Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles

9:02 AM, Thursday February 18th 2021

Drawabox lesson 7 - Album on Imgur

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Finally here. I struggled a lot in the beginning of this lesson but I think I gained some understanding towards the end

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3:19 AM, Friday February 19th 2021

Starting with your form intersections, I've just got a few things to point out:

  • When adding line weight, do not trace slowly and carefully back over your lines. Line weight should be drawn with the same confidence as the original stroke, using the ghosting method to plan and prepare beforehand. Tracing often results in the student focusing too much on how the mark they're following a path on the flat page, rather than how they're capturing an edge flowing through 3D space.

  • It appears that your cylinder's closer end was drawn with a wider degree than the end farther from the viewer, which is incorrect.

Your intersections largely are coming along well, although I did point out a few small corrections here directly on your work. As a whole you're definitely approaching this more confidently than back in Lesson 2, and I'm pleased to see that you're not applying line weight all over the place as before. Definitely moves in the right direction!

Moving onto the actual vehicle constructions, as a whole I am very pleased with the majority of your results. You do get somewhat weaker in the car area (as most people do), and I'll address that in a moment. First though I want to focus on a lot of the strengths I'm seeing in how you've approached many of your other constructions. The "simple" form intersection constructions of the RV and forklift read as exceptionally solid and very specific in how their elements are laid out. The RV especially, with its various curves, are pinned down with precision, which helps the forms maintain their illusion of being three dimensional.

I am admittedly glad that you stopped trying to fill in one side with hatching after the forklift - I don't think it was really adding anything to the constructions, and did get a little noisy. Your use of line weight here was definitely more than adequate to help clarify the drawings on their own.

I can see that you were certainly playing with the use of solid blacks, from the tank onwards, to varying degrees of success. The most important thing, when dealing with anything quite so heavy, is to keep their use clear in your mind. Ideally, stick to using the solid blacks to capture only cast shadow shapes, and avoid filling in areas that have a dark local colour (like the tires), simply because we aren't attempting to capture any other local colour information, and doing so in this limited capacity ends up being inconsistent. By treating the whole structure as though it's the same solid white colour, and focusing only on areas where something would receive a shadow (the interior of cars included), we can communicate more clearly and purposefully with the viewer. Just keep in mind - that also means, as discussed back in Lesson 2, ignoring any actual form shading as well.

Now, getting back to your cars, this is where some of the strengths you showed in earlier drawings get set aside. It's not uncommon for students to shift into a different approach simply because cars are so notoriously challenging to draw, but you definitely end up taking somewhat different strategies with some of these. This one most notably seems to skip over a lot of steps. Now I can definitely see that your underlying grasp of 3D space is pulling overtime here, and it is helping you create a construction that is still reasonably solid - but the key here is that by going through all the steps, drawing through our forms, and laying down that more purposeful structure, we're going through the exercise that is ultimately meant to help continue developing that grasp of 3D space and form. Now's not the time to focus on a cleaner, more "impressive" result.

Furthermore, because you didn't build the structure - like the cab - using solid, simple box forms first, and jumped right into those curves, those forms didn't end up feeling as solid as they could have (for the reason explained here in Lesson 6). Of course, stepping back to the RV, there you handled that same problem really well, pinning everything down as a more specific form, and only rounding off corners once you'd already built them out with straighter edges. This resulted in a much more solid, believable structure.

This last car is definitely doing better - it still has areas where you're a little more loose with adding rounded/curved sections, adjusting silhouettes a little too freely and such, but all in all its results are more believable.

So- overall your work shows me quite clearly that given more time to go through all the appropriate steps, you can do better when it comes to your cars, so I'm going to ask for just one more car drawing before I mark this lesson as complete. Remember that for most students, these drawings take many, many hours, so they're quite demanding. No need to complete a drawing in one sitting, or even one day. The focus here is on pushing the construction as far as you reasonably can.

To provide context, take a look at LordNed's work for this lesson. The last drawing took him 11-12 hours. I by no means expect that much from you, I just want you to see just how much the investment of time, patience, and care can pay off. And I absolutely think you have it in you to knock this one out of the park.

When you do this additional drawing, be sure to invest that time not only in the car construction itself, but in your proportional study, being thorough and careful to pin everything down as precisely as you can. This car was certainly headed in the right direction, but I think lack of precision when it comes to the proportional orthographic (side and front view) studies may have made things more difficult.

Next Steps:

Please submit one more car drawing. Don't go too complicated - no need to do any fancy sports cars. Try to stick to something boxier, like the car in your last drawing.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
11:20 AM, Monday February 22nd 2021

http://imgur.com/a/ks6cLuS

Tried to focus more on construction. Not sure at all about how I did

11:55 PM, Monday February 22nd 2021

So this is definitely a lot better, and moving in the right direction. The main issue I'm seeing is that you've got way too many big curves, way too early in your construction. As shown here, you should be constructing things out with straight edges (drawn with a ruler to avoid all the extra sketchy lines you've got going). Only round things out at the end.

This is certainly still looking a lot better, and I am really quite pleased with the level of construction, but I do want to see you trying to keep things blockier. I'm going to assign one more construction, but this time forget about all the curves. Keep everything straight, and see how far you can take that construction.

Next Steps:

One more, blockier, car construction. You're real close, I just wanna make sure that when you leave this course, it's with as solid a grasp on what you need to keep developing as possible.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
8:30 AM, Friday March 5th 2021

http://imgur.com/a/84kV9iK

Third time's the charm, right?

please tell me it's the charm

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