I started off with a template but it was awfully small and I felt constrained by it. I then started doing them by hand. I learned a lot a more doing it this way but the sharpness and quality began to suffer. Sorry for the sketchiness of the later drawings.
J.S.
In all honesty it would definitely have been preferable had you stuck with the ellipse guide throughout the entirety of the set. We try to encourage students to use them because at this point, students simply haven't had the mileage with ellipses throughout the course to be able to avoid having them interfere with the main focus of the challenge. So, while master ellipse templates do indeed result in smaller ellipses, they also allow us to focus our attention on what this challenge tries to address, rather than getting mired in ellipses, for which we have many other exercises. We do permit students to freehand them, but this is really more in the case that one is not at all able to get their hands on one.
It is worth mentioning however that in the way you've approached freehanding those later wheels, you have ended up straying from a number of important elements of the course. There's a lot more chicken scratching, which as explained here should not be permitted - even if it means making marks that are not accurate. So when you say things got sketchy, it's more than just a mild oversight. Additionally, you're also frequently trying to approach them by drawing more faintly first, then going back over those lines - effectively starting with a rough sketch and then doing a clean-up pass. This is not an approach that should be used in this course, as noted here, and as reiterated in this section of Lesson 6.
While freehanding is permitted, unfortunately the way in which you've done it here is too far outside of the bounds of this course's specific rules that I am going to have to ask you to redo the wheels from 12 to 25. For these, you should go back to using your ellipse guide.
Before I leave you to that, I did notice one issue in the first 11 that I wanted to quickly address so you wouldn't end up repeating it into the next steep. In a lot of these, you appear to be drawing the farthest end of the wheel with an ellipse with a much wider degree than the rest. This sudden and dramatic shift is too extreme, and causes the wheel to look rather significantly out of place. If you found yourself forced to pick that as the only ellipse you had that was wider than the previous one, then I would recommend in such circumstances simply using the same (narrower) degree, as this will be closer to correct than the considerable jump.
Next Steps:
Please redo the wheels from 11 to 25, using your ellipse guide.
I will give you a full critique when those are completed.
Here's the revisions. You were right about the template with the last batch.
Here's a new #25 wheel, the last one was awful.
J.S.
Alrighty, these are looking vastly better in terms of their core structures, so let's get into the proper critique. To start, I'm very pleased now with your use of ellipses here, and with the fact that you're leveraging many ellipses throughout the relatively short width of each wheel to create that arcing profile which helps us to interpret the tires as being inflated - and that they'd land with a bounce rather than a solid thunk.
In terms of the wheel's structure (which is the first of two elements I look at in the challenge), this core construction is coming along great but I do feel that the handling of the rims. hub cap is a bit sloppy at times. This can definitely occur as a result of having to work in smaller spaces - it's not that building those structures out properly isn't possible in a small space, more that it's harder and it can be more demanding on our patience (and thus make us more prone to being sloppy and not giving it the time it requires).
So for example, if we look at a case like 19, you kinda just roughly drew a bunch of lines for the spokes, but didn't consider how their pair off to create actual forms, one for each spoke. Furthermore, you focused only one establishing this singular outward face for the spokes, instead of also considering how each one would individually have a side plane as well, which helps a great deal to make them feel more solid.
Additionally, there are a lot of places where you were quite generous (and scribbly/haphazard) with hatching to fill in the spaces in between the spokes. This was not only unfortunately messy (every single mark we put down in this course should be drawn with consideration as to how you can execute it to the best of your ability - which means basing how much time you spend on how complex the task is, rather than how much time you have to spend. In addition to this, it's important to remember that in this course, we do not use form shading, and instead reserve our filled areas of solid black for cast shadows only (aside from when we're using hatching on simple geometric forms earlier in the course, not as shading, but to help convey which side is which). What you're doing here, in filling in spaces between your forms, is generally going to be form shading because you're filling in that inner structure's faces, making them darker based on their orientation in space - the parts of the spokes that face outwards are left blank, but the interior of the cylinder which faces in a different direction is then filled in. Not entirely shading because you're not thinking about its relationship to a light source, but it is still in effect the same thing and far from designing cast shadow shapes and considering how that filled shape is specifically meant to convey the relationship between the form casting the shadow and the surface receiving it.
Now, that expands further into the second part of the challenge. In a manner of speaking, it's something of a trap. Being as far removed from Lesson 2's texture concepts, it's very common for students to just... forget that they exist at all, and instead slide back into old habits on how to tackle things like detail. In this, they fall back into the idea of "decorating" their drawings, doing whatever they can to make it feel visually pleasing, but as a result they're more likely to either draw those details as one-off lines (and not in considering how the texture itself is made up of small textural forms that rest along the surface of the larger object), or when they do lean into filled areas of solid black, they tend more towards form shading by filling in the side planes of those textural forms (which we see a fair bit in your work, in cases like 21 for example).
This is most certainly something you're doing, so I strongly urge you to review the concepts from Lesson 2, especially these reminders. In addition to this, I have a couple diagrams to help explain how these matters of texture work a little further.
Firstly, this diagram and this one are effectively the same, but I've made them in two different ways just in case one arrangement speaks more clearly to you. It's more related to how we apply the concepts of texture to the texture analysis exercise, and should be considered in combination with the reminders I linked above. This may be useful in combination with those notes as well, as they all focus on thinking about the forms that are present, and considering their relationships with the forms around them.
The other diagram I wanted to share is this one which goes more in depth into thinking about the kinds of textures that are made up of grooves or holes. It's not uncommon for students to think of the groove or hole as being the textural forms - but they are not. The groove/hole is the absence of form, and it's actually the walls that surround those holes which cast shadows upon one another, and upon the floor of the hole. This relates quite a bit to our tire textures, especially cases like 18, 19 and 20, where you're prone to drawing the textures as lines representing the grooves themselves, without considering how they all come together in 3D space as forms.
As this aspect of the challenge is indeed a trap, it's really just meant to give you a rude reminder of what you may have neglected - and so I will still be marking this challenge as complete. Just be sure to review that material before continuing onwards to the end of the course. Although I should warn you that you have been rather sloppy with a lot of your linework here, and that kind of impatience will not fare too well in Lesson 7, as it is by far the most demanding lesson of the course.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 7.
It's not so much as impatience as it is pain. I have neck and shoulder issues as well as back issues, I usually have to stop what I'm doing and do stretching exercises or go for a short walk to relieve it. Doing small intricate work seems to make it worse.
Just thought I'd let you know, I am giving this my best effort.
J.S.
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.
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