Exceptional work. I'm really loving how you're clearly approaching these complex objects in terms of rudimentary boxes and cylinders, without getting distracted by the superfluous detail. The drawing of the ship on page 3 is by far my favourite - both for how you constructed it, as well as for the unconventional subject matter.
The only real suggestion I have at this point is to be mindful of your lines - you have a tendency to mess up some of those that should be straight, especially when constructing your subdivision grids. This is natural, of course, but be sure to keep up with some of the exercises from the earlier lessons to continue sharpening those skills at a base level.
Really at this point, you clearly have a strong understanding of space, it's just a matter of sharpening the rudimentary skills. I'm very glad to see that you're practicing wheels and ellipses, as those can be some of the toughest elements to contend with.
Anyways, keep up the fantastic work, and congratulations on completing the dynamic sketching lessons.
Hello again Uncomfortable. Homework for Lesson 7: http://imgur.com/a/ce9Hz ,with most of the references I used included this time. Like lesson 6 I found this kinda difficult. I think I'm getting there but not quite, as my drawings mostly resemble my references but not quite.
Drawing much longer straight lines sometimes seemed a bit hit and miss, despite always ghosting them; which could be a problem when I had box plane midpoint reference lines everywhere.
I also think I rushed in places, when I shouldn't have, leading to having to correct myself like the nose of the Chinook.
Anyway, thank you for your time and I look forward to what you have to say.
Really, really nice work. Your proportions are askew in some places (the scooter, the pickup, etc but what's really important to me is your sense of construction. I'm really happy to say that your constructions are really solid. In a lot of places, even when your proportions are off, your forms still have a tendency to feel quite solid.
The proportion will come with practice - it's a matter of experience, as well as patience (as you noticed). That said, with the solid core of form and construction, I don't think it'll take too long to round out sense of proportion.
I do still think there's a lot of value in continuing to pick a few exercises from lessons 1 and 2 to do as warmups before getting down to the day's work, though - from now until the end of time. Your ellipses/cylinders could use some polish, and as you noticed, long lines are understandably challenging.
Anyway, congratulations on completing the dynamic sketching lesson set! Though these lessons have been here for quite a while, there aren't many who've reached the end. Well done!
Your work is coming along well. There are a few areas of weakness that I'll mention in a second, but generally you are moving right along in the correct direction. These kinds of constructions tend to be particularly challenging, both due to their geometric nature, as well as the scale of them - which, despite being drawn from photo reference, actually has an impact on how we perceive them.
Okay, so there's two things that I'd like to mention:
Your ellipses. Your ellipses definitely need work, and I certainly hope that you haven't abandoned the exercises from lesson 1 and 2. As you continue to move through the lessons, and really until the end of time, you should continue to pick two or three exercises each day from that set to do as warmups before moving onto that day's work. These are skills that will take time and persistence to develop, and will impact the quality of your work immensely. On a related note, be sure to check out the 250 cylinder challenge. It includes notes on how to construct a cylinder and the importance of the minor axis, things you seem to have missed out on before attempting this lesson.
When constructing an object, there's often a point where the student will move away from construction and draw the rest of the object's details by eye. This makes a lot of sense when you're drawing organic things, like animals where you don't want to consider the form of each lock of fur, or scales, or whatever else. When it comes to geometric objects, on the other hand, I find that those who excel will never actually move away from construction. They generally don't do any sort of a 'cleanup' pass, to redraw their object on top of their construction lines. The forms they've constructed are their object, and at most they add line weight here and there to emphasize some lines over others. They never replace them, however - this is something I'm seeing in your drawings a lot.
Ultimately, I think this demo (from this gallery which you should check out if you haven't already) is a good example of how to approach construction. Construct as much as you can out of boxes and cylinders, and don't worry about superfluous detail. If there's a detail you feel is important, construct it out of more boxes/cylinders - do not simply draw it on by eye. Once you're done all of this, you can round out your corners (as I did on that spray bottle).
Anyway, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, but if you'd like to submit more work for this lesson in the future, feel free.
Definitely making improvements. That tank is looking quite nice. With the boat, I think you're breaking forms down too quickly, skipping steps. There's a lot of points in your construction that you've placed based on guesswork, rather than subdivision of your larger box.
Remember what I mentioned before, about sticking to constructive boxes as long as you can. I'd push the construction to a point like this before even considering any sort of guesswork or estimation: http://i.imgur.com/6Ktx0U0.png.
Hey! I know you're not taking critiques right now... So I'm not submitting anything yet, however I wanted to ask- your lessons seem to focus on drawing things near to us humans. (Man made objects, animals, plants...) Do you have any tips on how to deal with things like the ocean, water, clouds, and the like? Any resources you'd recommend for learning how to deal with these?
Also, I didn't know where to post this comment, so I hope this is okay.
