Uncomfortable

2019-01-15 22:00

Whew it's not too often that I get to critique one of these - it's definitely one of the more daunting and demanding challenges, so congratulations on getting all the way through it.

As a whole, your constructions are all very solid and demonstrate an excellent understanding of 3D space. Your designs, as you noted, vary in quality throughout, but I think I can pinpoint why.

It comes down to reference. Design is something that draws heavily on one's visual library - that is, the part of our brain where we store our understanding of all the things we've studied. This does include, to a degree, things we've seen and things we are vaguely familiar with, but not nearly in the kind of fidelity to which we grasp all the intricacies of the things we've really studied closely. So while we may think we are familiar with, say, a bicycle - given that we've ridden them since childhood - we still may not really know how all the pieces fit together.

That's what comes into play here, and the biggest way to work around this is to use a lot of reference. That isn't to say that everything we draw must be a reproduction of something that already exists - it simply means that we can use different pieces of reference to inform our decisions when drawing various parts of what we're designing.

Now, you definitely did use reference for various parts of these chests - so the other matter of discussion is just how you utilized that reference. This one stands out to me, for instance. The ornamentation and stylistic flare is fantastic - the brackets however do carry a certain degree of oversimplification and cartooniness that suggests to me that while you were working from reference here, that you may have equally relied a great deal on your memory. It's entirely possible to work from memory even when you've got reference open in front of you, and it's a pretty common mistake. Basically, you need to force yourself to look at your reference almost constantly, only looking away for a moment or two to transfer one or two very specific lines to your drawing before looking back. During this period of looking away, your memory of what you'd seen will immediately start getting simplified, and important chunks of information will be thrown away, making it necessary for us to look back almost instantly to refresh our memory.

To summarize, there are two critical things to remember:

• Your designs are your own - you come up with them and decide what kinds of elements are involved. Once you've decided, say, your chest has bars along the side for misbehaving children to look out from (this one made me laugh), then you go looking for reference of, say, prison bars and cages. Look closely at how those bars are welded together, whether there's any additional bolts or any other mechanism that holds it together. Always ask yourself questions about how what you're drawing works, how it all holds up when the universe is continually trying to break everything down in its eternal pursuit of entropy. A design is essentially a cohesive answer to a series of questions.

• When you do use reference, study it closely and don't rely on your ability to remember complicated things even for a few seconds. Constantly look back to your reference, and only take a moment or two to transfer some specific piece of information to your drawing. This is the process that will gradually build out your visual library.

Anyway, you've done some really excellent work here. Lots of great construction and clever design ideas - as you continue to practice using reference as a tool, your ability to communicate these interesting designs will continue to improve. You're already well on your way, but you should see plenty of growth as you continue to plough forwards. Keep it up and consider this challenge thoroughly complete.

Unfortunately there's no badge (because the flair system is just a hacked together piece of crap) but I'll add the a note that you've completed this so when we do eventually move off to a dedicated community platform on the drawabox website, you'll get a shiny achievement badge then.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-29 23:44

Fantastic work! I can see considerable improvement over the set on a number of fronts:

• The integrity of your boxes improves. They're generally pretty good throughout, but early on they're somewhat less consistent in their convergences towards their shared vanishing points, especially in the basic construction part of the challenge.

• Your spatial understanding of how the rotations of the lid gets better throughout

• Your designs get more and more inventive as you push through - you're clearly fighting against the monotony of producing the same chest designs over and over, and once you get the basic stuff out of the way, you really push into some thrillingly different approaches.

I really love a lot of your designs, especially later on in the set. One quality you always seem to carry through is the idea of every form being solid and substantial - they're rarely ever left as paper-thin slivers of material, you've got some excellent chunky masses in there that really give a strong sense of volume and weight. I'm also very pleased to see that you experimented with different themes - from fantasy with classic piratey chests to scifi where some of them looked almost like fax machines. I'm not at all sure what 57 is (it's probably a stretch from a chest) but whatever it is, the construction is phenomenally solid and believable.

There are a couple areas where that stand out to me as having room for improvement:

• I mentioned above that your estimation of convergences of sets of parallel lines towards their intended vanishing points improves, especially in the more basic versions of the exercise. There is still room for growth here however, primarily in the more complex designs themselves. Now the fact that some of these designs have slightly lopsided perspective isn't actually a problem. It is something you'll need to work on as you continue to move forwards, but fundamentally while you're designing, your mind should be focusing on design - and it absolutely was. So I'm not saying this as though it is a failure of any sort - your priorities were in order, but as you continue to develop your awareness of 3D space will become so attuned that you won't have to really waste much conscious thought on it, and will be able to nail it without distracting yourself from the design process. Some areas where the perspective issues stood out were, for example, on 84 where that wonderfully chunky base gets smaller at a much faster rate than the rest of the chest. It's one of those situations where your internal subdivisions of the enclosing box requires more attention.

• I think that for the most part, your more successful designs were those that didn't rely on quite so much texture (like wood grain) and focused more on the complexity of the forms and construction. This is because your textures tended to be a little rushed and a little scribbly - they simply didn't get as much time or attention as the rest of the drawing, and so they stood out as a weak link. While I think giving yourself more time on this area would work wonders, you can also look at exercises like the texture analysis exercise, a new addition to lesson 2 (actually it's just the texture challenge incorporated in a more bite-sized fashion).

Anyway, you've really done a fantastic job here. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete (there's unfortunately no flair for it, but I will mark down your completion so when drawabox eventually gets its own dedicated community platform on the drawabox website itself, you will be showered with well earned achievements and badges. Keep up the fantastic work!