1:56 AM, Thursday January 27th 2022
Starting with your cylinders in boxes, one quick point - it looks like you are keeping your boxes' edges extremely parallel, and this is actually incorrect. A vanishing point only goes to infinity (resulting in parallel lines on the page) when the edges it governs in 3D space run perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight, rather than slanting towards or away from them through the depth of the scene. This basically requires that box to align very specifically to the viewer, which given the fact that we're rotating these randomly in space, wouldn't really happen, so you'll always have at least a little convergence on each set of lines, suggesting a concrete vanishing point.
If we play devil's advocate however and say that the box does align as perfectly to the viewer's line of sight as possible, we'd be able to align just two of those sets of edges, putting two vanishing points at infinity, leaving the third vanishing point squarely on the page, with very rapid and sharp convergence towards it. That is because there is no "zero" point perspective.
Some people will try to argue that they're working in "isometric perspective" at that point, but there's actually no such thing. It's a conflation of two terms - perspective and isometric, both of which are types of projection, or strategies for taking that which exists a higher order of dimensions (like three dimensions), and depicting it on something in a lower order of dimensions (like a two dimensional page, canvas, or screen). Perspective projection seeks to replicate human, binocular vision, whereas isometric (or it's larger umbrella term, axonometric) projection has other benefits, but does not actually replicate how we see things.
Well, that wasn't quick at all - but with that out of the way, we'll continue on. Looking at your form intersections, the same points apply as it seems like you're not really playing with much convergence on those box forms. Furthermore, you're not drawing through your forms, nor using minor axes for those cylinders, and there are some concerns for a number of your intersections, as I've marked out here. While your Lesson 6 form intersections weren't perfect, I don't think you were making these same kinds of mistakes - which suggests to me that when doing the exercise this time around, your focus was likely on just creating a nice, pretty picture for your very last lesson, and that is unfortunately a misguided way to approach anything in this course. While it's fine for students to use rulers/ellipse guides for their work here, most students do still complete the intersections freehand as before - I think that having those tools on hand for that exercise set up a lot of weird expectations for you.
Continuing onto your vehicles, fortunately I don't think that you exhibited the same mixed up set of priorities here. A lot of your constructions are fairly well done, although I do think that there are definitely areas where you choose to eyeball some of your proportions, or the placement of certain things, when you could have worked with greater precision. Precision is effectively built up through all the steps we take preceding the placement of our construction's major (or minor) forms. For example, identifying where along the boat's length the benches would sit by first doing an orthographic proportional study, then subdividing the bounding box to find those specific locations and placing the benches accordingly.
That said, in other cases there were definitely drawings where you pushed that precision farther, such as with this jeep which came out quite well. I'm also pleased to see the fact that you built it up with boxier forms, keeping it all that way right up until the end where you rounded your corners out. This resulted in a very solid, believable structure. There are just two points of critique I'd offer here, and they both relate to the "filled" shapes:
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If you're going to fill something in with solid black, you shouldn't mix it with hatching lines elsewhere. Generally speaking, filling them in is going to be the right call given the limited tools we're allowed to use in this course, but if you keep it all consistent, using hatching in all such locations would be appropriate as well.
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That said, filled shapes should be reserved largely for actual cast shadows - that is to say, avoid just filling in the underside of the wheel wells and those sections along the bottom of the jeep. The inside of the cab is okay, as a sort of technicality - given that it's the interior, we can argue that shadows are being cast throughout that area, filling in the existing shapes (rather than requiring us to design new ones as we generally must for cast shadows). The inside of the wheel well, and other such cases where you used hatching however - these are more similar to form shading, where whether a side is light or dark is influenced by its orientation in space, relative to the light source. There are similar issues like this in the laborghini where you filled in the front grill - would have been much better to actually draw the different forms within that grill, and have them cast shadows onto one another. Of course, this is a fairly minor, nitpicky point.
The only other point I wanted to raise in regards to your work is that the tron bike isn't really finished. It looks like you were working at it and having quite a bit of success, then had some issues with the handle bar and lost interest. Remember - these drawings are not opportunities to create pretty pictures to show off, and thus their value is not diminished by making a mistake. They are exercises, and their value comes from the process employed in seeing them through to the end.
So! All in all, your work here is looking good, but I wasn't terribly pleased with your form intersections. So - and this is admittedly a little odd - I'm going to assign a couple pages of form intersections prior to marking this lesson and the course as complete.
Next Steps:
Please submit 2 more pages of form intersections. I'd like you to freehand these, draw through all of your forms, use minor axes in every situation where they'd be beneficial, and only draw the part of the intersection lines that would actually be visible (don't draw around to the other side, as this can become visually confusing). Oh, and make sure there's some convergence to those boxes' edges, and degree/scale shift on the cylinders, even though it should be fairly shallow.