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Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

11:08 AM, Saturday February 1st 2025

DrawABox - Lesson 6 - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/RyzMtA0

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The demos at the bottom of the album do not count toward the 8 object constructions, I only included them for completeness.

I feel like I added too much line weight in my form intersections. I also really struggled with adding shadows, especially on the rubber duckie - that got out of hand real quick. It was kind of like when you try to fix a small part of your hair with scissors and immediately make things worse, and your solution it is to try cutting off more to make up for the mistake, until you accidentally end up with bangs.

...Not that I've ever done that before... That would be crazy...

Nevertheless, I learned something different on each one of these constructions. Even though I don't anticipate using this particular technique much in my day-to-day drawing, I think these exercises were definitely worth working through and gave me a much greater appreciation for technical draftsmanship.

Thanks in advanced for any feedback!

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4:00 PM, Thursday February 6th 2025

Hello! I'm Simon and will try to review your Lesson 6 :)

I can completely understand for the shadow on the duckie that.. happens x)

First of all for the forms intersections you did really well! I don't have that much experience reviewing this but I couldn't find anything that would appear wrong, a thing i like to do sometimes with complex intersections is to try to get the same arrangement of shapes in blender and to play around to see how the intersection changes it can be really insightful so if when you do this exercise sometimes you're left unsure with something feel free to check this way after you've put a line down.

Moving on to the Everyday objects constructions,

Overall it all looks great i'll just go object by object with some thigns I find that could be improved on,

First of all for the airpods, speaker, rubber duck (which all have curves) you didn't seem to first draw straight lines to approximate the curve and then come over and draw the curve, this can seem like it's not that useful but especially with complex curves like the duck's it definitely comes in useful so if you practice this exercise in your warmups try to pick a curved object and first draw straight lines like mentioned in the exercise's page.

Second thing that's also got to do with curves do you have a set of french curves ? Because for all of the curves you seem to have redrawn over them manyyyy times even though your individual lines look clean enough, if you don't I understand why you'd want to redraw over but honestly it just makes the drawing look a bit messier and doesn't really make it feel more solid, so even if you don't have french curves I'd say try as much as you can not to redraw over your lines too too much.

Another little thing I could tell you I guess is for your mug you didn't draw the handle using Uncomfortable's technique (that's fine I didn't either for the first mug) but it's just a reminder to go check it out next time you draw a mug since it's good practice to try out different techniques :)

Other than that honestly great job! you practiced subdividing a ton and managed to transcribe your objects in the right proportions, you used ortographic plans and it worked great!

If you have any questions or if I can help in any way feel free to ask :) I'll be marking your Lesson as complete now

Next Steps:

Feel free to move on to the 25 Wheels challenge (Which is required before moving on to Lesson 7) You can also do some of the 25 textures challenge even though it's entirely optional.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
6:31 PM, Thursday February 6th 2025

Hey thanks for the critique! I always notice more things about my work every time I get outside feedback, so I very much appreciate it, it's very helpful.

I was doing a similar thing for the form intersections - doing my best to figure it out and when I had doubts I used Tinkercad (instead of blender) to check my intuitions.

You're totally right about approximating curves with straight lines before committing to drawing them - that's something I didn't really even notice I was missing until after I had finished the lesson, but it would have helped with my precision significantly and I'll try to apply in lesson 7 when I get there.

I don't own french curves unfortunately - I was re-drawing over my curves to add line weight, especially for the object silhouettes. If I understand correctly, we're supposed to be increasing line weight on the silhouette to help the object read more clearly, so I don't think that was a mistake on my part (if I'm understanding correctly). It was intentional, even though it was a bit messy I thought it was more important that the silhouettes stand out among the mess of subdivisions. I could be wrong though! I definitely concede I tend to make my line weight too pronounced though, so I'll try to make it more subtle going forward.

For the mug, I actually was following the example from the lesson instructions, but it's definitely possible my process was flawed. I started by building out this bounding box for the handle. I didn't built out the top portion with additional masses because my reference mug had a flat top to its handle, so I could just use this plane to define the top of the handle. I cut a diagonal along the bottom to form this bounding box, and built it out from there using the reference points I had. At this point I should have approximated the curves with straight lines line you mentioned before, so I definitely could have improved there, but for the overall construction I think I followed the process well enough? Idk.

You're totally right about the value of trying out different techniques, and I actually completely ignored this process for the nalgene bottle, which contributed to why that loop was angled wrong and was way too long. I for sure should have built that out with a separate bounding box like in the mug demo.

Again thanks for the unprompted critique! I'll definitely work on approximating curves before committing to them and making line weight more subtle in the future.

9:24 PM, Thursday February 6th 2025

Glad if it helped! Cool for tinkercard I'll be checking it out :)

For the line weight yeah I think you're overdoing it quite a bit then but it's ok if the intention was just to do line weight

For the mug I trust you if you said you followed the process but this https://imgur.com/a/yDuIzwT box you outlined in red doesn't ... exist ? Like I understand you like understood it but you didn't seem to draw it (my bad if I just can't find it though)

And thanks for answering it's always nice to have a back and forth when submitting a review :)

1:49 AM, Friday February 7th 2025

Nah you're not crazy - I only drew these lines for it because I didn't need to reference the top plane (probably because I wasn't approximating my curves correctly), and even then the construction lines for it came out really faint in the scan. I'm also just now realizing I should have drawn through those forms!

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