Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles
7:59 PM, Sunday September 1st 2024
Thank you for reviewing my homework!
Jumping right in with your form intersections, overall you're doing quite well. There is still room for improvement, but a lot of it comes down to the kinds of judgment that will come with continued practice. I did however make quite a few specific notes right on the page to help address individual issues - but again, your understanding in this area will continue to develop with practice (in a sense what we do with Drawabox is first and foremost focused on teaching students how to practice/develop their spatial reasoning going forward, even if the work you do in the course itself is going to get you much of the way there).
The only issue I noted there that is very important to note are the two issues associated with the cylinder:
Firstly, you drew the side edges as parallel on the page, which is incorrect. This is something I actually addressed in my feedback on your 250 cylinder challenge work, so I recommend you review that critique for more information.
Secondly, the way you drew your intersections suggested that you interpreted the end on the left side as being pointing away from the viewer, and the end on the right side as pointing towards the viewer. The degree of the ellipses themselves however contradicts this - the wider one would be farther away from the viewer, and the narrower one would be closer, so the corrections I drew for your intersections reflect this.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here has a few notable issues, which I've marked out on the page.
As shown on the bottom left box, you are skipping over identifying and extending your minor axis lines, and are instead extending a different line that connects the two ellipses, which is not part of the instructions. This appears to consistently be an issue across all of your cylinders in boxes on this page. I'm going to chalk this up to you working from memory rather than going back and checking the instructions - but I would strongly recommend checking those instructions whenever you're revisiting an exercise you haven't done in some time (and even for those you have done consistently, checking the instructions once in a while is always a good idea, as human memory is notoriously unreliable).
For the bottom right box, I noticed that you skipped identifying two of your contact point lines. This issue was only present for this instance, and not in the others.
Moving onto your form intersection vehicles, these are by and large fulfilling their purpose well. The main reason we include this exercise is because with some of the more detailed vehicle construction demos it can seem very much like we're laying down a forest of individual lines, only stitching them together into a cohesive structure towards the very end. This exercise serves to remind us that just as with the rest of the constructional drawing exercises we've done throughout the course, we're still building up volumes and 3D structures through the entire process. In a manner of speaking, this exercise helps remind us that rather than building something out of toothpicks, we should still be thinking in terms of whittling a piece of wood, starting big and simple and gradually breaking it down from there.
I do have a couple points to mention however that stood out to me:
Keep in mind that your focus with this exercise is on the primitive forms - don't worry about detail like headlights and license plates and other such things. It's really just like the form intersections, but arranging the forms to match the general layout of a vehicle, as explained in the homework section where this exercise is assigned.
Remember that degree shift on cylinders - the farther end of a cylinder is going to have a wider degree than the end closer to the viewer. When drawing our wheels, we can draw both wheels on either end of a car (so like the two front wheels or the two back wheels) as a single cylinder as shown here to illustrate this point.
I noticed that with this wagon, the minor axis lines you were using for your wheels were a ways off. It's important to pay attention to other edges in the scene (like those I've extended in blue, which would logically be converging towards the same vanishing point as the minor axes of our wheels), because they often give us hints in this manner. While such hints don't always exist, it's important to take the time to assess whether they do or not, before making decisions on a more arbitrary basis.
Lastly, your more detailed vehicle constructions. Honestly, your work here is by and large quite well done. Most of all I'm interested in how you've leveraged those orthographic plans to make your decisions, and then how you've applied those decisions to your 3D construction (rather than making new decisions on the fly), and honestly you've knocked that aspect of it out of the park.
At a glance there were some points that I noticed in the moment, expecting they'd be things I could use for further critique - for example, the fact that in cases like this land rover you drew in the windows in your orthographic plan but did not actually identify them with clear landmarks (at least not with enough landmarks to be able to place them specifically in three dimensions), but ultimately, you did not make any mistake here. In your 3D construction you didn't opt to include those windows or door handles, and so the issue was moot - you are of course in control of what you include in your construction and what you don't, and so no mistake was made.
