I think this might be the toughest, longest lesson for me so far. I feel like I really struggled with this one and a major part of that is just keeping track of the countless lines everywhere. It was hard to focus on only the lines relevant to the plane I was working on.
When students push into Lesson 6 territory, aside from the cylinder challenge (specifically the cylinders in boxes, which do put students in a similar situation what they're tackling here), they're primarily coming from a much more forgiving set of challenges. It's not that Lessons 3-5 aren't difficult, but rather it allows for a great deal of imprecision without issue. We put marks down freely, and we kind of figure things out from there, and we aren't really encouraged to think through all of the specifics of each decision to the degree that we are here. So, that you found this lesson especially difficult, makes a lot of sense.
Before we dig into that further, let's start with your form intersections. Your work here is coming along quite well, I caught one little hiccup here but by and large you're demonstrating a really solid understanding of how these forms relate to one another in 3D space. One thing I did notice however was that you didn't seem to play with any round-on-round intersections (ball x cylinder, cylinder x cone, cylinder x cylinder, etc). These are definitely the most difficult type of intersection, and we don't really expect students to be 100% there with them at this point, but it is definitely something you should be exploring.
Back to your object constructions - as I mentioned above, the big change is that now we're focusing a lot on 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. Of course how successful we are in matching those proportions correctly does depend on how we draw that initial bounding box (making it too long or too short will then throw off the other internal measurements) but as far as this lesson, and this course goes, we're not concerned with that at all. Your overall proportions can be all kinds of wacky, but as long as you are thinking through the process of breaking that complex subject down to determine where all of its elements go, and then reconstructing that on the page in a step by step manner that maintains the solidity of the construction, then you're golden.
And that's precisely what you've been doing. Difficult as it may have been, you did not allow the struggle to keep you from working through the process step by step. I'm extremely pleased with just about all of these - constructions like this spray can. Hell, your screwdriver and the sheer degree of subdivision you've applied is insane as well. This can be said about every drawing here - you put the time in, you demonstrated immense patience and care, and you really knocked it out of the park.
As if it even bears mentioning at this point, I'm also pleased to see that you've stuck very solidly to your boxy structures (only rounding off corners towards the end as instructed in the lesson), and when it comes to drawing those initial bounding boxes, I'm not seeing much lopsidedness or awkwardness to how they're laid out which honestly isn't uncommon for students at this point.
As a whole, you've done an incredible job, and you should be proud of yourself - all the moreso given how difficult the exercise was. I wish I could say this is the peak, it's all easy from here, but unfortunately that would be a lie. Lesson 7 is much the same, but a lot worse. All the same, I know you have it in you to knock it out of the park - but before that, there's one last challenge in your way. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge.
Thanks for the kind words, Uncomfy.
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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