Hello I'll be handling the critique for your lesson 6 homework.
Form Intersections
Starting with the form intersections your work is turning out well, most of the intersections are correct as far as I can tell with my current knowledge. The only thing I can call out is that on the third page you could have filled the page with more forms. And also don't forget about lineweight and hatching, to make the exercise more easy to see.
Objects
Moving on to the objects, these are well done , and overall you have made good use of the subdivisions to build your subjects and break them down into their more simple components.
-The main focus of this lesson is precision, this is something that we didn't worry too much about in previous lessons where we just focused on breaking each one of our subjects into its more primitive elements and we accepted the outcome of our choices even if they deviated from the reference images.For example we might have drawn the head of an animal too big, but that was not an issue as those mistakes didn’t take away from the things we learned by doing each lesson all the way to the end.
Precision and accuracy are two different things and in the context of this course accuracy refers to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, but precision has nothing to do with drawing that mark, instead it is about the steps and decisions that we take beforehand to declare our intentions.
A good example of this would be the ghosting method, when going through the planning of a straight line we can place an initial and ending dot, this will increase the precision of our drawing by declaring what we want to do. Once that is in place we can draw the mark, it may nail those points, it may overshoot or undershoot, etc. The important thing is that prior to any of that we have used the ghosting method to think about each mark's purpose and how we are going to achieve it best rather than figuring everything as we go, this kind of approach is more useful for the kind of geometric forms that we are working with as they have different planes, sharp corners, and clearly defined proportions.
We can capture all of these elements through the use of subdivisions, these allow us to meaningfully study the proportions of our object by way of an orthographic study, after that is done we can apply those studies to the object in 3 dimensions. That way everything that we do is the result of careful planning, and nothing is done by eyeballing or improvising.
-I can see that most of your objects are pretty simple, and most of them are boxy, so I want to direct your attention to the soap dispenser, where I can see that you drew those curves quite early, as explained in this section curves have an element of vagueness to them, instead what you could have done is to draw more cross sections of that object and then draw a bunch of straights,connecting them, once that is in place you can choose to round them off as needed.
-I also want to redirect your attention to the wardrobe, specially the handles, throughout all of the lessons we have made an effort to work with full forms rather than flat shapes, in this case drawing the handles with simple straight lines is not the best strategy, what you can do is to build more boxes to encapsulate the actual shape of the handle, again try to rely more on straight lines and rounding them off towards the end. You can see an example with a mug, here https://imgur.com/uSnwA4o
-Lastly you are generally pretty liberal when it comes to filling in areas. Within the context of the course however, it's best to always reserve your filled areas of solid black (or in this case since we're working with ballpoint, tight hatching lines) for specifically designed cast shadow shapes only. Avoid filling any existing shape in (because this is likely going to be more akin to form shading). I am referring to the picture frame specifically, the areas which you filled in black aren't really necessary.
Okayyyyyy, so everything I wanted to address. The points I have raised are fairly small and nitpicky. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete
Next Steps:
25 Wheels Challenge
Thank you so much for the detailed critique, it means a lot to me.
I kinda struggled with the handles of the wardrobe, but I didn't think to shape boxes first, so thank you for that tip. I'll definetly incorporate it as well as better planning my curves.
I thought filling in areas with solid black was mostly for separating forms, which is why I used it quite a lot, so thank you so much for clearing that up. I'll keep it in mind for future exercises.
It's hard to spot your own mistakes, so thank you again for taking the time and critiquing me
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.
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