The thing about these lessons is not that they teach you how to draw specific things - it's not about learning how to draw plants, insects, animals, etc. It's about learning how to capture form, volume and the illusion of weight and solidity by looking at the problem through many different lenses. You may think of these problems as being different, but as you go through similar challenges with each, you'll come to realize that it's really all the same thing.
Water and clouds both have form and volume to them - being truly aware of this on more than a superficial level will allow you to carve their silhouettes in a way that conveys that form to the person looking at the drawing. The lack of form in peoples' clouds is one of the most common problems there - people always look at them as flat shapes in the sky, and this makes them fairly unconvincing.
The ocean makes me think you're getting more into questions of landscape. Landscapes, like everything else, are built on an awareness and understanding of form, but as the majority of what you're drawing is so vast and so distant, it tends to become flattened into more graphic shapes. Because of this, the question becomes more of composition (how we lay out those shapes) as well as the use of light and colour. I have no lessons on the latter point, though I hope to delve into that some day. One book I'd recommend on that topic is Color and Light by James Gurney. That said, it is an advanced topic, so I would not recommend worrying much about that until you've established a strong sense of form.
I'll check out the book! (Maybe I'll eventually purchase it, once I've completed your lessons and have gathered some more confidence in my ability to understand 3D forms and the like.) Sorry to bother you when you're so busy, and thank you for taking the time to answer my question! I'll try to think of these problems as simply some complex applications of the lessons you teach, that I can come back to in the future.
Hello again! As always i thank you, that give us some of your time to check our homeworks is truly amazing. That said, Here it's my 7th Homework!.
I realized that i had some troubles with cylinders so i worked on them along the homework, and when it came to plane + submarine i think they came out right.
I think you'd likely benefit a lot form completing the 250 box/cylinder challenges - the earlier lessons don't deal too much in geometric construction but once you get here, it's painfully difficult to avoid. It doesn't help that we haven't really dealt with cylinders explicitly yet (unless you chose to do the cylinder challenge on your own), so it's no wonder that you'd find them quite challenging.
Looking at your work, setting aside the general construction of boxes and cylinders, proportion is definitely a concern. It takes a great deal of repeated practice to really get a sense of how to take the 2D proportion studies you did (which were well done) and transfer them to 3D. When the overall box that you start with isn't entirely solid, however, it gets even harder.
I think overall, despite these challenges, you're on the right track. A lot of it is going to come from a hell of a lot more practice, but what's important is that you're taking each construction and pushing it all the way through to the end. Also, I think your work does improve overall as you push through, and your focused practice on cylinders has helped.
One thing I want to recommend is that you try and keep your constructions in the realm of primitive 3D forms as long as possible. There's always a point where we transition into saying, okay these last few details don't need plotting, we'll just slap them on. Try to keep this as late as possible, or even go ahead and skip that step altogether. Detail isn't important here at all. What's important is getting your geometric forms to fit together properly, to make sure that their proportions are correct and that they align with one another as they're meant to.
Oh, one other thing that comes to mind - one of my instructor used to do a lot of really heavy construction drawing with all sorts of lines, and then he'd take a sheet of tracing paper and lay it on top, and then do his detail pass. In this particular case, this may be worth trying out.
Anyway, I'll mark this lesson as complete, since from here on it's just going to be a shit ton of practice.
Well done! Generally your sense of construction and your adherence to the geometric stage of things (that is, holding off on going into detail and treating things as simple geometric forms for as long as possible) has paid off. From what I can see, I definitely think you'd benefit form at least looking at the notes on the 250 cylinder challenge page as you definitely need a crash course on constructing cylinders (doing the challenge would actually be a good idea). Also, your weaker constructions often go that way largely due to a weaker initial box - so if the box you start off with is a little skewed or lopsided, you that trickles down into the rest of your drawing.
That is, in many ways, good news - just stay on top of practicing your boxes (this comic comes to mind).
I especially liked your volkswagon beetle, and the race car on page 12. Keep up the great work, and consider this lesson complete.
The chicken scratch returned a bit, but I tried hard to mitigate it. I feel it pops up when tackling harder problems and goes away as I gain confidence in drawing the more complex shapes.
It's about as good a start as I'd expect. Vehicles are tough, and the best way to approach them is to consciously think of them as a collection of basic forms arranged in a particular way, rather than the object itself (the same schpiel I've mentioned in the past). This is specifically why your first couple drawings (the truck and the train) come out more successfully than the later ones, where you tend to be thinking a lot more about the object itself, rather than the forms.
You are improving though. One thing you're continually missing is the use of the minor axis when constructing cylinders. In the case of wheels, definitely draw one big cylinder across the whole axle of a pair of wheels (which I see you doing later on in the lesson, so good job on that), but also start them off as a box first in order to get the alignment right. Construct a box, find the center point of its two opposing planes, draw a minor axis between those two points and then use the minor axis to construct your cylinder.
