10:46 PM, Tuesday November 28th 2023
I get homework submissions throughout the week, but I do my critiques in batches, on Tuesday and Thursday, so as to be more efficient. In between though, I'll often check submissions to just see what I've got coming up and consider how to handle any trickier situations. So, I did look at your submission the day you sent it in, and noted to myself, "Ah we'll be talking a bit about form intersections, but damn the object constructions were super well done".
Well, I just finished another Lesson 6 critique which was very similar to yours, and so I quite literally said more or less the same thing when starting - "As you've done a pretty great job with the object constructions, this critique is going to focus primarily on your form intersections."
I've now realized that while I wasn't wrong (and of course my feedback was based on their results), I... definitely got the two submissions confused. While theirs was indeed very well done, and while they made excellent use of their orthographic plans... you really knocked that out of the park. And we'll talk about it of course, but as I noted to the other student, we're going to focus on the form intersections.
In a lot of ways, the form intersections represent the skill we're training throughout the entirety of this course. It's all about spatial reasoning - so like we force students to dive into the deep end of the pool with the organic perspective boxes, before actually teaching them to swim in the 250 box challenge, by introducing them to the form intersections in Lesson 2 before we actually get into the constructional drawing exercises that help develop our understanding of 3D space, we're equipping them to first understand the nature of the problem it is we're trying to address. Then we revisit it here, once the student's had some time to cook, so to speak, so that whatever advice is offered here has a better chance to be understood and applied effectively. Doing so earlier risks overwhelming the student instead.
Now, looking at your work, your first page was definitely... not great. A lot of mistakes there suggest that you weren't all that clear on how the forms were relating to one another in space. We'll look at those mistakes, but beforehand I do want to note that as you progress into the second and third pages, you start demonstrating a much stronger understanding of what's going on. While this does suggest to me that your spatial reasoning skills are indeed quite strong, it also suggests to me that maybe you weren't incorporating the form intersections into your regular warmup exercise rotation as you should be. So what may have happened is that the skills had been developed as intended through the use of the constructional drawing exercises from lessons 3-5, but that you were just super uncomfortable with the form intersections themselves, due to a lack of practice on that specific end. Not the end of the world, but if I'm right in my guess there, do be sure to pick from all the exercises we've introduced when doing your warmups, as explained here.
Here are my corrections of your first page. I marked in arrows denoting the curvature of the surfaces relevant to many of the intersection lines, as each intersection is essentially a combination between the interaction between pairs of intersections. These individual pieces are then stitched together based on how we transition from one to the other. The easier ones are where that transition is a hard edge (which results in a sharp corner where that trajectory changes suddenly). What's harder is where the transition is a smoother, more rounded one, which starts to blur the lines between being a "transition" and being just another surface of its own - the distinction is more contextual, really.
This diagram kind of illustrates this, by taking a hard edge and "rounding" it out, although the way we navigate it is exactly the way we'd navigate that sphere intersecting with a cylinder.
Now, I'm fairly confident that these are not concepts that are new to you, as you demonstrate an understanding of them as you progress through the exercise, with the third page being very well done. The only issue I noticed on that page was here, where you'd drawn a curving line for the intersection between the flat end of the cylinder, and the flat side of the box, which should instead result in a straight line.
Anyway, continuing onto your object constructions, you've done a phenomenal job here. I am thrilled to see your extensive use of orthographic plans here to really precisely work up to the final result by first making decisions, then applying them. That is at the core of what we're doing both here and in Lesson 7, where we move from working reactively (that is, in the sense that if we make a dog's cranial ball too big, we simply draw the rest of its facial elements bigger to match, resulting in a dog with a very big head - but one that still feels solid and three dimensional) to doing a lot more planning so as to maintain more overall control over the result. It is time consuming, and it is tedious, but you met that challenge head-on, and have demonstrated the patience and care that will (if applied as you've done so here) yield excellent results when you get to Lesson 7.
So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the fantastic work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for Lesson 7.