5:25 PM, Wednesday July 7th 2021
Hi again Goodboy! I just know this is gonna be a long one, so Im just going to jump straight to it.
Starting out by your form intersections, I wanna talk about line quality first- I know this is something you´ve been struggling with and you are getting better at them, we just need to do some adjustments on your ellipses, taking of which, remember to just go through them twice, the most wobbly ones are the ones that you are going through multiple times, dont let those damn little circles wannabes get into your head, always approach them with a cold head, take your time ghosting them, and remember that is better that you mess them up in accuracy terms rather than confidence.
Now, lets move on with this exercise: I think that you are overall heading into the right direction on this exercise, I advise that you try to be a little more subtle with the first lines, so when you apply the intersections and give them some line weight, its all a little more visible. Turning our attention again into the actual forms, a lot of it comes down to looking at each of the different surfaces of each form that make contact. Here I´ve drawn over some of your forms and trying to show how their surface behaves in 3d space, as I said, when you understand individually how each surface behaves, its much easier to make them intersect. For an example, if you look at a cylinder, its surface mainly behaves in two ways, it curves along the midsection, but it also runs straight on the sides and along the minor axis of the whole thing, with boxes its all straight and for balls I usually try to think about its contours curves. Always try to think about how each of this surfaces works and then thinking the intersection will be much easier.
Moving on to your constructions, it seems like overall you are moving into the right direction, now it seems like sometimes you are going really deep into subdividing your forms to get more accurate results, but on other cases you are going on a more freely approach. For example, your guitar looks really complex and it shows a lot of dedication, but on the other side, in your phone charger you are going in directly and applying some curves, skipping the steps of first setting up two straight lines that will help you translate that exact curve into the other corners. On the same construction, on the little cylinders that stick out of the main for of the charger, you are not really subdividing a lot, you are drawing a line along on of the axis and then kind of eyeballing that they sit around the middle of each of their planes. Here you could´ve find the middle of their planes and if you would want to go further, you could build a long box form it and then position your ellipses. Like this!.
Following this trend of trying to get our subdivisions to help us create more accurate constructions, I want to move on to what you did on your headphones. So, here with your subdivisions, you are setting up the middle of the box to be the top part of the strap, and then when you are setting up some middle points of the curve to get it more accurately (which is great) you are kind of eyeballing them, If you look at this, its a really small change, but it will help create a better and more solid curve in 3d space (which you should be always be careful with since they are tough). Now, I this looks like a really tough construction, but little subdivisions like this is what we should look for so it all fall together more easily.
As a last example of what Im trying to explain, Ive drawn over your stapple and I want you to see how I just took a line that you´ve already drawn (and you did it proportionally too ;D) and created two planes that would later help me contain the width of the upper part of the stapple. I know I didnt respected your construction, like when I extended those diagonals, I just positioned them as if they would reach the end of the box, but it was to just show a point.
Now, you are clearly moving on the right direction, and thats why I will be marking this lesson as completed, though its important that you understand that this lesson is preparing you for the kind of mentality you need to take when tackling these more complex construction, specially in L7- As right now its great that you are going for really complex subdivisions, but you now need to take a little longer beforehand to think about which one of all those subdivsions will actually help you, this will get easier as you practice of course, and the reason why this lesson is so tough is because is the first time you are thinking like this. So, keep on this direction and dont skip steps, always subdivide as much as you need but try to do them on a smart way since we are always fighting against clutter, these are really hard exercises and take a lot of time and patience. Also, remember that your only responsibility here is to give this constructions as much time as they need, so take it easy, dont rush through them and always give your best (which it seems you are already doing though!)
As I said, Im gonna mark this lesson as completed! keep up the great work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move on to the 25 wheel challenge.