Also, DRAW BIGGER! You're a Forbes 30 under 30, you can afford the paper! When you lose confidence, it's totally normal to draw smaller, but this is going to hamstring you. Right now you need a fair bit of room for your brain to think through the spatial problems involved. Trying to work in a third of a page is going to limit you in that sense, causing you to make quite a few mistakes that you may not have otherwise made.
Anyway, keep at it. Vehicles are going to take a while to properly solidify, but ultimately it will pay off. I look forward to seeing your full set.
Your bus and truck are looking great. Very solid, very well constructed. Some of your other constructions are less good, and aside from the planes (which are utterly unfathomably stupid as a topic and I hate them and UGH i can never express how much I hate drawing planes) it really has a lot to do with how closely you keep track of your proportions, whether or not you draw your initial box properly, and whether or not you adhere to it.
Looking at the taxi, you've got a lot of arbitrary space on top of the taxi itself both in your proportion study and in your final drawing. I guess it's good that you were consistent, but the space in the proportion study doesn't serve any purpose. You should strive to construct the box so that it fits the overall form of something snugly in all dimensions. Think of it like packing something into a cardboard box. If there's extra room, it's going to move around and get damaged - you want to make sure that it's flush with all sides.
Now, if you start off with a box that is constructed incorrectly (say, near plane smaller than the far plane), it's inherently going to lead you down the wrong path. I mean, you're either going to be working the whole time to compensate for a fundamental problem, or you're going to adhere to the box and end up with a sort of reversed perspective. Really there's no way around this but to practice your boxes a lot, both so you can construct them better on your first try, and so you can identify the mistakes as soon as they occur.
The motorcycle definitely was a tough one, but you jumped in too loose to begin with. A tire is actually pretty complex as a form - it's not just a cylinder, but rather has several tiers - it's more of a cylinder with beveled edges. So, as a complex form, if you try and jump in to draw it without going through the various stages of construction, it's more than likely going to fall a bit flat. Then there's the internal section (the seat, the engine, etc.) which should have started out as solid boxes, subdivided and refined into more complex forms, rather than jumping into that complexity too early on. Keep in mind that by complexity, I really mean anything that isn't a very basic, simple geometric form. In certain cases an organic form can be considered the a simple form as well, but if you look at something like the motorbike seat, it's got a lot of specific deformations and clear planes to it that really need more support and scaffolding in order to properly flesh them out.
Now, with the planes (and this applies to that submarine as well) it's not always the best idea to fit the whole thing into a box. The lesson didn't cover this at all, so it's by no fault of your own. In this particular case, I would personally try to capture the fuselage inside of that initial box. The wings are inherently difficult to capture in terms of size, and the way that I learned it in my dynamic sketching class three years ago still doesn't sit that well with me, but I really can't think of a better way. It's all about eyeballing the proportions, and comparing them to other points on the image.
By reference points, I mean looking at the tip of a wing and drawing a perfectly horizontal or vertical line across your reference image to find some other landmark that it lines up with. What bugs me about this method is that there isn't always a landmark to compare against. In that case, I tend to err on the side of drawing a shorter wing, knowing that I can always extend it further later.
I spent a while this evening drawing out a demo on how I'd draw a plane, starting with the proportion study and how I go about using it. You'll notice that I don't treat the fuselage as a cylinder. I could but I find that this tends to throw the curvature off somewhat, and makes it feel a little less natural. In truth, the fuselage is somewhere between a geometric cylinder and an organic form. And so, I call it the great skysausage.
Now, with your truck and bus, I am pretty satisfied with your work. That said, I do feel like as you went through the rest, you started to adhere to the rules and concepts you'd learned from the lesson a little more loosely, which makes me want to reinforce them a little more.
I'd like you to do another four pages of vehicle drawings. Take your time, and focus on constructing the hell out of them. Oh, and another important thing - your linework is getting pretty sketchy. Reel yourself back, and apply that ghosting method. Think through each mark before you draw it, don't jump in shooting from the hip and then reinforcing lines by reflex when they don't come out right. And keep using that F pen, that's more similar in thickness to the pen that I use. Super Fine is probably too thin.
Definitely moving in the right direction. That last taxi is quite striking. Your planes are also feeling more solid. Keep driving yourself to get the proportions of your initial boxes right, and to work in terms of strictly geometric and simple forms only for as long as possible (ignoring the fact that you're drawing an actual object, and focusing on it as just being more of a form intersections exercise where all the forms are arranged in a particular way).
I'll be marking this lesson as complete. I gather you might be interested in moving onto lesson 8 next, so I wanted to let you know that I have plans to rewrite all of the figure drawing content. I'm not at all satisfied with what I've got up there right now, and I really want to improve it. That said, it's on the backlog, and I intend to add intro videos and redo the demos for lessons 5-7 beforehand, so it may be a few weeks to even over a month before I can get there.
