyes see - build what your brain understands.
In case it helps, here's a breakdown of what I did on the front of your SUV broken into a few steps. There's no additional labelling, but since the end result is undeniably overwhelming and I did break it into layers, I figured it could only help to show a bit more of how it came together.
One last thing - when it comes to your use of filled areas of black, I wanted to mention that the wheel wells are not examples of cast shadows. There's no specific form casting shadow onto the wheel wells, it's more that due to their orientation in space, they're darker (meaning it's form shading). When gauging whether something's a cast shadow or not, consider which form is casting the shadow, and which surface is receiving it, and whether the shadow's shape itself defines that relationship. There are cases - like when you've got a shadow being cast into a hole - where the shape doesn't reflect the spatial relationship as clearly, but the important part is taking a step back to ask yourself those questions, so you have the information you need to determine it yourself.
Anyway, as promised I'll be marking your lesson, and the course as a whole, as complete. I hope my feedback here has helped, and best of luck applying it and everything you've learned here as you continue to move forwards towards your goals.
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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