5:39 PM, Monday July 11th 2022
Starting with your form intersections, there are quite a few issues here (I've marked out corrections here). Part of it is definitely overthinking things - I can see that there are areas in which you're thinking through the spatial problems correctly, but others where you overcomplicate things. Back in my critique of your Lesson 6 work, I provided some advice on this front which I feel you may not have given enough attention more recently, and I can see some mistakes that do suggest that you may have forgotten those points. While I'm going to leave you to review that feedback, I am going to quickly mention the main things to remember:
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Intersections are made up of the interactions between separate surfaces or planes of a form. There's no "cylinder-sphere" or "sphere-box" or other form-to-form specific formula for solving the intersections. Rather, it's about breaking each form into its individual faces, and determining how and where they are to intersect.
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This diagram which I'd shared with you in Lesson 6's critique demonstrates how we can look at the individual pieces of a given form, identifying the parts that are relevant to a given intersection, and then solving them one by one to establish the whole.
Additionally, while most of the time your linework was fine, I definitely did see places where you may have not been applying the ghosting method in its entirety, or to the best of your ability - sometimes you'd go back over lines repeatedly, other times your lines would be a bit wobbly as a result of a hesitant execution. Definitely something to keep an eye on.
Your cylinders in boxes are looking good, no issues to note there.
Continuing onto your form intersection vehicles, I should note that you actually ended up applying this exercise incorrectly. It's not actually a huge deal, and not something I hold against students (you're not the only one making this mistake, so it's something I'll have to demonstrate more directly in the future) but in essence, the exercise is really just the form intersections, but with those primitive forms arranged in the likeness of a vehicle. A few boxes for the cab, cylinders for your wheels, etc. What you ended up doing was really much the same as the later vehicle constructions. So, I'll be treating them as being work done for the same section.
Across your vehicle constructions, your work is a little mixed. There's a lot you're doing very well, and there are definitely some constructions that stand out as really applying the principles of construction as shown in the lesson, with subdivision and actions that lean heavily into precision in most cases (working with planning and making decisions ahead of time, rather than working in a reactionary fashion in response to how things are panning out) - for example, this tank and this fighter plane.
That said, this level of precision isn't necessarily present in all your constructions. For example, this half-track personnel carrier stands out quite a bit especially due to the extremely loose and rushed nature of its orthographic/proportional study - which, it should be noted, appears not to include its rear section. Additionally, there is not actually a lot of precision here. You've put down a rough grid, but there are many specific elements that have no clearly defined position within the grid, as I've marked out here. If you were to work off this orthographic plan, you'd end up using a lot of arbitrary guesswork at the time of construction.
While our goal with these orthographic studies is to basically decide at which distance along a given dimension every feature will be placed (for example, that sloping hood might start at 5/12ths of the way up, and end at 7/12ths. These are not accurate, but in actually making a clear decision it is precise, allowing us to move onto the construction with a clear idea of what we're trying to achieve, without the need for estimation after the fact.
Ultimately the construction itself was still solid, and you built up your construction well - but keep in mind that the approach, down to how we use the tools like these orthographic plans, do help us make more effective use of the exercise as a whole.
Another point I noticed was that in this construction, if we look closely we can see that your ellipses actually don't touch the edges of the planes that enclose them. While this is understandable, in that our ellipse guides are rarely so perfect as to be able to fit snugly inside of predefined planes, by starting with the ellipses and building our planes around them, we can avoid the limitations of the more limited ellipse guides we may have. This way the ellipses dictate where everything else goes. This is especially useful given that it's these ellipses that determine the scale and proportion of the grid as a whole.
To that point, I've been noticing that you appear to have been starting with the whole box first, by approximating it, then building up your grid inside of it. This results in you then cutting pieces off after the fact, which can be avoided by simply using the constructing to scale approach from the beginning, rather than as a later step.
Now, while I think you're applying the core construction of your vehicles well, I do feel that it's these preliminary steps, and how you employ your proportional studies/orthographic plans that hinders you, and that's definitely something I want to hammer out before we call this lesson done. I'll be assigning some revisions below.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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2 pages of form intersections
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3 pages of vehicle constructions with orthographic plans. One of these must be a car, but the rest can be of your choosing.
When working through the vehicle constructions, I would like you to write down the date of each day you worked on it, along with a rough estimate of how long each session was. I'm not sure if you're already spreading your work across multiple days, but if you aren't, I would strongly recommend that you do. These kinds of constructions are very demanding in how much time they require of us, if we are to execute them to the best of our current ability.