Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your lesson 6 homework.
Form Intersections
-Starting by the form intersections you have successfully drawn your forms as if they were sharing the same 3D space, by keeping the foreshortening shallow and keeping their size consistent.
When it comes to the intersections themselves you are moving in the right direction, you do seem to be able to pick straight or curves as needed. If I have to get nitpicky I would point your attention to your lineweight on the first page, when you drew those intersections your linework got pretty scratchy. So don’t forget to go through each individual phase of the ghosting method whenever you are going to freehand something.
Objects
-Moving on to the objects there are many good things that you are doing, but first let’s talk about what we are exactly looking to learn in this lesson.
The focus of this lesson is precision which is something that we had not worried about before, in previous lessons we had to stick to the outcomes of our choices regardless of how they ultimately turned out. For example we may have drawn the head of an animal too big, but that was not an issue as we were only looking to break down our subjects into their main components and how those related to each other in a 3D world.
Accuracy and precision are two different things, and in the context of this course accuracy refers to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, but precision has nothing to do with drawing that mark, instead it has to do with the steps and decisions we take beforehand.
A good example of this would be the ghosting method, when going through the planning of a straight line we can place an initial and ending dot, this will increase the precision of our drawing by declaring what we want to do. Once that is in place we can draw the mark, it may nail those points, it may overshoot or undershoot, etc. The important thing is that prior to any of that we have used the ghosting method to think about each mark's purpose and how we are going to achieve it best rather than figuring everything as we go, this kind of approach is more useful for the kind of geometric forms that we are working with as they have different planes, sharp corners, and clearly defined proportions.
We can capture all of these elements through the use of subdivisions, these allow us to meaningfully study the proportions of our object by way of an orthographic study, after that is done we can apply those studies to the object in 3 dimensions. That way everything that we do is the result of careful planning, and nothing is done by eyeballing or improvising.
-You are doing pretty good when it comes to boxy objects, as they have clearly defined edges, but whenever working with objects that have curves you do struggle quite a bit.
Given the limitations in the tools we are working with it is better to break down those curves into a series of straight lines, this will also help you to take more time to think about what you are doing. Once you have done that you can start to round them off towards the end.
I also want to quickly redirect you to these notes which explain why jumping right into drawing curves is not the best choice. https://drawabox.com/lesson/6/1/curves
-I would also advise against doing more work than necessary, this may get you in the mindset that you can compensate for any mistakes you made during your first 8 pages, but the best approach would be to actually do your absolute best with the right amount of work, and leaving the rest for the person that is going to review it.
And lastly be careful with how you apply lineweight, if you are drawing freehand then try to avoid using lineweight on any particularly long segment. And also keep in mind that if you end up making it too thick as you will end up turning those objects into graphic shapes.
Fortunately I think that you still did a great job following the principles of this lesson, when you do hit lesson 7 you’ll find the challenges are going to be vastly more demanding and you will benefit from following the points I have raised here.
Okayyyyyy, I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, best of luck on your next assignments.
Next Steps:
25 Wheel Challenge
Yeah I did forgot about breaking them into straight lines if they were too complicated. I'll make sure to do that & also spend some time improving the lineweight.
As always, thank you for the feedback.
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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