Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects
7:45 PM, Sunday January 23rd 2022
Hello again. Here's my submission for lesson 6.
Starting with your form intersections, these are looking quite good. I'm always pleased to see just how much students develop in this regard in particular - it's such a painful exercise back in Lesson 2, but as one's spatial reasoning skills develop throughout the different lessons between then and now, elements definitely start to fall into place, and that is definitely the case for you. I'm seeing a lot of confidence in constructing forms that feel fairly consistent within the same space (some of your foreshortening is a little rapid, so I'd recommend making that a little shallower but it's still pretty good). More importantly, the intersections themselves - both the simpler flat-on-flat and more complex round-on-round intersections are all demonstrating a well developing, solid grasp of how these forms relate to one another in space. Great stuff.
Continuing onto your object constructions, what stands out to me most here is that your work is highly precise. That isn't quite the same as saying accurate (accuracy can refer to your ability to make the specific marks you desire, or your ability to match your reference well) - precision speaks more to actively identifying and choosing what marks we want to make, before making them. So for example, in the ghosting method's planning phase, when working with straight lines we define the intended start and end point. This increases the precision of our drawings.
In the case of this lesson, we start looking more at how we can analyze specific proportions, and then apply them to our constructions through subdivision. Students will use this tool to varying degrees - some ignore it altogether (starting with a bounding box and then drawing the whole object inside of it by eye), some will take it to a certain point and then stop, deciding to approximate things from there, feeling that they've done "enough".
You on the other hand, as shown with constructions like this humidifier, didn't stop until your construction was done. You've demonstrated considerable patience and care throughout this construction, really pinning it down to such a degree of specificity with very little room for error.
Another point I appreciate has to do with the fact that for your chunky water bottle, the bounding box you started out with was kind of lopsided, with a top plane slanting a bit sharply rather than running parallel to the ground plane. These things happen - constructing a perfect box is not an easy thing, even now (although we can always continue to practice them as part of our warmups). Now, some students will realize that their box is off, either right after drawing it, or much later into the process, and will seek to change it. You did not, and in that, you made the right call. Instead, you accepted that you were committed t othat course of action, and you pursued the construction with the given structure as though it was a perfect box.
I mean, sure - maybe you just never noticed, in which case, ta-dah now you know. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
To be honest, there's not a lot else to say - I could nitpick on the fact that your laptop is technically not particularly precise (for example, the different ports, and the touchpad are positioned arbitrarily, based on guesswork), but it's one amongst many that have been built up with a lot more thought and planning. As a whole, you're doing a great job of thinking through how each construction should be approached, and breaking them down into stages that can be tackled one at a time. This will continue to serve you well as you get ever closer to the end of the course.
So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the fantastic work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 7.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.