You're still free to start on those lessons if you wish, or you may want to take a break, or perhaps spend some time revising old material (and going through the new demos/videos) to solidify your grasp of what you've already covered. Taking some time to really digest what you've learned and reflect upon it could definitely be beneficial, since you've been tearing through this stuff pretty quickly.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll be switching over to composition next I think, and then coming back to the figure stuff. Meanwhile practicing bits from the first 2 lessons.
I'll check out those new videos and demos soon too.
[deleted]
2016-09-05 16:07
Hello! Thank you for your lessons! I have a profile on DeviantArt and there are a lot of my homeworks about your lessons. Could you watch my drawings and say some critics. I've read your thougts about ink drawing, but i still prefer pencils ecpecially for fast reference. This is the link: http://vano1337.deviantart.com/gallery/
I'm glad to hear that you've been making use of my lessons. Unfortunately due to the massive amount of work involved in doing homework critiques, there are certain requirements that I have in place to help keep the workload more manageable:
Lessons must be completed in order, waiting for me to give my critique and mark a lesson as complete before moving onto the next one
Lessons must be completed using the required tools listed in that lesson's homework section (1-7 requires ink, 3-7 specifically requiring felt tip pens)
One month out of every three, I restrict my critiques to patreon supporters only (to give myself a break).
I'd love to be able to give critiques to everyone, but unfortunately it's just not possible. Even with these restrictions, I end up with over 200 critiques to do every month. I'm likely to increase the restrictions and change how all of this is handled in the near future to reduce the still increasing workload.
I'm about halfway through, however I do have one question I wanna ask. Is there a good way to determine proportions of the vehicle for the side sketch? I find that I have a hard time getting it right when reference is at a 3/4 angle, which it more often than not is.
The unfortunate truth is that you're generally going to have to find a side view of the same kind of object. It's generally not too difficult, since most vehicles are reasonably well documented on the net. Even if you only manage to find a low resolution image, you can compare it against your main image to place things. As you improve on these sorts of observational skills, you won't need to rely on multiple images quite as much. When I was doing this lesson myself, my instructor actually took us to an old military museum (actually more of a parking lot with a bunch of old tanks and things in it), so we were able to walk around them and study them in person.
https://i.imgur.com/HNv6A8v.jpg (width on this one's messed up, but that's not abnormal at this point, as getting a hang of proportions takes a lot of mileage, and you seem to be well aware of that)
The rest of them vary in terms of quality, but in general you seem to be making some good headway. There's two major points that you seem to be struggling with:
Slooooow down with that linework. You're getting frazzled, and as a result are drawing more than you're thinking. Gotta hold back, remember the ghosting method, remember the whole one-mark-per-line rule. Don't let yourself immediately reinforce the lines you draw by reflex, don't fire from the hip. Think everything through, and be patient with yourself.
Cylinders. Everyone struggles with these. I noticed that when you started out, you weren't really using the whole minor-axis thing which definitely threw you off considerably from the get-go. You started picking it up further in, but honestly you need to work on getting your ellipses to align to the minor axes. Practicing this more in isolation (more individual cylinders) will help. Also, one tip I have when it comes to wheels is that it can help a lot to actually draw a single long cylinder going all the way across the vehicle, from one wheel to the other along its axle. Then it's just a matter of cutting it into slices like a sushi roll. Squatter cylinders (like wheels) can be difficult due to the lack of length of the minor axis, so starting off longer can be a big advantage.
And that's all I have to offer! Keep up the good work, and keep at it - I'll mark this lesson as complete, but you definitely have a lot of practicing to do (as most people who reach this stage do). Congrats on completing the dynamic sketching lesson set.
Uncomfortable
2016-03-26 01:18
Old thread got locked, post your homework here.
Lingwer
2016-04-01 10:19
Hope you're doing well in your new apartment, here is my homework for lesson 7.
http://imgur.com/a/JMJNW
Uncomfortable
2016-04-02 00:46
Exceptional work. I'm really loving how you're clearly approaching these complex objects in terms of rudimentary boxes and cylinders, without getting distracted by the superfluous detail. The drawing of the ship on page 3 is by far my favourite - both for how you constructed it, as well as for the unconventional subject matter.
The only real suggestion I have at this point is to be mindful of your lines - you have a tendency to mess up some of those that should be straight, especially when constructing your subdivision grids. This is natural, of course, but be sure to keep up with some of the exercises from the earlier lessons to continue sharpening those skills at a base level.
Really at this point, you clearly have a strong understanding of space, it's just a matter of sharpening the rudimentary skills. I'm very glad to see that you're practicing wheels and ellipses, as those can be some of the toughest elements to contend with.
Anyways, keep up the fantastic work, and congratulations on completing the dynamic sketching lessons.
