Starting with your form intersections, you're definitely moving in the right direction here and I can see you making a clear effort to apply the principles I explained before when sharing this diagram with you in Lesson 5. Normally I introduce it here in Lesson 6, as it is still entirely normal for students to struggle with these concepts, but generally in having practiced this exercise along with all of the constructional drawing up until this point, they're in a stronger position to understand those concepts and move forward.

Now, there are still a number of individual points I want to draw to your attention in regards to these intersections. Your work in many areas shows a better grasp of the more complex intersections than I'd expect at this stage (especially rounded surfaces intersecting with rounded surfaces), but I believe that a good bit of this is because you're at that stage where you're kind of memorizing the rules and trying to guess at how they apply. That's part of the process, but what we really want to get to is the point where you're thinking about the underlying components themselves, and how they create the rules that you're pulling from your memory. It's this that'll allow you to tackle a wider variety of odd or unique circumstances that might not fit perfectly into set rules.

Here I've put a number of notes on your first page of intersections.

• One notable issue I see coming up often is that when you've got two flat surfaces intersecting (like the various intersections between the chains of 3 boxes in the upper left), you often use curved intersections. The important thing to recognize here is that all the surfaces that are intersecting are flat - so the intersection defined between them will itself be one or multiple straight lines. There's no rounded surfaces involved, so there's nothing to provide any curves.

• Another point I noticed is that when dealing with cylinders, it's important to keep in mind that these forms are a combination of flat and curved surfaces. The ends are most definitely flat, so if we had an intersection between a box and just an end of a cylinder, the intersection line we can see will still be a straight line, since it only involves flat surfaces. If the intersection also crossed over into the length of the cylinder, this might introduce a curve, but if it's only engaging with the end, it's just a flat surface. This actually gets a little more complicated too - even the length of the cylinder isn't just a curved surface. It's curved wrapping around the cylinder, but lengthwise it's also straight. So if you had a box and a cylinder intersecting, and the box aligned perfectly to the cylinder as shown here, despite intersecting with the midsection, it's still only engaging with it in a direction in which it is straight - thus, the intersection is just a straight line with no curve.

• As an extension of the previous point, there's a cylinder-box intersection towards the middle-right where I point out that one of your intersection lines would be a shallower curve, because it runs along the curving portion of the cylinder, but is angled such that it runs more along the length (which is straight) - so you'd get the biggest curve wrapping around the cylinder, but as the angle of the intersection shifts to incorporate more of the length-wise direction, the curve gets shallower until we end up in the alignment I referenced at the end of the previous point, where this portion of the intersection becomes completely straight.

• I also did notice some places where the curvature of a given intersection was inverted - for example, where towards the top-right of the page I write "follow the curve of the surface", it's because you drew the intersection line backwards. The way it was drawn had it going into the volume of the sphere, but we want to focus on keeping our intersection lines along the surface of both forms at all times.

The big takeaway here is to focus on the individual surfaces involved in order to determine where the intersections are straight, where they should be curved, as well as by how much and in what direction.

Continuing onto the object constructions, I wanted to quickly address one thing you mentioned in your submission comment:

if this is something as important as 'this is how I'll construct every object I ever draw from now on', then it's worth spending a lot of time on.

While I absolutely commend the mindset behind it - as there are indeed things that are worth spending time on, and this is certainly one of them - I did want to correct the misconception that this is how you'll be constructing every object you ever draw from now on. While the techniques we teach throughout this course (specifically constructional drawing) can absolutely be used to solve tricky spatial problems ("tricky" being a bit of a variable term here, as it's based entirely on your own skill level and what you find to be tricky), the core goal is not actually to show you a formula to use for your drawings going forward.

Rather, the reason that these exercises are so demanding of our time, patience, and attention, is because they are the process of actively rewiring the way in which our brains engage with the world and with the things we draw. Every single construction is itself a 3D spatial puzzle that our brains are made to solve. In so doing, we gauge the relationships between different elements - drawn on a flat page, but representing 3D forms, with relationships between them that exist in three dimensions as well.

So what we're learning here is not how to draw, but rather it's how to train your spatial reasoning skills, how to perform the exercises in a manner that will continue to hone that ability going forward. How you actually draw your own things (as also noted in the 50% rule's FAQ) is entirely up to you. In practicing these exercises, and through the extensive mileage students are put through in the course alone, the intent is that how you understand the things you're trying to draw is what will be changed - so however you ultimately choose to draw those things, it's all fueled by this underlying understanding of how those things are three dimensional, not just lines and shapes stitched together on the page to fool the viewer.

We are not fooling anyone - we are sharing a lie we believe in ourselves. This course, and these constructional drawing exercises, teach us to believe that lie.

You are of course right though - for those reasons, it's extremely important that we take our time as we work through these exercises, because it's all about the act of going through the steps one at a time, in a very intentional manner. This lesson, as well as Lesson 7, end up being extremely time consuming for this reason, because where in the previous constructional drawing lessons we've been working more inside-out, where we could roll with the small mistakes we might have made in proportion and such, just accommodating them in how we build up the next set of forms, here we do have to be considerably more intentional. Ultimately this lesson ends up focusing heavily on the concept of precision.

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.

When it comes to your actual object constructions (which I'm only getting to 1500 words into my feedback, lol), there is much you're doing well, but there are also some ways in which you're making things harder on yourself than you need to. One of those comes down to the simple matter of using a ruler. Overall I suspect that you are using a ruler when it comes to laying out your initial bounding box and subdivisions, although it seems like you're less likely to use the tool when it comes to the later steps as you break down your structure further and build up the object itself.

