25 Wheel Challenge

9:02 PM, Wednesday July 3rd 2024

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I was absolutely not ready for how much this challenge would kick my ass. I couldn't believe how long I took to finish it. I think it took me longer than 250 boxes and cylinders combined!

At first I thought of going through the challenge without an ellipse template. The first four wheels were drawn freehand. But it quickly became clear that the tool was simply essential to get through the challenge.

Then I took a significant amount of time to accept the fact that the ellipse template is the size it is and to just go with it (seriously though, it is so damn small). Thoughts of 3D printing a bigger template were rampant for quite some time. But I just never got around to doing that.

That and the notion I had about not drawing the exact same wheel twenty five times or even designs that are very similar to each other.

Finding references proved to be much more difficult than expected. Every design I picked took a lot of searching. Finding a happy medium of design intricacy was the hard part, most results had treads that were overwhelmingly complex or too gosh darn simple and lacking decent articulation.

There were streaks of days where I found myself not even picking up the ball point pen. But I am glad I made it nonetheless.

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8:57 PM, Friday July 5th 2024

Based on your description of the troubles you ran into, I can't help but feel a little validated in that ultimately students generally discover that it's best just to stick with what we recommend in the instructions. They will of course still attempt to find other paths, especially when it comes to thinking of their situation as demanding changes, which itself is unfortunate as it means more of their cognitive resources are going towards working against the instructions, thus getting in the way of them applying them as completely as they could have, but it is what it is.

Anyway, jumping right in with the structural aspect of the challenge, there are a few points I wanted to call out, although you're still handling this reasonably well:

  • Firstly, it seems that you're skipping the step of including an ellipse through the midsection as shown here in the instructions. You tend to draw the ellipses on either side, but when it comes to ellipses that would be visible through the form (in the sense of how we draw through our boxes), you seem like you might be avoiding it in favour of a cleaner result.

  • Secondly, you seem to skip the spokes/rims on a lot of these, and in the cases where you do include them you seem to only be considering the outward faces as we see here and here, skipping over establishing the thickness of those structures. This one is better executed in that you've included the side planes to show thickness, but as I noted towards the bottom right, you've got a few that continue on in space instead of cutting off where they hit the inner rim.

Continuing onto the textural aspect of the challenge, this is an area where I expect you had ended up investing the most time and running into the most complexity. It is undeniable that you've put a lot of effort into this part of things - but, as most students do, you've stumbled into a bit of a trap in this regard which definitely had a lot to do with this extra work you put in.

Being as far removed as we are from Lesson 2, it's very common for students to either forget entirely that we have different approaches we employ when delving into texture, or to remember vaguely that there was something, but still not go back and try and figure out what it was. In your case, I expect it was the former - it seems you forgot about it entirely, and as such you ended up employing purely constructional/explicit markmaking techniques, rather than those involving implicit markmaking that were introduced in Lesson 2's texture section.

Looking at any of your wheels in isolation, floating in the void, they look great. But as soon as you incorporate them into, say, an illustration of a car, all of that dense detail and visual complexity that you've needed to define the tire tread structures will draw a lot of attention, creating a focal point in the illustration whether you want it to or not. That isn't ideal, as it takes the ability to control how the viewer's eye experiences the image out of our hands. That's where implicit markmaking, and its focus on drawing the shadows forms cast, rather than the forms themselves, comes in.

As shown in this diagram, depending on how far the form is from the light source, the angle of the light rays will hit the object at shallower angles the farther away they are, resulting in the shadow itself being projected farther. This means that even if we're depicting the exact same texture, the exact same arrangement of forms, it can result in it being depicted with very little visual complexity/contrast (in the case where all the shadows are so big they cover most of the surfaces and merge together, or where the shadows are so small they barely appear), or in it being depicted with lots of visual complexity/contrast (in the case where we're somewhere in between, lots of shadows and lots of lit areas). It also means that this can change as we move along the surface of the form, and don't have to stick to one level of detail density all the way through (hence why we practiced these concepts with the gradients from the texture analysis exercise).

So, as shown here, instead of drawing the textural forms themselves as we would construct any other form (by outlining and defining its volume with edges), we instead have to perform the more mentally taxing task of trying to keep track of how one of these textural forms sits in space, and what surfaces surround it, in order to design a cast shadow shape that reflects that spatial relationship. In the end, what's drawn isn't the textural form, but the impact it has on its surroundings.

Another issue that can arise in regards to all of this is that when it comes to those tires with shallow grooves, or really any texture consisting of holes, cracks, etc. it's very common for us to view these named things (the grooves, the cracks, etc.) as being the textural forms in question - but of course they're not forms at all. They're empty, negative space, and it's the structures that surround these empty spaces that are the actual forms for us to consider when designing the shadows they'll cast. This is demonstrated in this diagram. This doesn't always actually result in a different result at the end of the day, but as these are all exercises, how we think about them and how we come to that result is just as important - if not moreso.

Anyway, I'm still going to be marking this challenge as complete, as these textural issues are expected, and we prefer this challenge serve as a reminder for students to consider what else they might have left behind, and might be worth reviewing. At the very least there's these textural concepts, but do spend some time reflecting on whether or not anything else may have been allowed to slip through the cracks.

And of course, stick to our instructions/recommendations - don't try and find ways to tweak them to suit your situation better, as that's going to take cognitive resources that could otherwise be spent on applying those instructions as they're given.

Next Steps:

Move onto Lesson 7.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
4:42 PM, Saturday July 6th 2024

Thank you for the feedback Uncomfortable :D

I would like to link my references now, as I forgot to do so in the earlier post. I hope this helps someone looking for references. Also I wanted to show you that most of the references I worked with had no spokes and rims, so I guess I was drawing tires rather than complete wheels.

I am absolutely guilty of the first point though.

As far as the textural aspect is concerned, I simply had no idea there was any! And when I your remark about it in the critique I thought, did I really just forgot about an entire dimension of texture? So I checked the challenge literature again, only to realize that there was none! And I must say, I was absolutely not going through this challenge with the intention to capture texture at all. I invested no time whatsoever in texture, all I was focused on was building the wheel up as a three dimensional puzzle, where all the different pieces comes together to create the final result. Taking particular care about the tread pieces and how they wrap around the surface of the wheel as it turns away and towards the viewer, along both the higher and the lower point and the sides. I did not concern myself with the way my references were receiving light and casting shadows.

I'd say if the intent of the challenge was to capture the wheels through implicit mark making then I have gone in a very wrong direction with this whole thing. And I agree, that with the explicit markmaking, a lot of attention will be drawn by the wheels themselves. With that said, were we supposed to deal with this challenge with minimal explicit markmaking? Or a moderate mix of both implicit and explicit markmaking?

5:06 PM, Monday July 8th 2024

The intent of the challenge is to serve as a reminder - if it were mentioned explicitly in the lesson material for the challenge, I would have assigned revisions. It has however served its purpose. When you review the Lesson 2 texture material, you'll see some bits where I talk about how texture is essentially any case where we've got forms arranged along the surface of another structure, so by that definition, our tires definitely apply. For anything that fits that description, implicit markmaking becomes an effective choice, and so that's how we'd approach it in this course - but outside of the course, it's just another tool for you to decide how to employ.

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