5:06 AM, Tuesday February 9th 2021
To answer your questions first, you are allowed to submit lessons you've already completed - but unfortunately these lesson critiques still require you to follow the instructions of the course to the letter. The reason Drawabox functions is because it follows a structured path, down which all students must walk. Anything that can cause a student to walk a slightly different path increases the difficulty involved in critiquing their work, because now there are all kinds of other factors to consider. So, for example, using a brush pen would not be allowed, simply because it would force me to now have to figure out which issues arise because of the tool you've chosen to use, and which issues arise out of a misunderstanding of the material. With the countless critiques I have to deal with each week, and the revisions thereof as well, I don't have the time for that. For example, today this is I believe my 11th full critique of the day, alongside perhaps handling 10 revisions of varying difficulty. I simply cannot accommodate students who wish to experiment.
If something doesn't conflict at all with the instructions, then you certainly can use it - but I cannot offer to comment upon it. This is after all not a mentorship. I certainly appreciate that you feel I am a good instructor, but a big part of that is because of how this course has been structured to allow me to manage the number of students I do. And even that is tenuous at times. To put it simply, I'm very, very tired.
Anyway, let's get started with looking at your work.
Starting with your form intersections, you are definitely doing a good job in terms of demonstrating a strong grasp of how these forms relate to one another in space. You've got a lot of particularly complicated intersections that have been done well. Do however remember that in the instructions for this exercise, I do mention that you should be sticking to forms that are more equilateral in proportion - that is, avoid longer, stretched forms, of which you have quite a few here.
Your cylinders in boxes are looking very solid - I did notice that the convergences of your boxes in the form intersections were a touch sloppy, but here you're clearly demonstrating that you certainly have the capacity to mind them better.
Moving onto your vehicle constructions, I'm of two minds here. On one hand, you are demonstrating a generally strong grasp of how these forms exist in 3D space, and quite a few of your drawings are very well done - but you really aren't necessarily pushing these drawings nearly as far as I'd hope to see in terms of pinning down the constructions with specificity.
There's a lot of areas where you make significant leaps of logic, relying on your strong spatial reasoning skills, to figure out how a particular curve might need to be shaped, to still create a strong, solid form. But the key thing is that this course is not for you to demonstrate your spatial reasoning skills, it's for you to continue developing them. We do that by being more purposeful with our constructions, by taking all of the steps rather than skipping them, by investing all that time into each drawing.
For example, this drawing is excellent. The forms are pretty solid, and you've shown an excellent balance of observational skill and understanding of how all the forms fit together to be able to build them out with a strong sense of character and believability. But if we look at this drawing which follows, you miss the mark a little on a number of the vehicle's curves, and it causes the forms to feel considerably less solid and believable. Your proportions are certainly still good (as you're using the constructing to scale techniques), but there isn't enough underlying construction to provide your vehicle with a strong foundation upon which to be built.
Stepping aside from that for now, I did want to mention that your experimentation with form shading goes against the point raised back in Lesson 2, where I mentioned that we will not be including any shading in our drawings in this course. In doing so, you got a little too caught up in the idea of decorating your drawings. I feel this goes hand in hand with the fact that you didn't always push your construction as far as you should have, and skipped steps - you may have been more focused on the drawing at the end of the process, than the process itself. All your areas of filled black should be focused on cast shadows only. By taking this tool (filled shapes) and reserving them for a single purpose, we're able to communicate more clearly with the viewer, as we establish a more consistent visual vocabulary for them to understand. This is especially important when dealing with the limitations of working in nothing but black and white.
[Edit: I just realized that you were just copying how I effectively 'decorated' my camaro, so that's totally on me. I'm currently working through the material from Lesson 1 onwards to update all the video and demo content to better match how I prefer to teach the material now, but I'd forgotten that it was something I did indeed include in an existing demo. Sorry about that!]
I don't generally like showing students the work of others, because I don't want them to compare to them in terms of quality or skill level. But there is some value in this case in showing you this car by LordNed. The main takeaway is just how much time and effort was put into pinning down every little piece of structure, exploring the vehicle with incredible specificity and precision. No steps were skipped. You are certainly capable of that sort of thing, but the question is, can you put in the hours required? That is ultimately more in the vein of what I'm looking for in this lesson. Not necessarily to quite that degree, but I want to see you lay out the structure, to subdivide as much as is necessary to pin down the specific location of things, and to build out your forms from simple to complex.
To that same point, you may remember from Lesson 6, where I talked about how to approach dealing with curves. These principles were definitely left out of your drawings.
Rereading your own comments, I see that you did mention this:
I changed my approach pretty heavily, as i draw in the first days much to strictly (there is nothing left of this studies in the homework). Thats why i draw almost everything freehand (beside drawing number 2).
I'm not sure if you mean that for your other studies, you did dig into more explicit construction and structure, but if you did, it's unfortunate that you didn't keep those drawings.
So, I do want you to do some additional drawings. I'll assign them below - they won't be too numerous, but the expectation will be entirely on the investment of time. Also, I highly recommend that you use ballpoint for these. One of the reasons I allowed its use throughout these last few lessons is that they allow for students to lay down the kind of specific construction necessary for things as complicated as vehicles without their pages turning into complete messes.
Next Steps:
Please submit two more drawings, specifically of cars. I don't necessarily expect you to spend 9+ hours each like LordNed did, but I do want to see you hammering out as much of the structure as you can, rather than leaping over important steps as you have been.