Now there is one point I did want to address, and it once again has to do with your wheels. To put it simply, in most of your cars you generally opted to eyeball your wheels, effectively placing an ellipse as well as you could relative to the existing structure, but without leveraging all of the tools you could have. To put it simply, ellipses on their own can be really tricky to place in a three dimensional scene where they have to be aligned in a very specific fashion. One can certainly do it, but honestly even I would be pretty likely to mess it up - and so instead, I opt to add more supporting structure to help me in that decision. Instead of jumping right into the wheel, I'd usually define a box where I know I want the wheel to go (usually based on the landmarks defined in my orthographic plan).
Boxes and other planar, hard surfaced structures are much easier to place in 3D space because they have very clear corners, and so we can plot them out based on specific landmarks identified in our orthographic plans. Once placed, they limit the number of options we have in terms of where our ellipses (or in the case of other similar problems, curves) might end up being placed. By limiting our options, it helps clear the mind of unnecessary information and allows us to more easily identify where the correct placement would be. It also helps in the execution by giving us more structural information to work off in the construction itself.
This is essentially the same as what I would recommend for the curved cockpit of your PA30 - although instead of placing a box, I would represent the cockpit structure in my orthographic plans not with curves, but as a chain of straight lines between specifically identified landmarks/points. Then when constructing them in 3D, the chains of straight lines would become chains of flat surfaces, which would then be rounded out only towards the very end.
This approach is one we talk about back in Lesson 6, specifically in this section, which also includes this demonstration of constructing a curving handle on a mug to illustrate the concept.
The last thing I wanted to mention in this critique is a quick reminder of how a ruler can be used not only for drawing straight lines without taking away additional cognitive resources from the main challenges before us, but also to help us judge how to orient our lines as we draw. Looking at your cab over truck demo drawing, there are two main issues in regards to how you've approached the perspective aspect of this construction:
Firstly, your lines extending off to the left are diverging, rather than converging
Secondly, since the vanishing point sits on the horizon line, the way you've set that construction up (with those edges hitting the horizon line very quickly, within the visible portion of the drawing), you've essentially approached it as though you're working with very dramatic foreshortening, with rapid convergence. In truth, you're not - it's just that you didn't really consider what the horizon line was meant to represent, and ended up ignoring it. These things happen, but it's important to always consider the purpose of every tool we employ, so as to avoid this.
A ruler doesn't just help us draw straight lines - it also provides us with a visible extension in the direction of the line we wish to draw, without any commitment. We can see the line extended, but we haven't actually made any marks on the page and committed to any specific orientation for this line - and so, if we pay attention to how the ruler extends, we can compare it to the orientation of other lines with which it is meant to converge, and that can help us avoid issues where the orientation of our line would be very obviously incorrect. Going forward, be sure to factor this use of the ruler into your approach, as it can help us to avoid critical mistakes, while also reminding us to - ruler or not - always pay attention to the trajectory of our edges, and how the lines we're about to draw relate to those that have already been drawn.
Anyway! All in all, solid work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson, and the course as a whole, as complete. Congratulations.
This is a remarkable little pen. I'm especially fond of this one for sketching and playing around with, and it's what I used for the notorious "Mr. Monkey Business" video from Lesson 0. It's incredibly difficult to draw with (especially at first) due to how much your stroke varies based on how much pressure you apply, and how you use it - but at the same time despite this frustration, it's also incredibly fun.
Moreover, due to the challenge of its use, it teaches you a lot about the nuances of one's stroke. These are the kinds of skills that one can carry over to standard felt tip pens, as well as to digital media. Really great for doodling and just enjoying yourself.
I would not recommend this for Drawabox - we use brush pens for filling in shadow shapes, and you do not need a pen this fancy for that. If you do purchase it, save it for drawing outside of the course.
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