0 users agree
11:31 PM, Thursday July 6th 2023

Starting with your form intersections, overall your work here is quite well done. The only issue I noticed was this sphere-pyramid intersection where it seemed that some of the portions of the intersection may not have been drawn while following the actual surface of the sphere.

Continuing onto your object constructions, overall you've done a good job, but there are a number of things I want to call to your attention. First off, a point that you may have missed from the instructions - as noted here, specifically where I talk about the use of ballpoint pen, note that it states you should not be switching to a different pen to do a clean-up pass, or to make aspects of your drawing stand out. You should be sticking to the same kind of pen throughout. Throughout your work here, you tended to use a lighter pen for your construction lines/bounding box, and then went back over the object itself with a darker pen, as we see here with your scissors. That's specifically what you shouldn't be doing, so keep that in mind for Lesson 7, where the same point stands. You can also read more as to why we don't do "clean-up passes" here in the notes for the form intersections exercise.

As an extension of that point - though this one has some contradiction in the demos, so it's more of a reminder - it's best when doing your drawings for this course to avoid form shading, as discussed here. Reserve your filled areas of solid black for cast shadows only. So for example, anywhere you find yourself running up against the fact that you can't create midtones (like where you tried to use hatching in the pencil sharpener's hole in this construction, or if you find yourself filling in a shape that already exists as part of the construction (rather than having to design a separate shape which captures the spatial relationship between a given form and another surface), then take a step back and ask yourself whether you're applying form shading, or if you're really attempting to add a cast shadow.

For your orthographic studies for this controller, I noticed that you ended up in circumstances where your object ended up extending beyond the bounds of your box. While this is not a problem in and of itself, simply having those bits protrude means that we don't actually have any useful information on how far they should be sticking out. Instead, you can use the subdivision techniques to extend out the bounding box (like adding an additional section to it). This will ensure that we can do the same thing when building up the object in three dimensions - that is, using the same subdivision techniques to extend the bounding box out, allowing us to then build the protruding elements while being confident that we don't have to eyeball/approximate it, but instead can adhere to the decisions made during the planning phase.

To your credit, you appear to have done something to that effect here, where you mirrored a defined measurement from inside of the bounding box across the center-top to create a consistent, repeatable extension so you could account for the two elements along the top.

Going back to the scissors for a moment, these involve a lot of curving elements, although it appears that you didn't apply the concepts from this section when constructing them. As explained there, curves are simply too vague and unclear to jump to directly, and so by fleshing out the structure with straight edges or flat planes, and chaining them together to establish how exactly our curves need to occupy space, we can yield far more solid results. Be sure to review those notes, as well as the demonstration included with them, as this will play a big role in your work for Lesson 7.

All in all you're headed very much in the right direction, and with your phone holder and the pencil sharpener at the end, you're leveraging your orthographic plans quite effectively (aside from the phone holder protruding out the top). Just be sure to go through the notes and instructions more carefully to ensure that you're not missing important, or useful information. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for Lesson 7.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:52 AM, Friday July 7th 2023

Thank you so much for the feedback, you're right I didn't notice the "don't switch pens", and I guess on the phone holder I've really struggled with too many dark lines, and then I found this guide posted on discord

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xEdlP2GKai5H7alGaQTEcP12qRt3RCceEYK38ZTWvtU/edit

where I read and interpreted this wrongly as a permission to switch between lighter and darker pens

My page gets cluttered / The object is hard to see

*When this happens it’s usually for 2 reasons

You didn’t draw light enough. If you’re using fineliner I would strongly recommend you switch to a ball point pen and draw as light as you possibly can. Just enough to see the line. Then when you’ve drawn all of your subdivision lines draw the outline of the object very dark.*

And in general yes, I did notice that I'm constantly being reminded of paying attention to instructions. I'll try to simply make a checklist (wonder if it's even possible) when approaching a future task.

Again, thank you so much!

5:15 PM, Friday July 7th 2023

Unfortunately I can't really speak to recommendations from others, as those would not constitute an official part of the course. I can really only speak to the instructions I myself give.

The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Cottonwood Arts Sketchbooks

Cottonwood Arts Sketchbooks

These are my favourite sketchbooks, hands down. Move aside Moleskine, you overpriced gimmick. These sketchbooks are made by entertainment industry professionals down in Los Angeles, with concept artists in mind. They have a wide variety of sketchbooks, such as toned sketchbooks that let you work both towards light and towards dark values, as well as books where every second sheet is a semitransparent vellum.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.