Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles

12:06 AM, Saturday October 15th 2022

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I think the ballpoint I was using for the first several vehicles was too rich and giving me issues by not letting me get light lines out of it. I found a generic Bic for the last half which I think helped a lot.

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9:18 PM, Monday October 17th 2022

Starting with your form intersections, you're doing quite well! The intersections themselves are demonstrating a well developed understanding of the relationships between the forms. I'd just advise you to increase the foreshortening on your boxes a little - you're drifting into (and beyond) the territory of making them too parallel. Similarly your cylinders in boxes are coming along well too, save for that same issue - in 1 and 2, as well as to a point number 5, you're simply keeping your boxes' edges way too parallel on the page, effectively forcing them to infinity.

Remember - we do not control our vanishing points directly. We control the orientation we wish to use for a given set of parallel edges in 3D space, and it's that orientation that determines where the vanishing points will go, and if those vanishing points will be at infinity, resulting in the edges being drawn as lines that are parallel on the page. This would only happen if that set of edges were running perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight, without slanting at all towards or away from the viewer through the depth of the scene. Given that we're rotating our forms randomly for this exercise, we can accept that we won't achieve such perfect alignment - but even if we did, it's not possible to have all three sets of edges run perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight. We can max out at two, which effectively forces the last set of lines to run *parallel to the viewer's angle of sight**, resulting in a concrete vanishing point.

Continuing on, before I get to talking about the constructions themselves, I want to note four important points:

  • Firstly, this lesson allows for the use of a ruler - but it appears that while you may have used one for your constructional grids/subdivisions, you did not for the actual constructions themselves, choosing to freehand them instead. The reason for that allowance was not kindness - it was so the students could focus more directly on the tasks involved in the lesson, rather than also bearing the overhead of thinking about how they were executing each individual mark. This of course would not address all situations, it not only allows us to simplify a lot of the linework, it also sets a standard, subtly encouraging us to take more care with the marks we do freehand. There's also a lot to be said about the fact that a ruler effectively shows us exactly how our lines will be extending off into the distance, allowing us to assess a box's convergences prior to drawing the actual lines. Those convergences are something you are certainly struggling with, as we can see in cases such as this one.

  • Secondly, your freehanded linework doesn't adhere to the principles of markmaking, or appear to make much use of the ghosting method, both of which were introduced in Lesson 1. Your linework is sketchy and broken up - for example, we can see a ton of repeated strokes in this drawing, and a general tendency towards not planning things out ahead of time (in terms of the strokes themselves), resulting in a lot of additional "figuring out" being done on the page, where it should not be.

  • Thirdly, the instructions where rulers, ballpoint pens, etc. are permitted state that you should not be reaching for a different kind of pen to then trace back over your previous linework. If you use a ballpoint pen for your constructional grid, that's what you're using through the entire process. In general, "clean-up passes" are firmly against the principles of the course, as discussed as far back as Lesson 2.

  • Lastly, I'm not actually seeing any instances of you using the approach explained here in order to build a 3D unit grid to maintain the proportions of your objects. I did see that you used ellipse guides in the 25 wheel challenge - which it's normal for a limited master ellipse template to not provide us with enough options to draw all of our ellipses without resorting to freehand, at the very least it provides what we need to lay down the beginnings of a consistent grid.

Now, given these significant deviations from the instructions of both this lesson and this course, I am going to skip over critiquing your vehicles, and instead ask that you complete an additional 4 pages of vehicle constructions. I considered assigning a full 8, but I reflected upon that and decided it was not necessary. Do the 4 pages, and invest as much time into each and every one of them as you reasonably can, while also using the tools you have at your disposal.

Next Steps:

Please submit 4 additional pages of vehicle constructions. At least one of them should be a car, but you can choose whatever you like for the other three.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
8:12 PM, Saturday October 22nd 2022
6:12 PM, Monday October 24th 2022

Your work here is vastly improved over previously. While it's not so much that it demonstrates a greater level of understanding of the material itself (there were examples in your original set that did demonstrate that you understand how to approach this kind of construction in a general sense), your work here shows that understanding more consistently while also showing that you can really push yourself to execute your linework here with the kind of forethought and planning that allows for solid, believable constructions.

You've demonstrated considerable patience with each one, subdividing each as much as was needed. I really have just one complaint, and it's fairly minor in the grand scheme of things - the point I raised previously about avoiding "clean-up" passes - that is, going back over the entirety of the object to kind of have it separate from the underlying subdivision/construction. I totally understand why you went with that approach, given all of the subdivision lines, but remember that within your drawings for this course, we want to limit ourselves to applying additional line weight/thickness only in specific, localized areas to help clarify the overlaps between specific forms. You can read more about this here.

Obviously this is more specific to how we're drawing in this course (which you've now finished), but this approach can help students develop a more nuanced understanding of the tool that is line weight, and how it can be used to achieve their goals in more normal situations (like where you're not forced to deal with all your underlying construction lines).

Anyway! All in all, great stuff. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson, and the course with it, as complete. Congratulations!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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