Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects
12:28 AM, Tuesday December 3rd 2024
not sure why these got uploaded out of order but it includes
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drawing along with examples
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2 of the objects (camera, lamp) are across 2 pages
Jumping right in with your form intersections, overall your work is coming along well, but I noted some issues to keep in mind here:
Make sure you're following the surfaces of the forms themselves, so as to avoid inverting the curvature. In most cases you handle this correctly, but since it was inverted in one spot I figured it wouldn't hurt to share this diagram with you, which goes over how to think about the surfaces that are intersecting, and how to decide on which cross-section of a sphere (since there are infinite in every direction) is relevant, based on the other surfaces intersecting with it.
Some points about judging how shallow/dramatic to make a given curve. Again, it's a lot to do with focusing on the curvature of the surfaces themselves, so your intersection stays on the surface and doesn't penetrate into the volume of either form.
In a couple spots you drew "through" your intersections - stick to the part that's visible to avoid unnecessary complication of the exercise.
Continuing onto your object constructions, I do have some suggestions that can help you improve your use of these techniques, but by and large you have done well, and have clearly devoted a good but of time to increasing the precision of your constructions, which is the core focus of this lesson. 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.
One thing I did notice, just in terms of ensuring that you're following the instructions as closely as possible, is that your choice of using different colours and then going back over the construction in black does not adhere to what was explained here (specifically in the point regarding ball point pen) - we specifically ask that you not switch pens, because doing so pretty much forces you into drawing back over your object in a clean-up pass, which while an entirely valid approach outside of this course, does unfortunately go against what the course prioritizes since it causes students to focus on the lines as they exist on the page (to trace back over them) rather than always focusing on how the marks they're drawing exist in 3D space. Just be sure to take more care in following those instructions and restrictions.
Aside from that, here are some points that should help you continue to get the most out of these kinds of constructional exercises:
I noticed for your joycon construction, you identified the center point of each of your buttons. This is a good step towards increasing precision (since it allows us to ensure that they are all centered on points that are distributed evenly across that given area). Where it lacks however is in ensuring that each button is actually the same size. This could be achieved by simply adding more steps, and defining a 3x3 grid centered around the center of the button cluster, and then placing the buttons in the respective grid squares.
For both the buttons and the thumbstick in that same joycon controller, building them out as boxes first, then constructing the cylindrical structures within that box would help establish that they are all aligned perpendicularly from the surface, whereas right now their orientation is more approximate. Ultimately a lot of this lesson comes down to the lengths we can go to greater control the outcome. While pushing everything to its fullest extent is not expected for this lesson (since we're just introducing those concepts here), it is something you should strive to do when they come up again in Lesson 7.
When extruding the lens of your camera out, the side edges of that cylinder ended up converging, causing the lens to appear more conical than cylindrical. What can help with this is, instead of drawing the ellipse closer to the viewer and then adding the side edges, we can draw the side edges first, or at least estimate where they would be drawn and place a point as a landmark, based on the alignment of its container box's edges, as shown here. This will give you a better idea of how far out the ellipse needs to extend to ensure the side edges are in the right place.
I also noticed that for the camera lens you appear to have skipped defining the minor axis line, which is very useful for ensuring the ellipse you draw is aligned correctly. Don't skip steps, especially in this course - everything we do here is meant to be hyper-intentional so as to help rewire our instincts, which then influences the way we draw outside of the course, freeing us to devote more of our cognitive resources to what it is we want to draw, rather than how it all needs to be drawn to be correct.
Looking at this remote, based on how you approached the curves in the form it seems you may benefit from reviewing this section on curves from the lesson material. I can see some places - mainly the corners of the body - where you used it a little bit, but this is definitely a construction that would have benefited from a more extensive use of the technique. The section includes a demo for constructing a curving mug handle - that may help you better understand how it can be applied.
Anyway, overall your work is still well done. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for Lesson 7.
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