Peteman22
2016-05-09 14:09
Hello again Uncomfortable. Homework for Lesson 7: http://imgur.com/a/ce9Hz ,with most of the references I used included this time. Like lesson 6 I found this kinda difficult. I think I'm getting there but not quite, as my drawings mostly resemble my references but not quite.
Drawing much longer straight lines sometimes seemed a bit hit and miss, despite always ghosting them; which could be a problem when I had box plane midpoint reference lines everywhere.
I also think I rushed in places, when I shouldn't have, leading to having to correct myself like the nose of the Chinook.
Anyway, thank you for your time and I look forward to what you have to say.
Uncomfortable
2016-05-09 17:17
Really, really nice work. Your proportions are askew in some places (the scooter, the pickup, etc but what's really important to me is your sense of construction. I'm really happy to say that your constructions are really solid. In a lot of places, even when your proportions are off, your forms still have a tendency to feel quite solid.
The proportion will come with practice - it's a matter of experience, as well as patience (as you noticed). That said, with the solid core of form and construction, I don't think it'll take too long to round out sense of proportion.
I do still think there's a lot of value in continuing to pick a few exercises from lessons 1 and 2 to do as warmups before getting down to the day's work, though - from now until the end of time. Your ellipses/cylinders could use some polish, and as you noticed, long lines are understandably challenging.
Anyway, congratulations on completing the dynamic sketching lesson set! Though these lessons have been here for quite a while, there aren't many who've reached the end. Well done!
[deleted]
2016-06-13 16:30
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2016-06-13 20:05
Your work is coming along well. There are a few areas of weakness that I'll mention in a second, but generally you are moving right along in the correct direction. These kinds of constructions tend to be particularly challenging, both due to their geometric nature, as well as the scale of them - which, despite being drawn from photo reference, actually has an impact on how we perceive them.
Okay, so there's two things that I'd like to mention:
Your ellipses. Your ellipses definitely need work, and I certainly hope that you haven't abandoned the exercises from lesson 1 and 2. As you continue to move through the lessons, and really until the end of time, you should continue to pick two or three exercises each day from that set to do as warmups before moving onto that day's work. These are skills that will take time and persistence to develop, and will impact the quality of your work immensely. On a related note, be sure to check out the 250 cylinder challenge. It includes notes on how to construct a cylinder and the importance of the minor axis, things you seem to have missed out on before attempting this lesson.
When constructing an object, there's often a point where the student will move away from construction and draw the rest of the object's details by eye. This makes a lot of sense when you're drawing organic things, like animals where you don't want to consider the form of each lock of fur, or scales, or whatever else. When it comes to geometric objects, on the other hand, I find that those who excel will never actually move away from construction. They generally don't do any sort of a 'cleanup' pass, to redraw their object on top of their construction lines. The forms they've constructed are their object, and at most they add line weight here and there to emphasize some lines over others. They never replace them, however - this is something I'm seeing in your drawings a lot.
Ultimately, I think this demo (from this gallery which you should check out if you haven't already) is a good example of how to approach construction. Construct as much as you can out of boxes and cylinders, and don't worry about superfluous detail. If there's a detail you feel is important, construct it out of more boxes/cylinders - do not simply draw it on by eye. Once you're done all of this, you can round out your corners (as I did on that spray bottle).
Anyway, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, but if you'd like to submit more work for this lesson in the future, feel free.
[deleted]
2016-06-19 14:53
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2016-06-19 20:24
Definitely making improvements. That tank is looking quite nice. With the boat, I think you're breaking forms down too quickly, skipping steps. There's a lot of points in your construction that you've placed based on guesswork, rather than subdivision of your larger box.
Remember what I mentioned before, about sticking to constructive boxes as long as you can. I'd push the construction to a point like this before even considering any sort of guesswork or estimation: http://i.imgur.com/6Ktx0U0.png.
ganbarou
2016-06-24 01:59
Hey! I know you're not taking critiques right now... So I'm not submitting anything yet, however I wanted to ask- your lessons seem to focus on drawing things near to us humans. (Man made objects, animals, plants...) Do you have any tips on how to deal with things like the ocean, water, clouds, and the like? Any resources you'd recommend for learning how to deal with these?
Also, I didn't know where to post this comment, so I hope this is okay.
Uncomfortable
2016-06-24 15:58
The thing about these lessons is not that they teach you how to draw specific things - it's not about learning how to draw plants, insects, animals, etc. It's about learning how to capture form, volume and the illusion of weight and solidity by looking at the problem through many different lenses. You may think of these problems as being different, but as you go through similar challenges with each, you'll come to realize that it's really all the same thing.
Water and clouds both have form and volume to them - being truly aware of this on more than a superficial level will allow you to carve their silhouettes in a way that conveys that form to the person looking at the drawing. The lack of form in peoples' clouds is one of the most common problems there - people always look at them as flat shapes in the sky, and this makes them fairly unconvincing.
