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5:29 PM, Friday March 24th 2023

Congrats on finishing lesson 7! I'll do my best to give you feedback so you can improve.

Starting with your form intersections there are a few issues I'd like to address. The first being unconfident linework. Generally by the time students reach lesson 7 they should have built up enough mileage with the ghosting method and markmaking from warmups. I can only guess that you've neglected doing warmups so I strongly suggest that you continue to do them after you finish the course. Moving on to the intersections themselves, I can see that you do a good job for flat-on-flat intersections but problems start to appear on the round-on-flat and round-on-round intersections. Remember that instead of thinking of the intersections between forms, think of them as between surfaces. Usually for round-on-flat curves there will be a "C" shape between the 2 like your cylinder going through the box. For round-on-round, it's usually an "S" curve between the forms. From what I can see you still end up using C curves which makes the objects look flat. I'll be asking for a revision of this exercise with cleaner line work and more intersections between round-on-round/flat surfaces just to make sure you have a good understanding before finishing the course. I'll give you this diagram which may help your understanding as well as this form intersection pack (made by optimus on discord) and this guide on how to use paint 3D to make your own intersections and to experiment with different configurations.

Your boxed cylinders are looking good so keep it up. The reason uncomfortable asks for this exercise again at the end of the course is to see if students are doing it correctly so when doing warmups they can still get value out of the exercise.

Finally for your vehicle constructions you've done a really good job with these! I can see you've patiently and carefully built up the constructions. I only have a couple points to make.

First it seems like you've only blocked out the general shape of the vehicle on the orthographic plans and did the subdivision on the construction itself. While this isn't wrong, it can be more beneficial to do all the subdivision on the orthographic plans before doing it on the construction. Doing it this way allows us to separate the decision making process and the thinking in 3d process allowing us to focus on one task at each step instead of multiple on one step. Uncomfortable has updated the orthographic plan instructions from lesson 6 and 7 in case you missed it. The one on lesson 6 has an example which illustrates how orthographic plans can be used to precisely define specific landmarks on an object however that can also be transfered to vehicle plans as well.

Second, you've opted for a grid like approach in the subdivision which is ok, however you didn't replicate this grid onto the constructions (from what I can see) which essentially makes them useless as you can't transfer information from the plan to the construction. Luckily this is made up for by the fact you did subdivision on the constructions but it's still important to make the plan match the construction. On the topic of plans I'd also suggest that you base the plan off the wheel measurement as that is much more accurate than a grid (on cars atleast). This may not be possible in your case as from what I can see you don't have an ellipse / circle template but if you end up doing these exercises again I suggest getting one.

Third, the 7th vehicle down (the truck) ends up looking flat because you didn't extend the top points to the other vanishing point which you may have missed. This is why separating the 3d thinking process is essential as you are less likely to get distracted and miss small mistakes like that. Also on that same vehicle (and a couple of others) you end up using form shading which is something that this course avoids. This is the difference between cast shadows and form shading which shows how cast shadows suggest form and form shading describes the form. I assume you were doing this with the line hatching as well which is also something to be avoided in this course as it's another form of form shading.

Finally I suggest taking a look at this submission as this is what I consider as a perfect example for the exercises. In sharing this, I don't want you to compare your work to theirs as that would be missing the point. I share this so you can get a different perspective on how to approach these exercises.

Overall though you've done a great job with this lesson, with a few minor tweaks to your approach I feel like you can get more out of the exercises if you choose to do them again. If you have any questions or if anything was unclear don't hesitate to ask.

Next Steps:

1 Page of form intersections

  • With confident linework

  • More focus on round-on-flat and round-on-round intersections (check out the links if you need help understanding them better)

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
10:22 PM, Sunday March 26th 2023
edited at 10:28 PM, Mar 26th 2023

Hello Rabuuhs,

I'm just replying here to let you know I got your message. I'll need to read and reread what you said at least a couple times. Also I'm glad you critiqued my work in the first place as they can be quite hard to come by especially when you are not using paid credits or not doing the early lessons. I've been working on the Drawabox course on and off for about the last three years. The Drawabox course was one of my first foray of educational art materials.

For the longest time I did not think it possible for me to become an artist. I thought I was too old (in my 20s). One of my motivating factors for becoming an artist was because I thought that it would be one of the last areas to be automated by machines (and something that would be fun and fulfilling). Ironically, this tertiary field is in the process of being automated currently. People thought jobs like fast food worker would come before artist and many thought it impossible altogether.

From how machines have been improving lately I wouldn't hold my breath for any job that involves getting paid to not be automated (eventually). We may be moving from a labour (both physical and mental) based economy to a leisure based one (assuming something like universal basic income is introduced). Figuring out how to move forward when the world is changing so fast can be quite challenging indeed. This is beyond the scope of this website but I thought it appropriate to elaborate a bit about who I am and what I've been thinking.

I have made great progress indeed from struggling to draw a stick man to actually being able to draw stuff I can be proud of all in a matter of just a few years. It's kind of disheartening though that some people have called me talented (not realizing the ridiculous amount of time and effort it took me) to get to where I am and if I continue to hone my skills I'm bracing myself to eventually be told silly stuff like "that's an awesome AI you used" or something of that sort. I guess it doesn't matter what other people say as long as I know I'm genuine.

Anyways, I'll get back to you once I have completed the remedial work assigned,

Cheers,

Saanza

edited at 10:28 PM, Mar 26th 2023
12:11 AM, Tuesday March 28th 2023
8:56 PM, Tuesday March 28th 2023

Good job on completing the revision!

Overall you did the exercise correctly, however I should have probably been more specific in what I meant by round-on-round/flat surfaces. This basically means all the intersections but focusing on ones that create the round and flat ones. For example a cone and a sphere, a sphere and a cylinder, cylinder and cone etc. not just spheres and boxes. This only limits you to 2 intersections and doesn't really challenge your spacial reasoning skills because you are essentially just repeating the same intersection over and over. For the intersections themselves I noticed you tried surrounding the boxes with spheres which ended up creating impossible / "see through" intersections. This basically means you draw intersections where you can't see them. This is a good exercise once your spatial reasoning has advanced to the level where form intersections is easy but for now try to only do intersections which the viewer (you) can see. Finally, while the lines for the boxes and outer part of the sphere are certainly confident, the intersections themselves become very messy due to the repeated line work which tells me you aren't really ghosting that much and are instead re-drawing the lines based on instinct. Every mark done in the drawabox course should be thought out and deliberate by ghosting many times and thinking before hand. Additionally the lines on the boxes themselves are diverging which is impossible for a box to do.

I won't assign revisions as the major errors are from different lessons, however I strongly recommend you take a look at the box challenge and lesson 1, focusing specifically on line work and boxes. As you mentioned in your other reply, since you've been doing drawabox for a couple of years now you probably haven't done warmups consistently for those years but even just 10 minutes a day can go a long way.

About the stuff you wrote on AI, I actually thought it would never be able to be automated but it was actually one of the first things to be automated which is quite interesting. Because of this more and more artists have been posting less and less which is disheartening and depressing as people are accepting that they will lose their skills to AI. It would be nice if society shifted from a labour to leisure economy but I think that is still far off into the future, probably when AGI is developed as the current narrow AIs won't be able to replace every job (probably?).

Anyway, congrats on completing drawabox! If you have any questions don't hesitate to reply.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
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Sakura Pigma Microns

A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.

In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.

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