Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

9:00 PM, Tuesday March 12th 2024

Drawabox Lesson 6 Submission - Album on Imgur

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Thanks in advance, you guys are lovely. The sponge kinda felt like cheating, hope it's not "too simple".

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7:04 PM, Thursday March 14th 2024

Sometimes simple constructions are the best for helping us drill down into a particular concept, whereas always going out and picking the most complex can cause us to miss what may have otherwise been obvious. The objects you chose across your set cover a nice range, and provide a good balance, so you have nothing to worry about there.

Anyway, jumping in with the form intersections, overall you're handling these quite well. I did notice a few issues, which I noted here, but as a whole you're definitely exceeding our expectations. Normally at this stage we expect students to be comfortable with intersections involving only flat surfaces, while still having some difficulty with intersections involving curving surfaces. You seem to be quite comfortable with both, with your issues mainly being very specific to particular cases, rather than suggesting any underlying misunderstandings. In other words, the sort of things that will be ironed out with more practice/experience, but we can clearly see that you're approaching it well, and that these kinds of concerns are very few and far between.

Continuing onto your object constructions, it's clear that you've held very closely to the principles of this lesson, especially when it comes to the concept of precision. Precision is often conflated with accuracy, but they're actually two different things (at least insofar as I use the terms here). Where accuracy speaks to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, precision actually has nothing to do with putting the mark down on the page. It's about the steps you take beforehand to declare those intentions.

So for example, if we look at the ghosting method, when going through the planning phase of a straight line, we can place a start/end point down. This increases the precision of our drawing, by declaring what we intend to do. From there the mark may miss those points, or it may nail them, it may overshoot, or whatever else - but prior to any of that, we have declared our intent, explaining our thought process, and in so doing, ensuring that we ourselves are acting on that clearly defined intent, rather than just putting marks down and then figuring things out as we go.

In our constructions here, we build up precision primarily through the use of the subdivisions. These allow us to meaningfully study the proportions of our intended object in two dimensions with an orthographic study, then apply those same proportions to the object in three dimensions.

When it comes to your use of those orthographic plans, you leveraged them quite effectively across the board. You drilled down to a fine level of complexity, noted all the major landmarks required to capture that complexity in a manner that felt solid and tangible, and your execution showed a great deal of care and attention to detail. You were patient and avoided cutting corners, and your results show it quite clearly. It's true that you may have found some cases where the proportions of the object came out feeling wrong - for example, this glass appears taller proportionally than the one in your reference image, but for our purposes in this lesson there is nothing wrong with that. We actually have not (yet) provided you with the tools to maintain those proportions, so the box you started with was largely approximated by eye, in terms of how long it should be. This is something we do provide tools to address in Lesson 7 though, so it's simply not a concern right now, and certainly not any sort of a mistake on your part.

To be completely honest, I'm hard pressed to find any real problems with your approach in any regard. You've made every effort to follow the instructions and to give yourself the time you required - so all I can say is fantastic work. 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.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:51 PM, Thursday March 14th 2024

Thank you for the positive feedback! I for sure took my time with each of these, it's good to see it pays off :)

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