The ocean makes me think you're getting more into questions of landscape. Landscapes, like everything else, are built on an awareness and understanding of form, but as the majority of what you're drawing is so vast and so distant, it tends to become flattened into more graphic shapes. Because of this, the question becomes more of composition (how we lay out those shapes) as well as the use of light and colour. I have no lessons on the latter point, though I hope to delve into that some day. One book I'd recommend on that topic is Color and Light by James Gurney. That said, it is an advanced topic, so I would not recommend worrying much about that until you've established a strong sense of form.
ganbarou
2016-06-25 16:23
Thank you- That really cleared things up for me.
I'll check out the book! (Maybe I'll eventually purchase it, once I've completed your lessons and have gathered some more confidence in my ability to understand 3D forms and the like.) Sorry to bother you when you're so busy, and thank you for taking the time to answer my question! I'll try to think of these problems as simply some complex applications of the lessons you teach, that I can come back to in the future.
KiwiYoz
2016-07-05 20:16
Hello again! As always i thank you, that give us some of your time to check our homeworks is truly amazing. That said, Here it's my 7th Homework!.
I realized that i had some troubles with cylinders so i worked on them along the homework, and when it came to plane + submarine i think they came out right.
Uncomfortable
2016-07-05 21:26
I think you'd likely benefit a lot form completing the 250 box/cylinder challenges - the earlier lessons don't deal too much in geometric construction but once you get here, it's painfully difficult to avoid. It doesn't help that we haven't really dealt with cylinders explicitly yet (unless you chose to do the cylinder challenge on your own), so it's no wonder that you'd find them quite challenging.
Looking at your work, setting aside the general construction of boxes and cylinders, proportion is definitely a concern. It takes a great deal of repeated practice to really get a sense of how to take the 2D proportion studies you did (which were well done) and transfer them to 3D. When the overall box that you start with isn't entirely solid, however, it gets even harder.
I think overall, despite these challenges, you're on the right track. A lot of it is going to come from a hell of a lot more practice, but what's important is that you're taking each construction and pushing it all the way through to the end. Also, I think your work does improve overall as you push through, and your focused practice on cylinders has helped.
One thing I want to recommend is that you try and keep your constructions in the realm of primitive 3D forms as long as possible. There's always a point where we transition into saying, okay these last few details don't need plotting, we'll just slap them on. Try to keep this as late as possible, or even go ahead and skip that step altogether. Detail isn't important here at all. What's important is getting your geometric forms to fit together properly, to make sure that their proportions are correct and that they align with one another as they're meant to.
Oh, one other thing that comes to mind - one of my instructor used to do a lot of really heavy construction drawing with all sorts of lines, and then he'd take a sheet of tracing paper and lay it on top, and then do his detail pass. In this particular case, this may be worth trying out.
Anyway, I'll mark this lesson as complete, since from here on it's just going to be a shit ton of practice.
Suchimo
2016-07-12 07:01
Finally finished lesson 7!
Thanks for taking the time to do these critiques.
Uncomfortable
2016-07-12 19:40
Well done! Generally your sense of construction and your adherence to the geometric stage of things (that is, holding off on going into detail and treating things as simple geometric forms for as long as possible) has paid off. From what I can see, I definitely think you'd benefit form at least looking at the notes on the 250 cylinder challenge page as you definitely need a crash course on constructing cylinders (doing the challenge would actually be a good idea). Also, your weaker constructions often go that way largely due to a weaker initial box - so if the box you start off with is a little skewed or lopsided, you that trickles down into the rest of your drawing.
That is, in many ways, good news - just stay on top of practicing your boxes (this comic comes to mind).
I especially liked your volkswagon beetle, and the race car on page 12. Keep up the great work, and consider this lesson complete.
slavingia
2016-08-19 14:36
Wanted to submit the forms before the full vehicles. Here they are - https://imgur.com/a/cBjIf
The chicken scratch returned a bit, but I tried hard to mitigate it. I feel it pops up when tackling harder problems and goes away as I gain confidence in drawing the more complex shapes.
Uncomfortable
2016-08-19 23:59
It's about as good a start as I'd expect. Vehicles are tough, and the best way to approach them is to consciously think of them as a collection of basic forms arranged in a particular way, rather than the object itself (the same schpiel I've mentioned in the past). This is specifically why your first couple drawings (the truck and the train) come out more successfully than the later ones, where you tend to be thinking a lot more about the object itself, rather than the forms.
You are improving though. One thing you're continually missing is the use of the minor axis when constructing cylinders. In the case of wheels, definitely draw one big cylinder across the whole axle of a pair of wheels (which I see you doing later on in the lesson, so good job on that), but also start them off as a box first in order to get the alignment right. Construct a box, find the center point of its two opposing planes, draw a minor axis between those two points and then use the minor axis to construct your cylinder.
