Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

5:52 PM, Saturday August 21st 2021

DrawABox: Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects - Album on Imgur

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Usually something clicks when I am halfway through drawing for a lesson, but even after re-reading the lesson and videos multiple times, I am pretty sure I am "not getting it". I spent most of this feeling confused and disoriented. All the submissions on Discord seem to be far more complex and have way more guides/lines than mine but I can't figure out what any of them mean. I'm not even sure I get what I'm not getting.

Bring on the revisions.

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10:45 PM, Sunday August 22nd 2021

Starting with your form intersections, you're definitely moving in the right direction here, and a fair number of your intersections are playing out correctly, though there are a few issues I want to call out:

  • There were some intersections that were off. I've highlighted them here.

  • In this exercise, it's best to avoid forms that are really stretched out, as explained here. Stick to forms that are more proportionally equilateral. This will help you avoid more extreme foreshortening that can throw the sense of scale off and kind of become distracting in the exercise.

  • Since you did end up with longer forms, I did notice that when you draw cylinders, you tend to stick to the same degree for the ellipses on either end. As discussed in Lesson 1's ellipses video, the far end should be wider than the end closer to the viewer. The same mechanism applies to cones, even though there isn't an ellipse closer to the viewer, you should still be treating it as though there is so the far end isn't unnaturally narrow.

  • Don't be too liberal in the use of your line weight - you don't have to go back over the whole perimeter of a given ellipse. Instead, focus line weight only where overlaps occur, to help clarify the nature of those overlaps. Think of it like an intersection of roads - if you've got two lines of equal weight crossing each other, you're creating a 4 way intersection, so the viewer's eye can enter the intersection from one end, then take any of the other three options. Adding line weight to one of these two lines makes it more of an overpass - where that path actually goes over the other, making it harder for the viewer's eye to jump from one path to another.

Continuing onto your object constructions, while there are some areas in which there could be more specificity to your breakdowns and more structure preceding the curves you define, overall you're still doing fairly well. This lesson is really the first introduction to the idea of ensuring that every bit of complexity, every step of construction, is specifically supported by the structure that precedes it.

You can think of it kind of like whittling a piece of wood. If you were to try and create your heating pad remote from this page out of a block of wood, you wouldn't start with a box, then jump straight into establishing the curving edges of its body. You'd make a series of straight cuts establishing the gist of that body's curvature as a bunch of flat planes. With those in place, you'd then round out the corners, working your way step by step to a final result. Every cut you make is a line drawn on the page. This is more or less what I'm getting at in this section where I talk about creating more specific curves by first establishing them as a series of straight edges.

In most of these, I do feel that you have respected the idea of building your objects up step by step - for example, the keyblade is visibly built up in a series of successive steps, and as a result came out quite solidly. Looking at the glasses though, I do feel that there could have been more to figure out the specific landmarks and where they would sit in space, as I've shown here. You've pinned down a lot of points, but their positions are not specific in a manner that can be reproduced. That plane needs to be subdivided further to find exactly where in the resulting grid each landmark would be situated, so it could be rebuilt in those same specific terms in three dimensions.

One last point I wanted to call out is that the wheel of buttons on the remote from this page. It looks like the only existing scaffolding you had upon which to decide how that ellipse would sit was the center you determined by crossing diagonals for that particular plane. The actual bounds of the space the ellipse would specifically occupy were not defined - so it ended up floating somewhat more loosely within the given space. Partially as a result of this, the ellipse ended up being drawn with too large a degree, and doesn't quite give the impression that it's a circle sitting on the surface of that object. Instead, it feels either like it's circular but turned more towards the viewer, or that it's a somewhat oblong/distorted shape. It's another good example of why pinning down the scaffolding in previous steps, and avoiding skipping those steps, is important.

I do feel you're moving in the right direction here, but as this is will be particularly important when you get to the end of the course, I do want to make sure that you're comfortable including all of the steps necessary - so I will be assigning a couple additional pages below.

Next Steps:

Please submit 2 more pages of object constructions.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
12:00 AM, Monday October 11th 2021
edited at 12:08 AM, Oct 11th 2021

Additional pages: https://imgur.com/a/BiDva5o

The point plotting with the subdivisions clicked when you described it has carving wood, but I'm still hitting a block when translating more complex forms from orthogonal to 3D -- anything square or rectangular is OK where I can kind of "hug" the planes with the lines, but even after re-watching your video on the barrel, I get lost on what happens to the points I plotted out in the orthogonal views when translating them to 3D space.

edited at 12:08 AM, Oct 11th 2021
5:18 PM, Monday October 11th 2021

Based on your revisions, I definitely agree that the concept has clicked quite nicely - you're showing a lot more patience and care in how you lay out those subdivided grids and gradually build each construction out. I can see where you're talking about being somewhat uncertain of how to translate curving surfaces based on their various orthographic plans. While this is something that will improve with practice, I think the main issue I'm seeing is that on that bottom right corner drawing, you appear to have placed all of your points right on the side plane of the bounding box, when in fact many of them were further back.

In order to place them in 3D space, you need to first find to points on the side and front planes, then use them to determine the actual position in 3D space, as shown here. It's worth mentioning that I picked totally random positions, and didn't reference the actual ones in your orthographic plans - it's just an example of how to combine the side view and front view.

Anyway, I'm quite pleased with your progress, and will happily mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
9:19 PM, Monday October 11th 2021

O H H.

Yep, got it, that's clicking now too. Thanks for explaining and for drawing in the extra visual, I've achieved nirvana and look forward to crashing back to reality trying to draw a car or whatever in the next lesson.

Thanks.

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