Hello Harshdeep! It’s been a while, and I hope you’re doing well. As promised, here’s your critique for lesson 6.

Looking at your form intersections, your work here demonstrates a fairly well-developed understanding of how these forms exist in 3d space. This exercise really speaks to the core principle of drawabox as a whole. When it’s introduced in lesson 2, it’s more of an opportunity for students to dip their toes into the vast pool that is spatial reasoning. The constructions drawing exercises that we do throughout lessons 3 to 5 work to further refine this understanding. And so even though you shouldn’t expect to be completely solid, by the time you reach lesson 6, you should have a strong understanding of how flat surfaces intersect in 3d space. I’m also happy to see that you’ve got a decent grasp of how round objects intersect with both flat objects and themselves. While you don’t always get there (mostly when your pyramids poke into round objects), there’s plenty here to be proud of.

Now, moving onto the meat of this lesson is proving to be a bit difficult. Having been so active on discord, you’ve pretty much gotten every pointer I could give you for each of your individual objects. You’ve also gotten about every piece of advice about this lesson, its purpose, and how we go about constructing hard surface objects. So instead of repeating those points - as I’m sure you understand them well - I’d like to take the opportunity to go through your object constructions and give you the key takeaways you’ll need for lesson 7.

The thing you should be most proud of is the level of care and patience you employed when constructing your orthos. I’ve gone over orthos over and over again before, so I’ll spare you the long-winded rant this time. Suffice to say that your use of detailed, labeled, and explicitly subdivided orthos lines up with this lesson’s core focus on precision. I’ll borrow some of comfy’s words on the subject, as he’s able to put it far better than I can:

“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.

Through the use of orthographic plans here, your constructions are all decided upon before you actually start constructing it - that saves your brain a whole lot of trouble when it comes time to actually draw the 3D object, as you can follow the recipe you've already concocted. It's still pretty challenging of course, but it allows you to focus all of your available mental resources on repeating the process, rather than also having to make decisions alongside it.”

As for your work, you’ve done an excellent job making detailed orthographic plans and sticking to them. As you progress as an artist, these processes will eventually become streamlined as they move into your subconscious. For now, having the planning phase be so explicit and so complicated really forces your brain to consider the object you’re trying to construct before you actually go about constructing it. Borrowing comfy’s ghosting comparison, detailing your orthos is essentially like “ghosting” the entire construction; you go through the motions and do all the hard thinking about where your marks should go, which leaves your arm free to execute on your decisions. Instead of being for a line, this exercise takes it up a level to a whole-ass object.

And the complexity becomes greater still. Moving onto lesson 7, it’s easy to get lost in all the additional detail that vehicles bring. However, at the end of the day, we’re still dealing with the same fundamental process – object, ortho, bounding box, subdivisions, draw – just on a much different scale. And yes, it will certainly take much longer for you to determine where each feature goes, which subdivision to use for its placement, how it proportions out etc. etc. But it is still the same process that can be broken down into multiple steps. Take your time. Make your decisions. And don’t stress too much. The headaches that accompany the lesson just mean that you’re learning!

Looking at your lesson 6 work, it’s very clear that you’re well on your way towards completing drawabox as a whole. If you keep the critiques you’ve gotten on discord in mind, as well as the points I’ve brought up here, then I have no doubt that you'll do great. With that being said, I’m happy to mark this lesson as complete. I’ll try to get to your 25 wheels sometime in the next few days here. Until then, make sure you’re keeping up with your 50% drawing and we’ll see each other in the #lesson7 channel.

Ok, I lied. I might repeat at least one more tip from discord.

Please draw through your forms.

heheheheeeeeeeee…