Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

12:15 PM, Tuesday September 15th 2020

Drawabox lesson 6 : Everyday objects - Album on Imgur

Imgur: http://imgur.com/gallery/lgUAtG2

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Hi, Thank you for the critique! :)

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7:14 PM, Thursday September 17th 2020

Nicely done! Your work here is all in all quite well done, especially as far as my expectations for this lesson in particular go. Most importantly, you've gotten your feet wet with the idea of subdividing your constructions more and more to find specific, established landmarks against which to place specific features, and in a number of cases you've pushed your limits in terms of how far you were willing to take those subdivisions before approximating the rest of the way. This is something that will serve you very well into the last lesson - the pattern I generally see is that students will start pushing a little further with their subdivision here, maybe allowing their drawings to take a little longer than they're used to, and once they hit lesson 7 they dive in whole-hog, more willing to invest multiple hours and even days into a single drawing to really nail it down perfectly. I don't expect that last one here, but as far as what I do expect to see, you're doing a great job.

Starting with your form intersections, you've approached these with a great deal of confidence, and the intersections themselves are handled quite well. I am noticing some hiccups with your cylinders on occasion - mainly in terms of foreshortening being a little more dramatic than the boxes around them, and some ellipses being slightly misaligned, but all in all they're coming along quite well.

Moving onto your object constructions, I'm not sure if these are in chronological order or not, but if they are you don't waste any time into diving into those subdivisions. While these objects are at first glance quite simple, you push into them pretty far, even capturing very subtle elements of beveling on the bottom drawing in a very analytical, fastidious breakdown of the overall construction. For the drawing along the top, you nailed down that precisely curved side plane with considerable control and accuracy. Both of these drawings came out feeling very solid and believable.

The next page was admittedly a little weaker, with the mug's foreshortening being weirdly dramatic. Based on the construction, it does appear to be purposely tapered, although I'm not sure if that was intentional or if that was you correcting a mistake where perhaps you felt the foreshortening was initially too shallow. I'm leaning towards it being intentional, but that is something to keep in mind - the only difference between a mistake and an intentional choice is whether or not the viewer believes you meant to do something. That's a lot trickier to do when something falls out of line with what the viewer expects to see, and there's no particular recipe to convey intent. What we need to always keep in mind is to provide as much information (additional cross-sections along the length of the mug's main cylinder for instance) to make it clear that a particular result was what we were aiming for.

Looking at the handle of the mug, I actually have a demonstration for this which you may find helpful.

Getting back to your work, the bottle at the bottom of the page is actually very well done, more similar to the previous page. The container box is a little lopsided which throws off the construction a touch, but ultimately we need to work within the construction we've laid in already, so I'm glad to see that you didn't try and correct that mistake.

Jumping ahead, I think where you struggle most comes down to the simpler structures, like this pen. Or perhaps it would be more fair to say that they appear to be simpler. Here you ended up jumping from the container boxes (which were established really well) right to these cylinder-like structures that have various widening/tapering areas. Personally I would have attempted to break these down by defining different areas along their lengths to construct ellipses within those container boxes - basically subdividing the box and defining cross-sections in order to pin down the particular tapering of the cylinders more precisely rather than eyeballing it all the way through. This kind of strategy is one you've used yourself in a number of cases, but I think this pen may have fooled you into thinking it was a simpler problem than it really was.

As a whole, I'm quite pleased with your work, and you're overall showing a sense of patience and conscientiousness throughout each construction, and it yields strong results. The last lesson will no doubt push you farther and will demand more of you, but I'm confident you'll be able to meet those expectations. Of course, before that, there's one last challenge for you to tackle.

I strongly encourage you to try and pick up an ellipse guide before moving into the 25 wheel challenge, as well as for lesson 7. While full ellipse guide sets are pretty expensive, you should be able to find what's called a "Master Ellipse Template" for far less. It has its limitations, mainly in terms of the largest size of ellipse it'll allow you to draw, but it should cover a wide range of degrees and give you most of what you need to construct wheels effectively.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

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.
1:40 AM, Friday September 18th 2020

Thank you for the critique!

There is a little part I didn't understand : For the Mug, the form of the object is actually tapered. That means according to you I should add "additional cross-sections along the length of the mug's main cylinder". I didn't quite understand what it meant. Should I add contour lines that are perpendicular to the cylinder's axis?

Thank you :)

6:29 PM, Monday September 21st 2020

Here's a quick example of what I mean: https://i.imgur.com/i79AvPA.png

You're on the right track with "add contour lines that are perpendicular to the cylinder's axis" - except the point is that you draw those cross-sectional slices first to lay out the structure and the way in which the form tapers, and then build the form by bridging across them. Arguably you'd get the same result one way or the other, but approaching it this way allows you to pin down the specifics of the form you want to construct more easily, which helps with more complex situations.

7:15 PM, Monday September 21st 2020

Oh all right! Thank you!

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