Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles

10:25 PM, Friday February 19th 2021

Lesson 7 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/pBd5DRB.jpg

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You weren't kidding about car curves being really difficult.

I took a bit longer with these, mainly because i had some things going on. I stayed away from details and focused on forms, although I'm not sure if I should have, since your demos included minor details, and your last critique mentioning to brush up on lesson 2 textures again.

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4:24 AM, Tuesday February 23rd 2021

Starting with your cylinders in boxes, these are looking alright for the most part. Your form intersections are coming along too, although there are a few issues here:

  • Your linework is noticeably.. not ideal. There's a lot more time that could be invested in every mark you draw, specifically in the planning and preparation phases. Your execution, in turn, isn't as confident as it could be (due to a reduced planning/preparation), and ends up coming out a little wobbly at times.

  • Your boxes are a little wonky at times. It's not a big deal, but just remember what you learned from the 250 box challenge, about thinking how each line should be oriented in order to converge consistently towards the other lines in its set. It's not enough to think about the relationship between two lines - you've got to think about all four lines, even those that haven't yet been drawn.

  • When adding line weight, always draw with the same confidence and use of the ghosting method you'd use when drawing any other mark. Not only will this avoid the stiffness that comes with trying to trace over those marks, it'll also help blend your marks into the original linework.

Moving onto your vehicle constructions, while I am definitely glad to hear that you put a little more time into these, I am curious to hear how much the individual drawings took you. Sometimes students underestimate just how much time needs to be invested into every drawing for this lesson, and so even if they're trying to put more than they usually would, they can end up trying to complete a given task in far less time than it should really take.

Cars are definitely the most difficult thing you're asked to draw in this course, and I've had students spend anywhere from 5 hours to 12 to really pin them down in all their intricacies. Obviously not all that is done at the same time - it's entirely acceptable (and encouraged) to split a drawing up across several days, and to really take your time with every single step. The demands on one's patience for this lesson are legendary.

So with that established, there are definitely some constructions that came out quite well, where you built up your construction well and took as much time as was required - and there were some where much more time would have helped a lot. For example, this city bus honestly came out really quite well. The construction is solid, the proportions are pretty correct, the perspective isn't too heavily distorted (I'll talk about that in a sec), and you're making good use of your ruler to keep the linework consistent. Your proportional studies are also quite thorough.

This definitely took a lot of time, but it was also - as far as vehicles go - a relatively simple construction. Comparatively, if you look at this camaro you likely put just as much time into it, but because as a subject it was so much more complex, getting it done in the same timeframe meant skipping more constructional steps, jumping straight in with more complex curves rather than pinning them down as straight, flat edges (as explained here back in Lesson 6), and so on.

So the key thing to remember here is that construction is all about solving things in steps, breaking your complex problems into smaller, simpler ones. For example, with the previous camaro and with this SUV, you shouldn't be jumping straight into curves as previously mentioned. You should be starting by laying things out with boxier, simpler forms, and then breaking them down to achieve greater nuance and complexity. You're not just constructing a big box, then drawing from observation inside of it. That skips way too many steps.

Stepping back to your tank - and I think you picked up on this yourself as you fixed it in later drawings - positioning your vanishing points so close exaggerated the foreshortening to the point that we're getting visual cues telling us the scale of this object is way larger than it should be. When you've got that much convergence, you start thinking more the size of a small building, rather than a tank. Pushing those vanishing points further out will reduce this exaggeration.

As a whole, the main issue here is that you're skipping a lot of pretty major steps. Not on purpose, obviously, but because you're not entirely aware of just how far each drawing in this lesson can be pushed. I generally avoid sharing other students' work, because I by no means want to make a statement of "you should be able to do this" or anything of the sort. I do however feel that it helps to show students how much farther a drawing can be pushed, so take a look at LordNed's Lesson 7 work.

The last drawing there took him about 12 hours - a lot of that time was put into pinning down very specific subdivisions, studying the proportions of his reference, and building things out in specific stages. You can see how meticulously it was all built, and you can even see where he's built out an admittedly lighter, box frame for areas like the front of the car, that ultimately ended up being rounded out.

So, I'm going to assign quite a few pages of revisions - obviously this will be very demanding of your time, but since these are all revisions and don't require any credits, all you have to invest here is time. So take that time, and really show me the absolute best you can. Spread your drawings across multiple sittings, and pour yourself into every step of the process.

Next Steps:

Please submit an additional 6 pages of vehicles. I'd like at least 2 of them to be cars, though I'd recommend focusing on boxier cars - avoid sports cars that have a lot of smooth curves. No need to aim for particularly complicated things here - simple isn't bad.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
5:20 PM, Tuesday February 23rd 2021
edited at 8:58 PM, Feb 23rd 2021

Should I attempt to focus more on the pure forms, or should I attempt to add in more details as well? Also should I continue to those those side and front studies for every drawing? Or should I save that for the more complex forms that involve a lot of curves?

edited at 8:58 PM, Feb 23rd 2021
7:27 PM, Thursday February 25th 2021

Focus entirely on forms. That doesn't mean you can't get into detail - just that the detail you do choose to add itself needs to be made up of solid forms positioned and oriented in specific ways using subdivision. Sometimes students make the mistake of thinking of detail as a separate step, where they're allowed to "wing it" and just put things down willy-nilly. Everything is construction, it's just a matter of scale.

3:46 AM, Friday March 5th 2021
edited at 3:50 AM, Mar 5th 2021

My redo - https://imgur.com/a/est9lvh

I timed out how long I spent on the back of my drawings in an effort to slow down, and spend some more time on each drawing.

I added some notes on the imgur upload under each image.

for #3,4,5 and 6 I ended up drawing one of my vanishing points on the notepad behind my paper, the points that led to a rapid convergence. I don't know if I should have, since building up my intuition for perspective is part of the assignments, but I can just make a new submission without doing that if needed.

I did not do any side/front studies for these like I did with my original submissions.

I had some questions I was going to ask, but It is late, I'm tired, so I'll just end here.

Edit - Looking at my submission I may have drawn both my vanishing points rather than 1 (behind my paper) for #3 and 5 as well, I can't remember for sure

edited at 3:50 AM, Mar 5th 2021
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