Since the critique is already plenty long, I'm going to split the remainder of the critique under a few headings to help make it a little easier to absorb.

Use your ruler wherever you can.

To reiterate what's stated in the instructions, this is not us being kind, or gentle, for those who need it. We recommend students use rulers for all their straight lines throughout this lesson because the purpose of this lesson is not to help you develop your freehand linework. Lessons 1 and 2, and the various challenges do plenty of that, and introduce students to many exercises that ultimately become part of their regular warmup routine to continue honing those skills. That's a life-long thing of continuous practice, so we understand that students at this point in the course will still be sharpening their abilities in that area. This means that if they're free-handing their linework in this lesson, they're also committing an amount of their finite mental resources towards that freehanding, leaving less to be allocated to the specific problems being explored in the given lesson.

Of course this applies to ellipses as well (with ellipse guides), but in that area it's pretty normal for people to have to freehand their lines, simply because the nature of the constructions we're doing here demand a wide variety of ellipses that can really only be achieved by getting a full set of ellipse guides... which is prohibitively expensive. So we understand students freehanding their ellipses in that case (although note that the 25 wheel challenge can be done with a master ellipse template, which is much more affordable and highly recommended).

Now, there are aspects of a ruler that can help more than just by providing a reliable way to make straight lines. If we take a look at this amp construction, we can see some cases where the edges that are meant to be parallel in 3D space (which I've highlighted here) are not as consistent in their convergences as they could be. The one labelled E is particularly off the mark. While this is something that continuing to practice the freely rotated boxes and line extensions from the box challenge will help with long-term, using a ruler effectively gives us a live extension of the line we wish to draw, allowing us to estimate how it's going to converge with the other lines already present to help us avoid major mistakes. It does however require us to use the tool in that manner however, and is not itself a given.

Don't jump straight into curves - build them up as chains of straight lines first, then round them out later.

Another area I feel could be improved is with how you handle rounded and curving surfaces. Here in the notes, I explain that jumping into curves too soon can impede the illusion of solidity of the structure, as the curves themselves are kind of vague by their very nature. Instead, we can pin down a much more solid structure by building them up first as a chain of straight edges or flat surfaces, and then rounding them out towards the end.

As shown here on your mouthwash bottle, I think holding to those principle more closely would have definitely helped. That is, by first building out the structure with more flat surfaces/straight edges, and then rounding them out only at the end. You can also see this same principle demonstrated here in this mug demo where I go through the process in a more granular level as I build out the curving handle. The core is still the same - start out with a boxy structure, and only when it's pinned down with all the structural complexity you're after, should you round it out. Don't try and jump to those curves too early.

Using orthographic plans.

This one's something that was introduced in the computer mouse demo, but ultimately when my overhaul of the lesson content reaches this lesson, I'm going to be putting a lot more emphasis on how this can be put to better use. Between now and then, I share that information with students in the critiques I give, so I'll be doing that here.

In the computer mouse demo, we basically look at the base and side views, laying them out in a bounding rectangle, and then subdividing it into quadrants in order to give us grid lines we can use to better approximate our landmarks. Basically the idea is that these landmarks give us a closer reference point against which to approximate their positioning.

To that point, I did notice that you did miss some steps to this effect from the demo - most notably where we laid out the same quadrant subdivisions to the base plane of the 3D bounding box in which the mouse was being constructed. In forgetting to add them, you ended up eyeballing the landmarks of that base shape against only 5 reference points - the 4 corners of the bottom plane, and its center point.

How I want you to use this technique going forward pushes us in the opposite direction - rather than less subdivision, we're going to be relying on more, identifying the landmarks, their positioning and their relationships with much more specificity. Rather than explaining it in text, I instead ended up spending quite a long time creating this demo using your mouthwash bottle and making it as detailed as I could. By nature, this kind of thing is extremely time consuming, so it certainly will be that for you as well.

There are two key points in this:

• Every single action I've demonstrated there for this orthographic, two dimensional analysis of the object, can be reproduced in three dimensions. It relies either on subdivision, mirroring, or leveraging the points at which diagonals cross established horizontals or verticals. We can follow the exact same steps on a plane in 3D space, allowing us to transfer this information into 3D space... as long as we're patient about it.

• We are not finding the accurate locations for each landmark. Rather, we are deciding where they will go. The reference image is a source of information, but how we ultimately use it is up to us to decide, so we do have the freedom to say "I'm going to go with 2/5ths instead of 19/50ths". Of course the more of this we use, the further we may drift from the actual reference, but for our purposes in this course that is fine. What matters is that the plan we create here, and the construction we ultimately create in 3D space match up and follow the same process.

I'll be adding this demo to the lesson in order to help provide other students with more instruction on how to leverage these orthographic plans, at least until I am in a position to redo the official demos more thoroughly.

Conclusion and next steps

Ultimately I'm only going to be asking for one more object construction from you, but this is definitely going to be the most time consuming drawing/exercise you've ever embarked upon. Once you've had several opportunities to go through my feedback, to take notes on what I've called out, and so on, I want you to pick a single object and do a construction of it. Start by creating the orthographic plans as I've detailed in my demonstration above. I strongly recommend picking something simple. The mouthwash bottle was a good one - if you can find another similar object (even better if it gives you an opportunity to demonstrate the approach to building up curves I explained in my critique), then that'll be good.

Once both your orthographic plans are completed, you can start on your object construction. I expect this work will be the result of many individual sessions across several days. Take breaks, spread the work out, and take photos of your work after each break, along with noting down the duration of each session on the page.

And of course, use the tools you have at your disposal to the fullest.