Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

9:40 PM, Wednesday February 3rd 2021

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/VxK9YTX.jpg

Demos: https://imgur.com/a/xul2ULQ

I didn't include reference photos but can provide upon request! As they were all drawn from life, I don't have their photos handy.

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7:48 AM, Friday February 5th 2021

Starting with your form intersections, you're off to a great start. Your linework is confidently drawn, and while your spheres are a little uneven, it's quite minimally so. The spatial relationships you've defined between your forms appear to all demonstrate a pretty strong grasp of how these forms all exist together in 3D space, and you certainly approach them with a great deal more confidence than you did back in lesson 2.

Moving onto your object constructions, honestly your work throughout this lesson is exceptionally well done. There are just a couple issues I want to touch upon, but as a whole you're showing a great deal of patience and care in how you break down your objects, and how far you're willing to push your subdivisions to capture the various components and details with accuracy and precision. I especially loved the headphones - I can see that you did struggle a bit with their ellipses given how large they are (obviously they didn't work with any available ellipse guides), but you broke those down way farther than I'm used to seeing from students at this stage. Usually Lesson 6 serves as an introduction to those subdivisions, and so many students will often dip their toes in it, but perhaps hit a point where they feel they'd rather wing it, estimating the rest of the way. It is excellent to see that you were willing to take it all the way, and I expect that tenacity will be extremely useful throughout Lesson 7.

So the first issue I wanted to talk about is actually very minor, but it's still worth it. In your toaster, tape dispenser and in some parts of the clothes iron, I noticed that you tended to leverage your solid blacks primarily to fill in the 'voids' in those objects. Always remember that the filled areas of solid black in your drawings throughout this course should always be used for cast shadows. That means thinking about the relationship between the forms casting the shadows, and the surfaces upon which they'd be cast. Through these shadows, we're able to convey additional information about how those elements relate to one another, whereas simply filling in voids can actually tend to flatten certain things out a little.

For example, in the toaster's slider/plunger, we don't get a sense of how thick the cover actually is - we jump straight from the front face into the black depths, and it makes that area feel somewhat paper thin. We get a similar impression in the toaster slots, with that metal notched surface suggesting no real thickness. Conversely, if we look at the little protrusions in the bottom left of the toaster, the shadows being cast there help to give a greater sense of dimension to the construction, as it does on the dial for your clothes iron.

The only other issue isn't really an issue at all. In this lesson, we don't really worry too much about proportion. In lesson 7 you'll be introduced to some techniques that will help you construct objects to actual scale, but at this point we're just getting into working with geometric constructions. So, while your camera was definitely off in terms of proportion, and I suspect that the gum dispenser may be stretched vertically (despite that it looks entirely convincing and believable, so perhaps that is simply what it looked like), we will be addressing how to approach that soon.

So! All in all, your work is looking fantastic. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the great work.

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.
2:00 PM, Friday February 5th 2021

The gum dispenser is definitely stretched vertically, I think I discovered that ellipses in planes in perspective may end up smaller than I expect and didn't account for that!

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