Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles

5:53 PM, Saturday August 3rd 2024

Lesson 7 - Album on Imgur

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10:15 PM, Sunday August 4th 2024

Jumping right in with your form intersections, overall these are looking really good. The only piece of advice I have to offer is that when you have to deal with the more complex intersections between different curving surfaces (which usually result in S-type compound curves, or ones with even more bends than that), you may find it more effective to draw them in individual segments - one curve at a time, rather than the whole intersection line all at once. Reason being, when you draw all of the curves together in one stroke, you end up averaging them together. That is to say, instead of each part curving more dramatically where it needs to, they all get a little shallower because you're not just thinking of one curve at a time, and so you may be drawing a bend that goes in one direction, but because you're also thinking about the next bend that goes in the opposite direction, it influences the curvature of the first. By separating them into different parts, your brain will be able to deal with each one, one at a time, and this will help you eventually get to a point where you're mindful enough about each separate component of the curve that you will be able to do them all in one stroke.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, everything looks to be in order here - you're applying the line extensions correctly, so you've got plenty of opportunity to identify issues and adjust your approach when tackling the exercise next.

Carrying onto the meat of the lesson - the form intersection vehicles and the more detailed vehicle constructions, you are absolutely knocking it out of the park. I genuinely have no complaints, and no criticism to offer. You've taken everything the lessons present and have applied it impeccably.

With the form intersection vehicles, these serve to remind the student that even though we're dealing with a ton of subdivision, which can make it seem like we're stitching together a bunch of individual edges, and only producing something 3D and solid in the last step, we are actually still supposed to be thinking about our constructions in terms of large structures and volumes that we are gradually refining. So instead of building with a bunch of toothpicks, we're carving something out of wood, going from simple to complex.

Based on how your more detailed vehicle constructions come out, this is a principle you hold to very well, while also applying the useful information and control that subdivision offers you to great effect. Constructions like this car really demonstrate this well - I absolutely love how solid the structures feel, they convey a strong sense of weight.

Ultimately this course isn't one about drawing cars, or insects, or animals, or plants - it all comes down to spatial reasoning, the understanding of how the things we draw on a flat page represent three dimensional structures in a 3D world. I can say with great confidence that your work here demonstrates an exceptionally well developed understanding of 3D space, and that you have certainly gleaned all you were meant to from our lesson material

So, I will happily mark this lesson - and the course as a whole - as complete. Congratulations! You should be proud of yourself, as what you've achieved here has not been easy, and more importantly it shows that you can tackle anything you set your mind to.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
1:21 PM, Monday August 5th 2024

Thanks for the kind feedback! Drawabox was a great experience - I really feel like now, when drawing, I'm thinking in 3 dimensions instead of just 2. Shout out to you for making this course and making art feel like something that can be learned.

I really want to pursue drawing environments and landscapes - are there any courses that you recommend in particular?

2:06 AM, Thursday August 8th 2024

Sorry for not answering sooner, I've been traveling a bunch. Unfortunately I don't really have any good course recommendations for that simply because I have limited opportunities to go through other courses, and those I took myself were in person. If you hop into our discord chat server though, there should be other folks who can recommend different options based on their own experiences.

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Framed Ink

Framed Ink

I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.

Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.

Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.

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