Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

3:51 PM, Tuesday July 27th 2021

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Hello again and here is my lesson 6 homework. Thank you for your time and critique.

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9:28 PM, Wednesday July 28th 2021

Starting with your form intersections, you are largely doing a really good job here. Your linework is confident and smooth, your forms are looking solid and well constructed, and the intersections themselves demonstrate a well developing grasp of the relationships between these forms in space, with particular attention towards how the relationship changes whenever we hit the corner on a form. I have just one observation - when constructing your cylinders, you did a good job of employing minor axis lines on the second and third pages, but neglected to use them on the first. This simply shows me that you got forgetful, but corrected the issue later on, which is fine - just remember to use them consistently in the future.

Moving onto your object constructions, for the most part your work here is well done. There are a few issues I want to call out, but none of them are particularly major, just things to keep in mind as you move forwards.

This is the first lesson that really pushes students to build up this kind of specific, precise, intentional scaffolding, and while many students will still feel hesitant to push that to its fullest extent (often picking some arbitrary point at which they've done "enough" and eyeballing the rest), I can see that you've been pretty thorough in your use of the construction and subdivision, taking it far enough to block out even smaller elements with precision. Nowhere can we see this more clearly than this camera which is really remarkably well done. You blocked everything out, subdividing every last little bit of necessary structure, and the result came out solid and believable because of it.

So the first point I wanted to call out is that it appears you approached your drawing in two distinct phases, each using a different tool. You took advantage of the permission to use a ballpoint pen for laying out your scaffolding (which is great - I give students that freedom because it is really valuable and keeps them focused on what they're doing), but it appears that once you'd laid that structure down, you went back in with a fineliner to establish the "real" object amidst the scaffolding. Note that in the section that gives you permission to use a ballpoint pen, I do mention that you should stick to the one tool and not jump to anything else. The reason for this is that I don't want students to feel that there is a distinction between their construction and the drawing itself - it is all a part of the same process, and if some of the scaffolding accurately captures an edge that makes up the final object, it should be allowed to stand on its own. In the end, we can always add line weight - but of course line weight serves only to clarify specific overlaps between forms, and is reserved to localized areas, rather than replacing whole lines.

Another minor point I wanted to call out is the distinction between cast shadows and form shading. In some drawings you make really good use of cast shadows (like in the barrel, but remember that form shading itself should generally be left out of these drawings as discussed back in Lesson 2. There are very limited exceptions... sort of. There are cases where I use something that is more akin to hatching where I wanted to capture the curvature of a rounded edge, like in the speaker demo, but that is more similar to what is shown in these notes.

In general, unless you have a specific, intentional reason to employ tools like this which kind of ride the edge of how we use these various concepts/tools in this course, it's best just to leave them out and fall back to focusing on the use of filled areas of solid black as cast shadows only.

As a side note, I think that in your lead pointer/sharpener drawing, where you only outlined the main shadow the object cast on the ground, you very much made the right call. This allows the shadow to still exist, but makes it more understated and avoids distracting the viewer from the object. In the water bottle, having that shadow filled in led to a lot of challenges that didn't really need to be solved.

Anyway! All in all your work is coming along very well. 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.
8:08 AM, Thursday July 29th 2021

Thank you very much for the critique!

Will keep the issues in mind and try to correct them especially the shading/shadows I want to improve at.

Also I guess just as info (probably irrelevant at this point), I think I only mistakenly used fineliner for lines with the mouse demo. Everything else is either ballpoint or brush pen.

Especially the last four drawings are definitely ballpoint pen only but since it is relatively dry/pale I went multiple times over the same line to apply some more lineweight/thickness to make it visible/readable amidst all the construction and I guess it ended up looking like a fineliner.

Again thank you for your time.

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