Also, DRAW BIGGER! You're a Forbes 30 under 30, you can afford the paper! When you lose confidence, it's totally normal to draw smaller, but this is going to hamstring you. Right now you need a fair bit of room for your brain to think through the spatial problems involved. Trying to work in a third of a page is going to limit you in that sense, causing you to make quite a few mistakes that you may not have otherwise made.
Anyway, keep at it. Vehicles are going to take a while to properly solidify, but ultimately it will pay off. I look forward to seeing your full set.
slavingia
2016-08-20 02:08
Axes, bigger, basic forms. Going!
slavingia
2016-08-25 23:23
Gone! Here you go: http://imgur.com/a/5rtzV
I think I did alright, especially when there were plenty of wheels and boxes to make the proportions and forms a little (a lot) easier.
I picked a tough motorcycle image and hit the dirt pretty hard. The perspective and angle of the front wheel tripped me up.
Edit: also my Superfine pen died halfway through it, so I switched to an F.
Uncomfortable
2016-08-27 02:16
Your bus and truck are looking great. Very solid, very well constructed. Some of your other constructions are less good, and aside from the planes (which are utterly unfathomably stupid as a topic and I hate them and UGH i can never express how much I hate drawing planes) it really has a lot to do with how closely you keep track of your proportions, whether or not you draw your initial box properly, and whether or not you adhere to it.
Looking at the taxi, you've got a lot of arbitrary space on top of the taxi itself both in your proportion study and in your final drawing. I guess it's good that you were consistent, but the space in the proportion study doesn't serve any purpose. You should strive to construct the box so that it fits the overall form of something snugly in all dimensions. Think of it like packing something into a cardboard box. If there's extra room, it's going to move around and get damaged - you want to make sure that it's flush with all sides.
Now, if you start off with a box that is constructed incorrectly (say, near plane smaller than the far plane), it's inherently going to lead you down the wrong path. I mean, you're either going to be working the whole time to compensate for a fundamental problem, or you're going to adhere to the box and end up with a sort of reversed perspective. Really there's no way around this but to practice your boxes a lot, both so you can construct them better on your first try, and so you can identify the mistakes as soon as they occur.
The motorcycle definitely was a tough one, but you jumped in too loose to begin with. A tire is actually pretty complex as a form - it's not just a cylinder, but rather has several tiers - it's more of a cylinder with beveled edges. So, as a complex form, if you try and jump in to draw it without going through the various stages of construction, it's more than likely going to fall a bit flat. Then there's the internal section (the seat, the engine, etc.) which should have started out as solid boxes, subdivided and refined into more complex forms, rather than jumping into that complexity too early on. Keep in mind that by complexity, I really mean anything that isn't a very basic, simple geometric form. In certain cases an organic form can be considered the a simple form as well, but if you look at something like the motorbike seat, it's got a lot of specific deformations and clear planes to it that really need more support and scaffolding in order to properly flesh them out.
Now, with the planes (and this applies to that submarine as well) it's not always the best idea to fit the whole thing into a box. The lesson didn't cover this at all, so it's by no fault of your own. In this particular case, I would personally try to capture the fuselage inside of that initial box. The wings are inherently difficult to capture in terms of size, and the way that I learned it in my dynamic sketching class three years ago still doesn't sit that well with me, but I really can't think of a better way. It's all about eyeballing the proportions, and comparing them to other points on the image.
By reference points, I mean looking at the tip of a wing and drawing a perfectly horizontal or vertical line across your reference image to find some other landmark that it lines up with. What bugs me about this method is that there isn't always a landmark to compare against. In that case, I tend to err on the side of drawing a shorter wing, knowing that I can always extend it further later.
I spent a while this evening drawing out a demo on how I'd draw a plane, starting with the proportion study and how I go about using it. You'll notice that I don't treat the fuselage as a cylinder. I could but I find that this tends to throw the curvature off somewhat, and makes it feel a little less natural. In truth, the fuselage is somewhere between a geometric cylinder and an organic form. And so, I call it the great skysausage.
You can find the demo here: http://drawabox.com/viewimage/lesson7/skysausage.jpg
Now, with your truck and bus, I am pretty satisfied with your work. That said, I do feel like as you went through the rest, you started to adhere to the rules and concepts you'd learned from the lesson a little more loosely, which makes me want to reinforce them a little more.
I'd like you to do another four pages of vehicle drawings. Take your time, and focus on constructing the hell out of them. Oh, and another important thing - your linework is getting pretty sketchy. Reel yourself back, and apply that ghosting method. Think through each mark before you draw it, don't jump in shooting from the hip and then reinforcing lines by reflex when they don't come out right. And keep using that F pen, that's more similar in thickness to the pen that I use. Super Fine is probably too thin.
slavingia
2016-08-27 16:18
Here you are: https://imgur.com/a/JKcGs
Uncomfortable
2016-08-27 16:24
Definitely moving in the right direction. That last taxi is quite striking. Your planes are also feeling more solid. Keep driving yourself to get the proportions of your initial boxes right, and to work in terms of strictly geometric and simple forms only for as long as possible (ignoring the fact that you're drawing an actual object, and focusing on it as just being more of a form intersections exercise where all the forms are arranged in a particular way).
