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9:46 PM, Thursday February 6th 2025

Jumping right in with the form intersections, your work here is largely well done. At this stage we don't expect students to be fully comfortable with what the exercise demands, but rather to be fairly comfortable with those intersections involving only flat surfaces, while still having some room for improvement when curving surfaces are included. In your case you're further along than that, although there's still room for growth.

I noted some corrections here:

  • Remember that while we're keeping foreshortening shallow here, that does not mean eliminating it entirely. As noted here in the cylinder challenge, to draw edges that are not specifically perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight as parallel on the page would be incorrect, so be sure to incorporate a little identifiable convergence.

  • Don't include intersections that wouldn't be visible to the viewer. While drawing through forms is very beneficial, that doesn't mean that drawing "through" in general is always going to be better than not doing so. When it comes to drawing through forms, it doesn't add a ton of extra complexity that would serve as distracting to the viewer, while providing a lot of benefit to help us understand how those forms sit in 3D space, despite being drawn on a flat page. Conversely, drawing through intersections (at least, doing so more broadly - what you did here once wasn't really a big concern) tends to make things a lot harder to visually parse and understand, while providing little overall benefit.

  • When approaching a complex intersection (like one with curves - but really anything where it doesn't jump out very obviously at you, which is going to be most cases), it helps to understand that an intersection is not a monolith. Often times it's made up of individual pieces, which themselves represent the intersection between different pairs of surfaces, and approaching them one piece at a time, analyzing the actual surfaces and how they sit in space, can be a good strategy for figuring out how to approach the intersection as a whole. The cylinder-sphere intersection at the bottom demonstrates this, and this diagram goes into it into more detail, also exploring how a curving surface can be thought of as accomplishing a more gradual transition between different surfaces - something a simple edge does more suddenly.

Keep at it, and we'll revisit this exercise as part of Lesson 7 as well.

Continuing onto your object constructions, your work here is by and large well done. I have a few things to note, but overall you've done a pretty good job of breaking down the complex objects into simple elements and building them back up mindfully, with an approach that prioritizes precision.

As you didn't include any orthographic plans for these constructions and overall the objects are arguably not so complex that you couldn't be mindful of breaking down the steps while building them up in the moment (neither of these being problems for the purposes of this lesson) - in the case that you didn't use any here, I do want to encourage you to go through this section as this concept is used very heavily throughout Lesson 7, with their inclusion being mandatory.

The other point is similar - I wanted to make sure that you had a chance to go through these notes on tackling curves. The section includes a demonstration on how to approach building out a coffee mug with a curved handle, and I noticed that while you had such a mug, you approached it was less in line with the material from this lesson, and generally broke away from the methodology of the course (going back over the same lines multiple times, "feeling" things out rather than making conscious and concrete decisions, etc) which implies that you weren't sure how to tackle it.

In case you missed that section, or perhaps both of the sections I've mentioned here, do be sure to take more care in going through the written parts of the material. There's a lot of information there that we haven't had an opportunity to integrate into the video material, making the text the only way we can convey adjustments we've made in how we approach teaching this stuff.

All that aside, as a whole your object constructions are coming along well, and you're demonstrating a lot of comfort with 3D space. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for Lesson 7.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
2:52 AM, Friday February 7th 2025

Thank you.

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Wescott Grid Ruler

Wescott Grid Ruler

Every now and then I'll get someone asking me about which ruler I use in my videos. It's this Wescott grid ruler that I picked up ages ago. While having a transparent grid is useful for figuring out spacing and perpendicularity, it ultimately not something that you can't achieve with any old ruler (or a piece of paper you've folded into a hard edge). Might require a little more attention, a little more focus, but you don't need a fancy tool for this.

But hey, if you want one, who am I to stop you?

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