5:16 PM, Monday February 6th 2023
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.