Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

1:17 PM, Wednesday June 9th 2021

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This was a painful lesson :)

I was really struggling with turning the orthographic views into a 3d object, particularly with the curved shapes as I felt like I was guessing with the curves, and messing up the thickness. Those more organic shapes are really hard.

Thank you in advance for the feedback :) I'll go sit in a corner and try to piece my brain back together.

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8:03 PM, Wednesday June 9th 2021

Starting with your form intersections, you're demonstrating a really strong grasp of how these forms relate to one another in 3D space, through the highly specific and purposeful ways in which you've drawn their intersections. I'm not seeing anything that stands out as being particularly incorrect, and I'm very happy with how they don't appear to be tentative or hesitant - you knew how they intersected, and you plotted that down precisely on the page. The forms themselves are also carrying a consistent level of foreshortening to help keep the sense of scale consistent throughout the scene.

As a whole, while you may well have struggled with working from orthographics as you mentioned, I think your work throughout this set is exceptionally well done. You've shown a great deal of patience and conscientiousness - first in constructing a solid enclosing box with consistent vanishing points (avoiding feelings of lopsidedness or skewed structures), then in subdividing them as much as was necessary to handle every complex element - from curves and rounded edges, to the positioning of buttons and other sub-forms - with a high degree of precision and intent.

You mentioned that organic structures were considerably more difficult - this is absolutely true, but it's actually an interesting thing to consider. In Lessons 3-5, we study organic structures but they are distinctly different from those we encounter here. Where animals, insects, etc. are considerably more forgiving in their organic nature, with the proportions and such being subject to a lot of variation, what we're tackling here are made far more difficult through their organic curves because they do not suffer any variation. Those curves are specific and intentionally designed by a human mind to be just so.

The wii-mote nunchuck (or whatever it's called) that you drew captures this really well, in that if the curves were put together in such a precise manner, with keen observation and study, it would not have given the impression of that particular product. We'll run into this a lot more throughout the cars we encounter in lesson 7, but to a lesser extent, wheels will also be similar. Each such object is designed with specific qualities, and to make small changes can easily change the character of the object in its entirety. This is where we fall more into the realm of product design, leaving us with a lot more to worry about.

All that said, you did a fantastic job despite those challenges, and the wiimote thing is easily identifiable, and looks solid in a way that one could reach out and grasp it.

There were admittedly cases where your proportions were somewhat off - the gamecube controller was particularly difficult, and its awkward design definitely left you open to all kinds of opportunities to throw things off, even slightly. All the same, I think you made the right call in sticking to the scaffolding of your construction, avoiding the temptation to alter things. Construction is a process where we don't really have the freedom to just make big sweeping changes halfway through - we have to stick to what we've built, even if we find it straying from our reference. In this case you didn't stray too much, but the nature of design I alluded to previously is that it's easy for small things to lead to a sort of uncanny-valley impression where we know what it's meant to represent, but can't quite put our finger on why it feels off.

That said, such situations could be remedied by opting to draw directly what we see, to make those changes and alterations to bring it back in line with our reference - but to do so would sacrifice the solidity and believability that this thing we've drawn is something solid and real. That is what our real priority is here, and you stuck to it. So in the end, while the sweeping curve along the back edge of the controller doesn't feel like a game cube controller, it still feels like a solid, real object that you've drawn accurately - as though you were drawing some sort of a knockoff, but a real object all the same.

I'm going to skip over the headphones - this one didn't turn out too well, but I don't think it was anything but things sometimes going wrong, which is quite common when we have to draw a lot of ellipses. It's for that reason that I do allow (and encourage) students to use ellipse guides for these last few lessons. Freehanding ellipses confidently and consistently, especially larger ones, will be something that will demand a lot more mileage and practice. That said, full ellipse guide sets are expensive, and the ones students generally use in this course (which are especially useful in the wheel challenge) cap off at a smaller size, in exchange for being quite cheap, so they wouldn't have helped here. If you don't have a set of these "master ellipse templates" (which have smaller sizes but plenty of variation in degree), I do recommend that you get some for the wheel challenge. It'll force you to draw smaller wheels, but it'll be well worth it.

There are a lot of constructions throughout this set that I feel particularly embody the principles we explore both here in this lesson, and throughout the course as a whole. Your shaving razor, the wiimote nunchuck, and the iron at the end are all exceptionally well constructed. Honestly, there's more still - the hand sanitizer bottle, the stationery case... You've knocked it out of the park with the vast majority of these. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - unfortunately without much to offer by way of critique, simply because you've done such a solid job.

Keep up the fansastic work.

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.
4:36 AM, Friday June 11th 2021

Thank you very much! I will trudge onwards to the wheels... :')

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