Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects
1:00 PM, Saturday January 29th 2022
Thank you in advance for the critique.
Jumping right in, your form intersections are coming along pretty well. While your intersection lines themselves are demonstrating a well developing grasp of the relationships between these forms, there is still room for continued growth (I've marked out some corrections here. All in all however, you're progressing well and are at where you ought to be at this stage of this lesson - that is, being comfortable with flat-on-flat intersections, but not quite being 100% with the curved-on-curved. Ultimately there are two main things to keep in mind:
When an intersection line hits the edge of a form (like the edge of a box), its trajectory is generally going to change, placing a corner right on that edge.
Not how in places like the upper-left cone-cylinder intersection, I marked out the curvature of the given surfaces. Think of the intersections as being a matter of first breaking down the different surfaces' curvatures in each dimension (both the cylinder and cone feature a curve in one dimension, and a straight/flat run in the other), then piecing them back together to create the resulting intersection line. In the case of this intersection, we're going from the curvature of the cone, into the curvature of the cylinder. Then, where the cylinder actually hides the rest of the intersection from view, it would follow the cone again.
Continuing onto your object constructions, as a whole you've really knocked this one out of the park. Throughout this set you've demonstrated a lot of effort being put towards achieving a high degree of precision to each of these constructions. Precision and accuracy are two terms that are often conflated with one another, but for our purposes here, precision speaks to the steps we take before executing a mark to assert and declare exactly what that mark is meant to be. For example, in the ghosting method's planning phase, that step of marking the start and end points for a straight line helps increase the precision of our result, even if we end up missing slightly when executing the mark. Similarly here, it is through analyzing our subject matter (through those orthographic proportional studies), identifying the specific position along each dimension that different sub-elements might sit, and then carrying that information specifically into three dimensions in our construction that we can achieve a very high degree of precision.
Throughout your work, with your extensive reliance on subdivision, you've done an excellent job of this and have shown a great deal of care for understanding the specific nature of what you were drawing rather than simply jumping right into the drawing itself.
I'm also extremely pleased to see how you're handling curved edges and corners, building everything up with an appropriately boxy structure, and only rounding them off towards the end.
Lastly - I noticed that when you drew some of your bounding boxes (like the one for this bluetooth speaker demo drawing), you ended up with a box that was somewhat lopsided. While this is certainly a sign that you'll want to continue practicing those freely rotated boxes with line extensions (from the box challenge), as a whole I do not take this as bad sign. It's pretty normal to have little discrepancies and whatnot, but what's important is that you've shown how you will respond to such instances.
Rather than attempting to correct mistakes, you simply treated the box as though it was correct and pushed forwards from there, which is the absolutely correct approach. Construction itself is about adhering to the structure from previous steps and just pursuing it from there, and if we're working from something lopsided, then the result will be lopsided. But there is still ample benefit from pursuing it further, as that lopsidedness does not actually interfere with the goal of the exercise. That is, of course, to push our brain to navigate through the spatial relationships as we continue to carve our construction in the direction of our reference image.
So! As a whole you've done a great job and are progressing very well. 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 is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.