WELCOME TO THE THUNDERDOME!

Starting with your form intersections, fantastic work. You're doing an excellent job of demonstrating a strongly developed grasp of 3D space, specifically in the way in which you've defined the specific way in which these forms all relate to one another in the world. I'm not seeing any issues, and some of the intersections you've tackled here can be quite difficult to wrap one's head around (especially the cone/sphere on the far right).

Your work on the cylinders in boxes is still looking great as well - but of course, that's not what we're here to talk about.

You have absolutely knocked it out of the park with your vehicles. You've demonstrated inordinate amounts of patience and care with the specificity of each construction - the level to which you've broken down each bounding box with subdivisions, and how closely you've clung to the structure of that grid as you built out each vehicle. I'm not seeing you skipping any steps or making any leaps of logic - every choice you make is clearly established and defined right on the page, and it's easy to follow the specific choices you made throughout the process.

While your later drawings are especially well done - this one in particular honestly makes me feel a bit threatened, I'm pretty sure that's better than I've been capable of myself - I think it's the earlier drawings in the set that really show your strengths most of all. This helicopter especially blows me away.

As you can imagine, I don't really have a whole of critique to really offer, but there is one very minor stylistic point that I feel obliged to call out, just to earn my keep. It has to do with the use of filled black shapes in your drawings, and it really applies most specifically to the way we draw in this course, specifically because of how the tools we use force us to work in stark black and white.

So as you've probably encountered in previous critiques, we generally use those filled black shapes to capture cast shadows. That means defining a new shape that defines the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it. This tool ends up being really effective - for example, if you look at this car, just the act of adding the shadow along the ground gives us a clear sense of where the ground plane is. If the cast shadow were far lower, we'd know immediately that the car was in the air.

It also leans into what the viewer expects - when they see an area filled in black, their subconscious immediately jumps to cast shadow. If however it doesn't represent a cast shadow, then we get into some tricky waters. Since the viewer is expecting it to be a shadow, it takes a moment - even a split second - for them to register that it's something else, and then to figure that out. That delay can serve to chip away at the viewer's suspension of disbelief. So we want to avoid things like form shading (which I see a little of in your drawings here and there, especially along the side of your wheels), as well as capturing any sort of local colours - we basically treat everything like it's covered in the same flat white.

Generally speaking, when we fill a space or shape that already exists in your drawing with black, we're usually falling into using form shading. For example in this sports car, you've filled the inside of the wheel's rims. Those black shapes don't actually define the relationship between different forms, they jump straight to filling things in, like a colouring book.

These "rules" are never quite so firm, however, and there are exceptions - we just need to have a good reason when we break them. One such case would be when handling the interiors. As you did in your drawings (and I certainly did in my demos) it's pretty normal to fill in the interior of a vehicle. There's two reasons this generally works out okay:

• Firstly, being on the inside of the vehicle, we can argue that the structure of the car is casting shadows into it, covering all its surfaces in cast shadows. There certainly are cases where cast shadows will just "fill" a space.

• Even if the first point wasn't valid, filling the interior in with black would flatten that interior out, which is actually somewhat beneficial, as it would through contrast and juxtaposition, make the rest of the construction "pop" and feel more solid by comparison.

The thing to keep in mind though is that these points apply pretty well when dealing with a normal car whose interior is entirely closed off - but in this convertible, I don't think it worked out too well, and it would have been better to actually construct that interior instead. Either way, it's still important to ensure that the black shapes you use on your interiors be designed purposefully to capture the complexity of the silhouettes contained therein. Don't forget to include things like the seats - this porsche ended up quite empty due to their absence.

Anyway! I managed to ramble for a while about shadows, but as a whole you've done a fantastic job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson, and the course with it, as complete. Congratulations!