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10:43 PM, Thursday August 12th 2021

Starting with your form intersections, these are for the most part, very well done. You've done a great job of executing confident linework and constructing forms that feel solid and cohesive within the same space. You've also done an excellent job in defining the relationships between the forms through the intersections - I can see a wide variety of relationships tackled here, and I don't see any that appear to be incorrect, or misunderstood. Your use of line weight here also helps keep the scene organized and clear for the viewer, without being overbearing or stiffening the existing linework.

Your cylinders are similarly coming along well, although I noticed that you're forgetting to extend that central minor axis line towards its intended vanishing point - this is pretty important, because we want to be able to test whether it's converging towards the same vanishing point as one of the box's sets of edges.

Continuing onto the first part of the vehicle drawings, these are honestly fantastic. They're not exactly what was asked for in this section - which was literally just the form intersections exercise where they're arranged in the general structure of a vehicle, but still a bunch of primitives - but I still feel this holds very nicely to the spirit of the exercise. You were able to drill down to the most basic elements of each vehicle. You've demonstrated both exceptionally strong spatial skills in how you've built out each of these structures, but also a keen eye for the kinds of relationships that are present in our references that make something feel intentional and real.

Moving onto your more detailed, completed vehicle constructions, here I feel things take a somewhat more notable turn away from what I was really hoping to see here. It's not that your drawings aren't fantastic - they are. They demonstrate the same kind of spatial mastery and observational fastidiousness as the previous exercise. The greater issue at hand is that this lesson, and the course as a whole, focuses less on having students perform - that is, to find whatever path they can to achieve the end results - and more on having students practice. Practice is not about how the drawing turns out, but rather what we learned from going through the process in a meticulous, step by step fashion, thinking about every choice, every mark, every form we construct and building it out in an entirely thorough fashion.

In these drawings, you were able to do a lot of the tedious work in your head, and as a result you didn't need to block out complete, simple forms. You were able to jump ahead in levels of complexity without hurting the end result (or at least not hurting it in a noticeable fashion). A good example of this is that in this drawing you didn't build out a bunch of primitive forms, build up from simple to complex - you drew a few rudimentary lines, then drew a whole god damn helicopter. It's impressive to be sure, but it's not what was asked of you here.

Here, I want my students to show that they understand how to apply the actual exercise itself, as shown in the demonstrations (going through all the steps of creating a bounding box set to a particular scale, breaking it down, building up simple forms inside of it, and then gradually working towards the more granular complexity). This isn't about showing me that you can draw vehicles - but rather showing me that you understand the exercise itself. The exercise is, like in all the previous lessons, about improving one's spatial reasoning skills. While yours have developed very nicely, that doesn't mean you don't still have room to grow - and you'll grow more efficiently by practicing, rather than performing.

So here's the deal - I'm going to ask for just one more drawing. These drawings take a long time when done correctly, as you'll see in VeeDraws' work (she included a little time card). I'd like this one drawing to be of a car of some sort, and I want you to show me the absolute best of which you're capable, following through all of the steps - all of the subdivision, all of the rudimentary forms working your way up to the more complex ones.

Complete that one drawing as described above, and you'll get your completion and all the glory that comes with it. I don't expect you'll have difficulty with that, but I do think it'll be a pretty substantial investment of your time.

Next Steps:

Please submit one drawing - of a car - going through all of the constructional steps without skipping anything.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
9:25 AM, Friday August 13th 2021

Understood, I will get right to it.

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The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"

It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.

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