I'll be marking this lesson as complete. I gather you might be interested in moving onto lesson 8 next, so I wanted to let you know that I have plans to rewrite all of the figure drawing content. I'm not at all satisfied with what I've got up there right now, and I really want to improve it. That said, it's on the backlog, and I intend to add intro videos and redo the demos for lessons 5-7 beforehand, so it may be a few weeks to even over a month before I can get there.
You're still free to start on those lessons if you wish, or you may want to take a break, or perhaps spend some time revising old material (and going through the new demos/videos) to solidify your grasp of what you've already covered. Taking some time to really digest what you've learned and reflect upon it could definitely be beneficial, since you've been tearing through this stuff pretty quickly.
slavingia
2016-08-27 18:46
Thanks for the heads up. I'll be switching over to composition next I think, and then coming back to the figure stuff. Meanwhile practicing bits from the first 2 lessons.
I'll check out those new videos and demos soon too.
[deleted]
2016-09-05 16:07
Hello! Thank you for your lessons! I have a profile on DeviantArt and there are a lot of my homeworks about your lessons. Could you watch my drawings and say some critics. I've read your thougts about ink drawing, but i still prefer pencils ecpecially for fast reference. This is the link: http://vano1337.deviantart.com/gallery/
Thank you! Wish yu well!
Uncomfortable
2016-09-05 16:29
I'm glad to hear that you've been making use of my lessons. Unfortunately due to the massive amount of work involved in doing homework critiques, there are certain requirements that I have in place to help keep the workload more manageable:
Lessons must be completed in order, waiting for me to give my critique and mark a lesson as complete before moving onto the next one
Lessons must be completed using the required tools listed in that lesson's homework section (1-7 requires ink, 3-7 specifically requiring felt tip pens)
One month out of every three, I restrict my critiques to patreon supporters only (to give myself a break).
I'd love to be able to give critiques to everyone, but unfortunately it's just not possible. Even with these restrictions, I end up with over 200 critiques to do every month. I'm likely to increase the restrictions and change how all of this is handled in the near future to reduce the still increasing workload.
Lobachevskiy
2016-09-08 11:11
I'm about halfway through, however I do have one question I wanna ask. Is there a good way to determine proportions of the vehicle for the side sketch? I find that I have a hard time getting it right when reference is at a 3/4 angle, which it more often than not is.
Uncomfortable
2016-09-09 02:12
The unfortunate truth is that you're generally going to have to find a side view of the same kind of object. It's generally not too difficult, since most vehicles are reasonably well documented on the net. Even if you only manage to find a low resolution image, you can compare it against your main image to place things. As you improve on these sorts of observational skills, you won't need to rely on multiple images quite as much. When I was doing this lesson myself, my instructor actually took us to an old military museum (actually more of a parking lot with a bunch of old tanks and things in it), so we were able to walk around them and study them in person.
Lobachevskiy
2016-09-18 14:00
https://imgur.com/a/d5YH2
Finally done. I think I forgot all the comments I was gonna make.
Uncomfortable
2016-09-18 21:58
These constructions are feeling really solid:
https://i.imgur.com/WMxnMxK.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/HNv6A8v.jpg (width on this one's messed up, but that's not abnormal at this point, as getting a hang of proportions takes a lot of mileage, and you seem to be well aware of that)
The rest of them vary in terms of quality, but in general you seem to be making some good headway. There's two major points that you seem to be struggling with:
Slooooow down with that linework. You're getting frazzled, and as a result are drawing more than you're thinking. Gotta hold back, remember the ghosting method, remember the whole one-mark-per-line rule. Don't let yourself immediately reinforce the lines you draw by reflex, don't fire from the hip. Think everything through, and be patient with yourself.
Cylinders. Everyone struggles with these. I noticed that when you started out, you weren't really using the whole minor-axis thing which definitely threw you off considerably from the get-go. You started picking it up further in, but honestly you need to work on getting your ellipses to align to the minor axes. Practicing this more in isolation (more individual cylinders) will help. Also, one tip I have when it comes to wheels is that it can help a lot to actually draw a single long cylinder going all the way across the vehicle, from one wheel to the other along its axle. Then it's just a matter of cutting it into slices like a sushi roll. Squatter cylinders (like wheels) can be difficult due to the lack of length of the minor axis, so starting off longer can be a big advantage.
And that's all I have to offer! Keep up the good work, and keep at it - I'll mark this lesson as complete, but you definitely have a lot of practicing to do (as most people who reach this stage do). Congrats on completing the dynamic sketching lesson set.