Lesson 6: Applying Construction to Everyday Objects

While this demonstration focuses on an extremely simple object, it covers a couple of very important topics - handling curves, and using subdivision to position elements within a given surface.

The demo video includes full audio and discussion of the concepts demonstrated in the drawing.

Here's our reference - it's a dead simple bluetooth speaker, and while it's got some interesting details (mostly in those circular holes littering all its surfaces), we're going to be ignoring them entirely.

As one might imagine, we're starting with a box. you'll notice immediately that the far right vertical line of this box is a bit dramatic. When this happens to you, you may think, "well damn, I'm going to start over on a fresh page". Don't.

Mistakes happen, but there's a lot of value in seeing a construction through to the end regardless.

You'll also notice that I've drawn crosses on many of the planes of this box. If you're not sure of what I'm doing here, or if you haven't watched the advanced boxes video, go give it a look. It covers concepts involved with splitting a box into equal parts, which is integral to this lesson as a whole.

As you can see in the reference image, this speaker has very clearly curved (beveled) edges. It's often a bit tempting to just jump right in and curve them immediately, but I want you to fight that urge.

Instead, we're going to deal with straight edges and sharp corners as long as we can through this construction. The reason for this is that a curve is, by its very nature, a vague answer.

In previous lessons and demonstrations, I've explained the constructional method to consist of a series of questions being answered. We take a very complicated question, or problem, and we break it down into many smaller, manageable ones. We then, through drawing, answer each question or solve each problem, working our way up until eventually the whole complicated question is answered.

A curving line, if not following a clearly defined path, is by its nature a vague answer that can summarize or represent many different combinations of straight lines.

Applying the technique discussed in the intro video for this lesson, where we take a line on a plane and mirror it across the center of that plane, we can transfer one end of our cut corner to the opposite side. This can be used whenever you need to transfer such a detail to the other side of the plane it is on.

When you want to transfer it to a different plane, however - one that sits opposite it across the box, then we can draw a line across it, minding one of the box's original vanishing points to create a cross-sectional cut.

While this image looks a bit visually complicated, it's a repetition of the same process. We're using the mirroring technique in some cases, and creating cross-sectional slices in others, to transfer this cut corner to all the other corners of the box.

With our corners cut, we still have a bit more construction to do here - positioning the big button. I've mostly used a combination of approximation and mirroring the vertical lines across the center of that front plane to create a squarish cut, centered horizontally and set towards the bottom half of the box as observed in my reference image.

I was eyeballing that position, though upon further inspection after the fact, I found that the top edge of the button sat flush with the vertical center of the box. My estimation came pretty close, but I could definitely have been more conscientious about that.

I've created a bit of an inset here, by drawing my usual diagonals from corner to corner, and picking a position along one of those diagonals. I then draw lines around it, keeping parallel to the outer edges of the plane.

The last major step is just to apply the same principle of inset lines to create the concentric lines along the top face of the speaker. I've also rounded out the corners that we cut initially, sticking closely to the straight lines.