Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

3:01 PM, Saturday November 23rd 2024

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Thanks in advance for the critique! I really enjoyed this lesson.

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6:42 PM, Monday November 25th 2024

Starting with your form intersections, as a whole you're doing a pretty good job. This exercise was of course initially introduced in Lesson 2 (before we really started targeting our spatial reasoning skills with constructional drawing exercises), and when we assign it again here, it's not with the expectation that students will nail it perfectly. Rather, we actually only expect students to be comfortable with those intersections involving flat surfaces, and to still have some difficulty with those involving curving surfaces. I'd say you're some ways beyond this, but still with some room for continued improvement.

I've made a few notes here directly on your work, which mainly focus on a couple things:

  • Drawing through forms? Great. Drawing through intersections? Not so great. For the forms, it provides a significant enough benefit to outweigh the increase in visual complexity/greater likelihood of confusion. For the intersections, it doesn't really help that much more, but it does make the intersections a lot harder to wrap our heads around. It's for this reason in the demonstration for this exercise's instructions, we only draw the portions that are visible to the viewer, so definitely stick with that when doing this exercise.

  • Not a mistake, but something to keep in mind - the wider your ellipses get when constructing cylinders, the more the circles in 3D space being represented are turned towards the viewer. For a single ellipse, not a big deal. But if you think about what happens when a whole cylinder's orientation is turned more and more towards the viewer, the two ellipses will generally overlap more and more. Or, if they don't, then that tells us that the cylinder itself is much longer - because it needs that length in order to allow for the greater gap between the ellipses on the page. So, when drawing your cylinders in a situation where they would maintain more specific relationships with the forms around them, as a cylinder's ellipses both get wider, be sure to think about how that would impact the distance between the ellipses, and the orientation of the cylinder as a whole.

Continuing onto your object constructions, by and large your work here is quite well done. You've gone to great lengths to apply the concepts from the lesson material, which focuses primarily on the idea of increasing the precision of our approach as we construct these kinds of objects. Precision is often conflated with accuracy, but they're actually two different things (at least insofar as I use the terms here). Where accuracy speaks to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, precision actually has nothing to do with putting the mark down on the page. It's about the steps you take beforehand to declare those intentions - and so it's less about the results you achieve, and more about the process used to achieve them.

So for example, if we look at the ghosting method, when going through the planning phase of a straight line, we can place a start/end point down. This increases the precision of our drawing, by declaring what we intend to do. From there the mark may miss those points, or it may nail them, it may overshoot, or whatever else - but prior to any of that, we have declared our intent, explaining our thought process, and in so doing, ensuring that we ourselves are acting on that clearly defined intent, rather than just putting marks down and then figuring things out as we go.

In our constructions here, we build up precision primarily through the use of the subdivisions. These allow us to meaningfully study the proportions of our intended object in two dimensions with an orthographic study, then apply those same proportions to the object in three dimensions.

You have demonstrated use of these techniques in just about every possible opportunity. There are definitely cases where more precision could be used, but ultimately what I want to see here is that you're making an effort to move towards more precision instead of less, rather than always ensuring a maximum amount of precision. So for example, you used specific landmarks for the placement of each leg on the ground. Yes, you could have gone to much greater lengths to ensure the size of the "footprint" where each cylinder touches the ground is equal, but using subdivision as you did to ensure the spacing/placement of them was consistent is an increase in precision, and so I am pleased to see it.

One area where I do think it would have been a good idea to use a little more scaffolding is with the protruding lens of the camera. Your top view orthographic plan cut this out, which definitely simplified the requirements of that top view (which can definitely be the right call), but as shown here it wouldn't be more than just a couple of mirrorings to create a bounding box for the lens itself that is reliably aligned to your existing structure. This would also give you a plane on the opposite side of the lens so you can find its center and construct a minor axis that is definitely aligned to the overall structure, rather than approximated by eye.

The only other thing I wanted to suggest - and this is just because of how we work with stark black/white in this course, as well as the course's own focus on spatial reasoning so it's not a general "rule" for how to draw outside of the course - but try to reserve your areas of filled black for cast shadows only. That is, cases where one form is casting a shadow onto a different surface - which means that the design of the shadow shape itself directly defines the relationship between the form casting it and the surface receiving it in 3D space. Avoid using those filled areas of solid black for form shading or separating surfaces out from one another (you often fill side planes with black, but this can make the actual instances of cast shadows harder to parse visually, weakening their usefulness in terms of constantly emphasizing the focus on 3D spatial relationships).

So for example, where on this kettle the handle's inner surface was filled with black, I would avoid that in this course. The spout however, which casts a shadow onto the main body of the kettle, is a solid use of filled black shapes that comes back around to keep the focus on spatial reasoning. A good rule of thumb is that if you're gonna add a black shape somewhere, make sure that you had to design the shape itself first, and that you weren't just going in and filling in a shape that already exists. There are cases where this is necessary, because the shadow itself is so big it engulfs the entire shape - but taking the extra step to think about whether that's happening or not will help.

Anyway! All in all, solid work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for Lesson 7.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
2:41 PM, Friday November 29th 2024

Thank you!

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The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"

It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.

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