The title of each image includes a number, which corresponds to the order that they were drawn in (1 being the first, 8 being the last).
Object intersections completed freehand with the 0.5 fineliner.
Everyday objects completed with ruler and ballpoint pen.
As you've done a pretty great job with the object constructions, this critique is going to focus primarily on your form intersections. I'll of course take a moment at the end to talk about your object constructions, but as you'll see, they won't need a ton of feedback.
Form intersections are interesting in that they represent what this course focuses on from start to finish. While some might argue that it should be something that would be introduced towards the end of the course (where we are now), I find it more useful to introduce it early and allow students to continue practicing it alongside their constructional drawing exercises, which help build up the same understanding of the relationships between the forms they've drawn as they exist in 3D space, and to revisit the exercise towards the end when the student is in a better position to make use of additional information and advice. It's in some ways similar to how we introduce the organic perspective exercise at the end of Lesson 1, before actually teaching the student how to address that kind of problem in the 250 box challenge.
As this exercise comes up again in Lesson 7, I do not expect students to be able to apply this exercise perfectly (mind you I don't expect that at the very end either), but rather I find this to be a good spot to look at the student's form intersection work and point things out that they can actually act upon, whereas back in Lesson 2 dumping all that on would easily become overwhelming.
As a whole, your form intersections are coming along well, but there is a lot of inconsistency in terms of where you get things right and where you don't that suggests that you may at times still feel overwhelmed. That is not a problem, but rather something I'm going to try and address now.
Here I've written a number of notes over your work, identifying a few different kinds of issues. Some of these include:
Making an intersection line, or part of an intersection line, curved when it only involves flat surfaces.
Getting confused by an edge on the opposite side of the form (which wouldn't be visible) and ending up placing a corner along your intersection line where it crosses that edge.
Or alternatively, crossing an edge that is visible to the viewer, without any changes to the intersection line's trajectory - so for example if a sphere intersects with a box, where the curving intersection crosses the edge between the box's faces, that edge denotes a very sharp change in trajectory, so we'd place a corner at the edge and then continue following the sphere's surface and this new face of the box.
These issues are not consistent - sometimes you get them right, sometimes you don't. This as a whole suggests to me that you may want to simply give yourself more time to think through the problems you're handling, and avoid taking any actions without fully understanding why you've come to the conclusion that a given action should be taken.
What I just said is dangerous, and can easily lead to paralysis, where a student continually second-guesses whether or not their reasoning is sound. That is definitely not its purpose, and I am not saying that you should only draw a mark when you know it's correct. Rather, what matters here is not that you're correct, but rather that you have some concrete reasoning to explain why you made the choice you did. It's entirely okay to make the wrong choice, but when students take actions based on instinct, it doesn't leave much beyond simply saying "that's wrong" and showing them what would be correct.
Conversely, if the student is in a position to explain "oh I made that choice because of XYZ", the reason may be incorrect, but it is something that can be addressed and built upon. Moreover, even outside of the context of critique (where more often than not my educated guesses as to the reason for a given choice are pretty good, just as a result of the thousands of homework critiques I've done over the years), taking the time to think through your decisions and ensure that you've explained to yourself why you're going to take a certain action allows you to catch a lot of those kinds of mistakes yourself. For example, saying "I'm going to put a corner here because of this edge", it gives you a chance to realize, "wait that edge isn't visible based on the form's orientation".
Before we move on from this topic, I wanted to share with you this diagram. It illustrates the thought process behind navigating the intersection between a sphere and a box - using the relevant faces of the box to identify which cross-sectional slices of the sphere will also be relevant, then demonstrating what happens if we replace the edge with a smoother curved transition from one plane to the other. I've found that this diagram can help illustrate for students what is actually happening as these forms intersect, and as the forms change, so you may find it helps to formalize and solidify a bit of what you already grasp, but may not be applying entirely consistently.
So! Moving onto your object constructions, as I noted before, you've done a fantastic job, with only a couple points to note. I'm very pleased to see the extensive use of orthographic plans, as well as the fact that you've leveraged them so thoroughly to make concrete decisions about the nature of the object you would then construct.
I have just two issues to note:
Firstly, your boxes - that is, the initial bounding box we start with - have some issues involving their sets of parallel edges diverging when drawn on the page. For example, looking at this pencil holder, the orthographic plan suggests that this is just meant to be a simple straight box, but if we were to apply line extensions along the height dimension, we'd quickly see that there is indeed slight divergence where those edges should be converging slightly. While some of this certainly comes down to ensuring that you're continuing to include the exercise from the 250 box challenge (with line extensions included) in your warmup exercise rotation, as that is the main exercise that addresses this, it is worth mentioning that we can also use the nature of our ruler to help mitigate the issue. The ruler itself provides a physical extension of the line we wish to draw, allowing us to see how its trajectory behaves without having to commit to the stroke. Meaning, it is entirely possible for us to see whether the line we're going to draw is likely to diverge from the lines that are already present, we just need to know to look for it when using the ruler.
The other issue isn't really that noteworthy, given that it's specific to this object construction. The main issue is that in comparison to all your other object constructions, it lacks precision - meaning, decisions are made on the spot when actually drawing your forms, rather than beforehand (which is the role the orthographic plan usually plays). So for example, the knobs and such that are placed on the surface of the microphone don't have any set "footprint" defined that would tell you how big they should be, so it ends up being something you do by eye, as you actually draw that structure. If we think of it in terms of the ghosting method, it's like skipping the planning phase where we identify the nature of the mark we wish to make (so in the case of a straight line, where we mark out the start/end points). This means that the step must be combined with one of the later steps, resulting in your cognitive resources being split between two tasks, rather than just focusing on one at a time. In the case of the knobs, this would be addressed by using an orthographic plan, and using subdivision, defining the specific rectangular footprint for each knob. From there you can extrude a box out for each knob, and construct the cylindrical structure within it. Or you could ostensibly decide not to go with the full box and instead extend a minor axis line from the footprint and jump straight into the cylinder - that's less precise, but we're really talking about ways in which precision can be improved, rather than saying that one approach is always necessary.
Aside from that, you've done a great job. 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.
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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