Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles

3:49 PM, Wednesday February 10th 2021

Lesson 7 Official Submission by Caeruleum - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/G200urO.jpg

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Hello boss!

This lesson's way harder and everything took way longer than I've expected. I am very confident that I've tried my best though I'm not sure if it's good enough to pass.

As always, thanks in advance!

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11:46 PM, Thursday February 11th 2021

There's a reason this lesson's considered the big boss - where other lessons certainly demand a lot, and expect students to put in many hours, the sheer difference in magnitude of the time that goes into each drawing here is definitely a big jump. Looking at the time estimates you added to your drawings (thanks for that by the way), you're definitely putting a good chunk of time into each drawing, and that's great. I will say this - the amount of time you put in is totally normal. I have had students who've invested even more time - for example, LordNed's submission had him spending upwards of 9 hours on some of his drawings. I definitely don't expect that from students, but it is always good to see the way in which that time can be spent. When it comes to construction and pinning down all the specific subdivisions and whatnot, there is much work to be done.

Anyway, let's get started. Starting with your form intersections, you are largely doing a great job of demonstrating a strong grasp of how these forms relate to one another in 3D space. Your boxes are decent, though I do think more can be done to think through how each line needs to be oriented, relative to the other lines of its set, in order to converge consistently together, but your linework is confident and the approximated convergences aren't too bad. The intersection lines themselves are looking great though, and it shows that you've come a long way since your first stab at lesson 2.

Jumping ahead to your vehicle constructions, by and large the methodology by which you approach these constructions is quite solid. There are issues in some of them, but the trend is essentially that when you stick to the construction, your drawings turn out better, and when you take liberties and jumps of complexity that aren't really supported, your work suffers.

For the various demo drawings, you've shown a lot of patience and care, and the capacity to build these out to achieve solid results. You push deep into details without abandoning constructional principles - always working in form, making sure you pin down the correct subdivisions and all to ensure the details you do construct are positioned specifically where they need to go.

We can see this carrying over into all of your vehicle constructions, but the main difference is that in a number of the drawings, you sometimes seem to decide, "construction's done, let's have some fun!" - for example, this camaro demo drawing definitely marks a bit of a difference from your other demo drawings, where it seems you decide to abandon your construction fairly early on, once you've got the major proportions down. Admittedly, that is more than a little bit my own fault, because the demonstration itself could certainly be better. That said, there still are a lot of ways in which this late stage still adheres to the structure.

My real mistake was the fact that back when I created this demo, I was still not entirely clear on how I wanted to teach this course, and so I, like most students, fell towards making things look pretty in the end. The mustang demo definitely pushes the adherence to construction way farther. When I decided to keep the camaro demo around, I did add the disclaimer at the top pointing out that it's very old (from 2016), but still valuable in many ways. It should still be superceded by the mustang demo in pretty much every way.

I am currently embarking on redoing all the video content of the course, starting from Lesson 1 (I've got the videos for Lesson 1: Lines recorded but a few pieces still need to be edited before I can push them out), so in the coming months I hope to remedy this issue completely, without any straggling old bits hanging on.

As a side note - the whole "splotches of black" rendering style I used in the camaro, which you applied to a number of your drawings, should probably be left aside. It's honestly just not needed - proper structure stands for itself, and more and more I find that when we rely on rendering like that, it's because the structure isn't strong enough.

Anyway, I've gotten off topic here. My main point is, stick to construction throughout the entire process, and avoid allowing yourself to find the point where you say "construction's over". Construction is never really over - we can always push it further while still clinging to that base structure and building directly on top of it. The moment we set construction aside and go back to treating our drawing like, well, a drawing, is when we start undermining elements of its solidity.

To that point, you definitely have a number of constructions that cling to construction well. For example, this firebird has excellent structure and maintains specific curvature and profile. This Mercury Comet maintains its structure quite nicely too, though the car itself leans into it being boxy as it is. I even think drawings like this one and this one do a great job, and they show that it isn't ultimately about detail. As long as you're still holding to the structure firmly and haven't gone back to treating it like a 2D drawing, it'll still maintain that excellent sense of solidity.

So, I am definitely pleased with the overall progress you're showing, but before I mark this lesson as complete, and with it the entire course, I want to see one more car drawing from you. I want you to give this one everything you have, to really push the limits of your already impressive patience, and to see just how far it can be pushed. Don't work in really long continuous stretches, as you did for some of these. Spread it out over a few days, and take lots of breaks. Looking at LordNed's work, which I linked earlier, may help serve as motivation as well, because I guarantee you can produce work that good as well.

One other thing - definitely put more time into studying the proportions of your cars with orthographic proportional studies. You may well be doing this already, but the proportions are still a bit iffy, so investing more of your time to really pin that down will help immensely.

I look forward to seeing what you can produce!

Next Steps:

One - just one - car drawing, pushing you to your limits and showing me the absolute best of what you can do. No additional detail, just taking construction as far as it'll go. Take lots of breaks and spread it out over as many days as you need.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
9:35 AM, Sunday February 14th 2021

https://imgur.com/gallery/I8pckPl

I'm not overall satisfied with this, but yeah, I did put maximum effort on this one. Thank you!

7:45 PM, Monday February 15th 2021

I definitely agree that you worked really hard at this one, and it shows. You're definitely moving in the right direction, but the tricky thing about cars is just how easily mistakes (specifically in studying proportion) can snowball out of control - and sports cars with a lot of fluid curves are notorious for making this even harder.

I did a bit of a proportional analysis of your drawing, in comparison to your orthographics, and I found some notable mistakes. Here's my analysis.

The first thing I noticed - though I didn't really focus on it much - was that when transferring your "unit" grid over to the width dimension, the ellipse you worked with didn't have its contact points aligned towards the vertical vanishing point (should have been pointing straight up), so this would have thrown off your scale in that dimension.

More notably though, there were two key issues I noticed:

  • Your back wheel was too far back. Stepping back from the front wheel, you've got a little short of 2.5 wheel lengths. In your drawing, however, you're taking almost 3. Before the rear wheel there should be a full wheel length, but you cut it pretty short. This suggests that you placed your back wheel too far back.

  • The height of your construction was incorrect as well - looks like you've got the height set at 2.5 wheels, but looking at your orthographics it should be just 2 wheels.

These issues had a lot of significant impact on your resulting construction. Something that could have helped is to take the analysis you did of your orthographics, and then draw your own orthographics based on the proportions you'd recorded. This should help you more quickly identify any key issues or misunderstandings before you get too deep.

Now, like I said - I think you are demonstrating the appropriate attention to construction, just not so much to the earlier planning phase. Normally I'd be okay with marking this lesson as complete, given that this is the end of the course, I don't feel that I'd have quite done my duty without giving you one more swing at this.

So here's what we're going to do. You're going to do one more vehicle construction. I recommend that you stick to something a little boxier - a 60s or 70s muscle car, a 1920s model T, or one of those boxy sedans from the 1980s. The key isn't to throw something hard at you, but rather to get you accustomed to pinning those proportions down correctly, and then seeing it through to the end.

Next Steps:

One more vehicle construction, as described at the end of my feedback.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
6:22 AM, Thursday February 18th 2021

https://imgur.com/gallery/NsZsohy

It is near 5 hours and I think it's fine. I had a little bit of chaos in the middle so I took a break, and although after finishing it I felt it was terrible, now I think it is fine. Everything is just kind of fine. I kind of failed the curvy part of the above the wheel thing, but I believe it's because I messed up when putting in the big black chunk.

The brewer's technique helped a lot honestly. Usually the back corner of the enclosing box will not line up but this time it did, I believe it helped a lot.

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