Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

10:45 PM, Thursday September 22nd 2022

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whew.

thanks!

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8:38 PM, Tuesday September 27th 2022
edited at 9:20 PM, Sep 27th 2022

Alrighty, let's jump right into it - I'm coming off the back end of a hurricane and several days without power, so I'm going to try and keep this as brief as I can, while still addressing any important points and calling out your main strengths.

Starting with your form intersections, this is generally a point at which students have had enough mileage playing with constructing forms and combining them between Lessons 3-5 that we can generally discuss the mechanics of intersection a little further without students getting lost in their own bafflement and confusion. In your case however, it seems you've shot past even that - you're demonstrating a very well developing understanding of how the forms at play here relate to one another in 3D space, and the manner in which you're leveraging those intersection lines - piecing them together from sections each defined by the different surfaces that are interacting with one another - demonstrates this very clearly. It's to the point that this diagram which I often share at this stage, is probably of no use to you, as I can clearly see your understanding of it in your work.

Continuing onto your object constructions, I can see that you've made fairly extensive use of subdivision throughout your work here, towards the core goal of increasing the precision of your work. Precision is often conflated with accuracy, but they're actually two different things (at least insofar as I use the terms here). Where accuracy speaks to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, precision actually has nothing to do with putting the mark down on the page. It's about the steps you take beforehand to declare those intentions.

So for example, if we look at the ghosting method, when going through the planning phase of a straight line, we can place a start/end point down. This increases the precision of our drawing, by declaring what we intend to do. From there the mark may miss those points, or it may nail them, it may overshoot, or whatever else - but prior to any of that, we have declared our intent, explaining our thought process, and in so doing, ensuring that we ourselves are acting on that clearly defined intent, rather than just putting marks down and then figuring things out as we go.

In our constructions here, we build up precision primarily through the use of the subdivisions - but it's important to keep in mind why they allow us to increase our precision, so we can use such tools as effectively as possible, understanding the goals towards which we're working. The subdivisions, just like the ghosting method, forces us to make the decisions separately from the act of actually executing our marks. The earlier we make our decisions (so long as we hold to them and do not then try to contradict them later), the better.

To that point, if we look at this coffee maker, you've definitely done an excellent job of thinking through each choice prior to making those marks - but those decisions can in fact be pushed farther back towards the beginning of the process. This is not a mistake you've made - rather, it's an opportunity to take what you've done well (and you undoubtedly have, given how much time you committed to the single construction) and look at how it can be done even better.

Looking specifically at the orthographic plan you drew in the corner, this is definitely a helpful first step - but as shown here, a lot of the positioning of the important landmarks are loose - thus you're figuring out their positioning in more general terms, but really still making the decisions as to how you're going to place them and where while working on the 3D construction. If however we identify the positioning of those landmarks in the orthographic plan, where we don't have to worry about more than two dimensions, we find the process of building the object up to be vastly simplified. The trick comes down primarily to ensuring that when we make those decisions, we're building up to them using subdivision on the orthographic plan, since the process would be the same for applying such things in 3D space as well.

One point worth driving home though is that this is a process of decision making. Our concern is less with accuracy, although it plays a part, but more on ensuring that the decisions are made at this early stage. So that means we may have an element that would span from 19/50ths to 41/50ths in the width dimension of your object - but subdividing into 50ths is going to be painful at best. There are however many situations where we can get away with simply asserting that this feature spans from 2/5ths to 4/5ths. Is it perfectly accurate? No. Does it matter? Probably not, but there are circumstances where such rounding might conflict with the positioning of objects (for example, if you had something going from 29/50ths to 31/50ths, rounding them both would result in that thing disappearing altogether, since both its start and end would be rounded to 3/5ths).

But most cases allow for such little adjustments to be made, as long as you think through them entirely.

Before I call this feedback finished, I just wanted to call one other point to your attention. As noted here, students are allowed to use a wider variety of tools (mainly with the inclusion of ballpoint), but I did stress that students should not be switching to a thicker pen to do a sort of clean-up pass (to separate their final object from its construction). You can use a thicker pen or a brush pen to fill in shadow shapes, but this should be limited only to actual cast shadow shapes, as discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section - doing this carelessly can result in simply filling in existing shapes in the drawing, or adding form shading. Cast shadows always require you to understand how the form in question sits in 3D space, and how it relates to the surface receiving the shadow.

I wanted to draw this to your attention because it does seem like you're in places trying to separate your final object out from the construction (possibly using thicker pens at times, though I can't be entirely sure), and in other places where you're filling areas in more arbitrarily, without considering how those filled shapes represent cast shadows. Be sure to be more mindful of this going forward.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 7.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
edited at 9:20 PM, Sep 27th 2022
8:54 PM, Tuesday September 27th 2022
edited at 8:54 PM, Sep 27th 2022

oh my god, that's scary -- i hope you and your loved ones are safe, and that things have calmed down a bit. i want you to know how much i value your lessons and critiques. making time for us, especially considering how crazy things must be for you right now -- it means a lot. thank you.

edited at 8:54 PM, Sep 27th 2022
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