3:45 AM, Monday August 30th 2021
Starting with your form intersections, your work here is coming along quite well. Your linework is confident and self-assured, and you're constructing each of your forms with a strong sense of solidity. The intersections themselves go a long way to demonstrate that your understanding of how these forms relate to one another in space has been developed quite a bit, and you've done a great job of dackling quite a few particularly difficult ones here as well. Very nicely done.
Your cylinders in boxes are similarly well done - nice, consistent convergences, and you've been very fastidious in testing those line extensions throughout.
This is honestly the first time in quite a while that someone has actually applied the "form intersections vehicle" exercise correctly - most end up going way too far into drawing actual cars, breaking away from the simple primitives. Here you've done an excellent job of focusing on the core, simple elements, establishing how they all fit together in space, and laying them out to achieve the likeness of a variety of vehicles. I feel you've done a great job here of breaking them down into smaller elements, allowing for an amount of the unique design/balance of each given vehicle to show through.
I've got just one simple reminder - be sure to construct your cylinders around a central minor axis line. You did this correctly in the form intersections themselves at the start of the lesson, but forgot them here.
Continuing onto your vehicle constructions, while there's a fairly small issue I'll call out, it's largely superficial. At the core of it, you've done a great job of really investing your time well, and working through all of the highly specific steps of figuring out exactly where each given element would fall, subdividing to find these measurements with precision, and laying them out in a manner that continually reinforces the illusion that what we're looking at is solid and tangibly three dimensional, rather than just lines on a flat page. While there are countless areas where one might feel tempted to skip steps and "wing" it, you were consistent in your willingness to hold to the principles of this course, and to apply them at every turn.
Honestly, the biggest issue I can see right now really is superficial in its entirety - it has to do with how you're using those filled areas of solid black. The thing is, when students see something filled with black, their brain will first interpret it as a cast shadow, and try to understand the form that casts it. When it eventually realizes that no such form exists, it'll try to understand it in other terms - but by that point the battle is somewhat lost. That's why in our drawings we generally try to reserve those filled black shapes just for cast shadows, avoiding the temptation to fill in "spaces" (like gaps or other negative spaces) with solid black. We always look for the relationship between a given solid form, and the shadow shape that results.
Or at least, we usually do. There are certainly exceptions, and you no doubt saw some of them in the demos for this course. In the shelby mustang, I did opt to fill the interior of the cab with solid black, in a very similar fashion to what you did yourself. In fact, the difference between what you did, and what I did, involves splitting some hairs. In effect, we're saying that the interior of the car all received a cast shadow from the rest of the construction - but in the shelby mustang example, there's simply a lot more design to the resulting shape, implying the presence of seats, and leaving the passenger and rear windows clear. This gives the viewer a little more to chew on than simply filling that window in completely.
As much as Drawabox tries to simplify things into repeatable rules, there are still grey areas when we start to get into problems such as separating the interior from the exterior. One could argue that we shouldn't bother to do so at all, just focus on the rule that all filled shapes should be cast shadows and nothing else. Or, we could explore how the design of those filled black shapes can in being overly simplistic can flatten parts of a drawing, and look for opportunities to include a little more complexity to counteract that.
When it comes to the ones that are cast shadows however, it is very important to make sure that the shape does relate to the form casting it. It doesn't have to necessarily be perfectly accurate, but in cases like this one you would want to avoid the impression of how it gets cut off along the bottom and front. Also, with the grill in the front of that same car, it's tempting to just fill in the spaces between the metal grill bars with black - but we still need to think in specific terms of how those shadows are cast one by one. Here's an example of what I mean (excuse the clumsiness of the linework - I've had to draw this on my laptop screen with a stylus.
Anyway! As a whole, I feel you're doing very well, and you're demonstrating all of the qualities I look for in students who've gone through this course. Not only does that include a strong sense of how what you're drawing exists in 3D space, but also the patience and discipline that will serve you well as you continue to move forwards and develop your education further.
So, congratulations! You've completed this lesson, and with it, you've completed this course.