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7:59 PM, Wednesday December 4th 2024
Jumping right in with your form intersections, as a whole your work here is moving in the right direction, although I do have a few things to call out. For the most part at this point in the course, we expect students to be fairly comfortable with intersections involving flat surfaces, but to still have trouble with those involving curves, which is roughly where you appear to be. I've noted some mistakes here on your work, so keep those things in mind. Additionally, this diagram can help better understand how to think about the actual interaction that is occurring between the forms, in terms of one plane cutting through another like a knife's blade, and dictating which cross-section of the form being cut is relevant. This is something that can be a lot to take in back when the exercise is introduced in Lesson 2, but generally it ends up being more useful at this stage, when students have tangled with thinking about the relationships between forms in lessons 3-5.
Another point I did notice however is that you appear to not necessarily be as fastidious in applying the ghosting method to your freehanded linework, as I'm not seeing the usual signs of its use. Additionally, while your linework is pretty close, there is a distinct trace of hesitation in your execution that suggests you may not be focusing completely on executing the mark with confidence in that last step, which is common when students get a little too lax about the application of the method. Always a good idea to review the principles behind the method and ensure you're applying it correctly and intentionally in all your freehanded linework throughout this course.
Speaking of linework, as we move into looking at the object constructions, I noticed that you appear not to have taken advantage of the permission (and encouragement) towards using tools like rulers to help with your work for this lesson. While the other tools - ellipse guides, french curves, etc. are harder to come by and frankly less useful here than they (at least ellipse guides) can be for the remainder of the course, a ruler is invaluable here as explained here in the lesson material. Note also that the last paragraph, while discussing why we encourage their use here as opposed to earlier in the course, I also stress the necessity of using the ghosting method in executing any lines you end up freehanding. It seems here you opted against the ruler, but also didn't employ the ghosting method.
These decisions deeply impacted your work, and what you ultimately were able to get out of the lesson's assignments, not just in terms of ensuring you're working off a well constructed box (rulers are useful not just in terms of drawing a reliably straight lines, but they also give us a "free" look at the trajectory the line we're looking to draw follows, allowing us to compare its convergence to other lines in our drawing and better judge how to orient the stroke), but also in ensuring that our choices are made with precision, which is at the core of the lesson's focus.
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.
Though you didn't include any orthographic plans in your work here, they are technically not required as part of the homework submission for this lesson (though they are in Lesson 7). That said, while I can see you employing subdivision in to varying degrees in some of your constructions, the main one that suggests it might have used an orthographic plan is your roku remote. If you didn't, and are perhaps unsure of what I'm talking about, I would encourage you to review this section from the lesson material, which includes a link to a detailed demonstration using a mouthwash bottle.
I think the best course of action here is to assign revisions, and then continue my critique based on those. Your work here is unfortunately not representative of the best of which you are capable - the inconsistency of the linework itself can bleed into other aspects of the construction, and as a whole it is unfortunately not meeting the standard required for official critique. Normally I'd assign a full redo, but there's enough here that suggests you understand the principles behind the techniques, and the concepts discussed in this lesson, with the main concern being that you made some bad choices in terms of your approach and didn't necessarily give the work as much time as it really demanded. That sloppiness can unfortunately hide other issues, so the revisions will either establish that you do indeed fully understand what you need to be doing, or will highlight those issues so we can address them together.
You will find your revisions assigned below. Please be sure to use a ruler for these, and take as much time as the task demands. If marks need to be freehanded, be sure to apply the ghosting method in its entirety.
Next Steps:
Please submit 4 additional object constructions. For each of these, use orthographic plans as explained in the lesson material here, and include them in your submission. Don't worry about things like labels, text, etc - just focus on the overall structure.
Ellipse Master Template
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.