25 Wheel Challenge
5:06 PM, Sunday May 9th 2021
Hi everyone! I finished my 25 wheel challenge. Any comments are appreciated!
The 25 wheel challenge basically breaks down into two separate components. I mean, it's basically the same two components of every lesson, but they're particularly distinct here, with both being looked at with particular focus when I critique. Construction and texture. I'll look at each of them in turn.
Starting with the construction, you've done a great job. I'm very pleased to see that you picked up an ellipse guide, and it has definitely helped you stay focused on the core task of constructing these wheels, both the complex cylindrical forms as well as the internal structures of the rims and spokes. You've captured a nice, subtle widening through the middle of the wheel, and have paid a good deal of attention to each of the rims, having tackled quite a variety.
I really don't expect students at this stage to be quite comfortable enough with ellipses to freehand these. It's certainly something students will continue working in, but there are better exercises for it, and if they get all caught up in drawing their ellipses, then it's very difficult for students to get anything else from this exercise.
Now, when it comes to the textures portion of this challenge, there is a pitfall that many students fall into. I basically expect it at this point, and it's part of why this challenge exists. Students tend to forget to apply the concepts covered in Lesson 2's texture section. Being as far removed from it as they are, having the somewhat rude awakening of this fact is sometimes necessary to ensure that students finish the course with a good appreciation for all aspects of what we explore - both the macro, explicit drawing via construction, and the micro, implicit approaches we use to capture textural elements.
Here you've relied pretty exclusively on line, so you were forced to draw each and every textural form in its entirety, which in turn creates a lot of visual noise and contrast. With the wheels on their own, this might be fine, but as soon as you add them to a larger construction - like a car - it can draw the viewer's eye somewhere you don't intend.
Instead, of course, we need to focus on implying the presence of these forms by drawing only the shadows they cast. This is by no means easy, because it forces us to think about the form as it exists in the world without drawing it, and then has us think about what shape its shadow would take as it falls on its surroundings. Of course, all of that is explained back in lesson 2's texture section, so I won't go further with it here.
As you move forwards, try and remember - whenever you're drawing any sort of textural information (and tire treads are definitely texture - they're an arrangement of forms that run along the surface of a larger form), capture them entirely using cast shadow shapes. You can use outlines where they break the silhouette of your form, but for anything internal, always draw the outline of a specific shadow shape, then fill it in.
I find that this bush viper example can help. Though it's not a tire tread itself, it shares a lot of elements of one, and demonstrates how we can control the density of our textures without changing the nature of the forms that are present.
So, with that, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 7.
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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