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6:49 PM, Tuesday July 16th 2024

Jumping in with your form intersections, your work here is by and large coming along very well. While there are some bits that are a little rough - for example, confidently adding line weight so as not to have it wobble - but as a whole I can clearly see that the choices you're making demonstrate a strong and well developing understanding of the relationships between these forms. At this stage in the game we expect students to be comfortable with intersections involving flat surfaces, but to still struggle when curved surfaces are added into the mix, but as I can see it from your work, you're comfortable with both. You do hesitate when adding that line weight (as you obviously don't want it to go way off track), but that's really the only issue. Just be sure to remind yourself when tackling that line weight that these are just exercises, so getting everything to fall perfectly where it needs to go isn't important. What matters is the process we use, the choice to execute our marks with confidence no matter how important their accuracy may seem, so that we can hone the skills involved.

Continuing onto your object constructions, overall these are similarly well done. I'm pleased to see that you've held closely to the use of orthographic plans, which really reinforces the core principles of precision that we espouse throughout 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, which we plan out using our orthographic plans. As I mentioned above, I'm very pleased to see that you've been employing them, and I can see that over the course of the set how you employ them improves, although there are a few areas where being a bit more explicit with the decisions we're making while laying out our orthographic plan can definitely help.

This one is admittedly one of your weaker orthographic plans - you've done much better in others, but I wanted to start by pointing out this issue where it is most prominent, so it can be most clearly understood. Here, only the vertical going down the center of the side view, and the vertical going down the center of the front view, is actually established in a specific fashion, because they're anchored to the center point which was determined via subdivision - a process that can be used in exactly the same fashion in a 3D construction, as it could in this 2D plan.

The others - many of which I've highlighted, but it basically covers everything else - appear to be placed by eye. For the sake of argument though, let's say you placed them by measuring out the distances with a ruler. This approach wouldn't work, because it only works in 2D space. Once transferred to a 3D structure, we have to deal with perspective, and so those measurements aren't able to be used meaningfully. It's for this reason that we want to use subdivision to pin everything down - we can make the decisions about where things should go in these 2D plans, and then directly transfer those decisions to 3D space without additional thinking or consideration.

That isn't to say that every spatial relationship must be determined very specifically - just that the more you can do to avoid total guesswork, the more you can anchor each decision on something else, the better. Looking at this wall wart, the edges of the prongs at the top may not be positioned in very specific proportional terms (in terms of, one prong goes from 2/10ths of the object's width to 3/10ths), but they are anchored to each other in how you've used mirroring across the central axis, which does increase the precision with which we're working. Often times that is enough, but ultimately it's a decision you make, as long as you're not leaving anything completely untethered and entirely based on guesswork.

An example where you've generally done a much better job but still have some "untethered" elements would be this soap dispenser. As a whole though, I am still very happy with how you've progressed as you've worked through each of these, with your use of these orthographic plans and their application to your constructions becoming more specific and thought out.

The only other area I wanted to comment on quickly is in regards to handling curved structures - for example, the spout of this watering can. Based on that plan, it's possible you may have been aware of this section from the notes which talks about establishing curves first as chains of straight edges, only to round them out towards the very end, but I'm a little unsure. For the longer section of the spout you stuck with a single edge for either side, which doesn't really give you anything to "round out", resulting in you having to estimate the curves when you put them in. This is basically what that'd look like, although here's just the straight edges on their own as they get a little covered up in the end. Each corner would also result in its own set of horizontal and vertical land marks to be pinned down, so this isn't exactly a quick-and-easy approach, but it does focus on precision, and allowing us to build up to a specific, controlled result.

Anyway! Keep what I've said here in mind, but I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work.

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.
7:10 PM, Tuesday July 16th 2024

Thank you for your critique !!! And thanks for your work ????????

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The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"

It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.

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