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Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles (Patreon Critique Thread)
Dynamic Sketching
u/Uncomfortable
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Moderator of r/ArtFundamentals, speaking officiallyOriginal PosterScore hidden · 13 days ago · Stickied comment
Old thread got locked, those of you eligible for private homework critiques can post your work here.
Basics Complete, Dynamic Sketching Level 4
ThunderEasy
3 points · 3 days ago
Here's my lesson 7!
https://imgur.com/gallery/eXZuJGd
Original Poster2 points · 3 days ago
If I'm being completely honest, your work here is really fantastic, and I wouldn't feel that guilty if I just finished my critique here and sent you on your way. Your use of construction, your understanding of form, your grasp of how everything exists in 3D space and how it can all be manipulated to your heart's content is all very solid and I can happily state that you know how to draw.
Now that wouldn't really be giving you your money's worth, so I have picked on a couple things that I want to point out in your work where you could continue to improve.
The first one that jumps out at me is how when you start working on details beyond a certain threshold of importance, you tend to get a little sloppy. For example, your tank's treads and general construction were really quite well done, and the cylinders on the tank gun were phenomenal, but take a look at this thing resting on top of the turret. It's... just not really up to par with the rest of your constructions. It's a case where we know you can do much better, but you just got lazy. Same goes for the antennae on top of this boat.
This sort of thing can also apply to detail areas like the grills on the front of this bulldozer and on this awesome.. thing. For the grills you drew them in as simple lines. Instead, always remember that lines don't exist - that the marks we put down to capture detail and texture are all the shadows cast by little forms that sit on the surface of our objects. So actually having the slats of the grill cast their own shadows would have been much more effective.
I actually added some additional content back on the texture analysis exercise from lesson 2 this weekend that you may be interested in giving a read: check it out here.
I noticed that you tried one car, and it definitely had a lot of strong points as far as construction goes. It felt very solid and tangible, but what was conveyed to me was that the car in your reference was... odd. Like its proportions were a little strange. This is often the biggest challenge people face, and is why we consider cars in lesson 7 to be the big 'boss battle'. It's fantastic that you were able to maintain your constructional instincts, and they definitely pulled you through, though there is definitely room to grow here. Specifically it comes down to your observational skills, and applying them to really find the aspects of the car that give it a distinct personality or sense of character, as I talk about in the shelby mustang demo. It's really just something you could definitely stand to improve on with further practice, but you're definitely heading in the right direction.
The other point I wanted to mention is just about how we can further leverage cast shadows to help organize our details and make certain parts stand out over others. You're clearly doing this in a lot of cases, so you definitely understand it to a point, but I saw certain places - like this ship that would have benefited from some bolder cast shadows. Here's some of the shadows I would have added. Just remember - we're only drawing the cast shadows, not the "form shadows". Form shadows are basically like when a box has a light shining on it, the face on the opposite side of the light source is dark. That's not what we're worrying about. We're only concerned with the shadows created when one form blocks a light source, and therefore projects its own shadow onto another surface. This will help you to organize a lot of information in a way that it is still readable (considering that we're still working with ink, which largely means heavy blacks).
Anyway, that's that! I declare this lesson completed, and with that you have completed the drawabox constructional drawing curriculum. You may continue onto the treasure chest challenge, though that is optional. Congratulations! I'll go ahead and award you the completionist rank on discord, which comes with lifetime access to the patreon channel, even after you cancel your patreon pledge. Just don't forget that you won't have been charged for the critiques you received this month until the beginning of August, so at least maintain it until then.
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Basics Complete, Dynamic Sketching Complete
captain_tedious
3 points · 13 days ago
It took 2 years, but here's my L7 submission. Thank you in advance for the critique.
https://imgur.com/gallery/eoNcwJ3
Original Poster1 point · 13 days ago
It seems you've learned a great deal over the course of these two long years - your work here is, for the most part, very well done. You've got a few places where you stumble a little, and forget some of the core principles of the lessons, but by and large you demonstrate a pretty strong grasp of them overall, and apply them to great effect.
To start with, I'm very pleased with how you approached your general warm-ups - cylinders in boxes, the perpendicular planes with ellipses in them, etc. These were an excellent way for you to get into the appropriate headspace for tackling these kinds of problems.
Your first model T - the one with all the notes on top - honestly impressed me a great deal. It's a simple construction that you've done, focusing primarily on just those major forms as instructed, but it really conveys the character of the vehicle through proportion (even if it's a little wide set), and makes it believable through the overall block-in of tangible, solid forms.
This carries over nicely into the second one, which honestly feels like it could be off the set of a classic disney animated movie. The fluidity of your linework, in combination with mindfulness towards the overall structure and solidity has me expecting it to start bumping and bopping around with that kind of classic, exaggerated style.
The final version came out quite nicely too, though I do feel that the front/grill section may have fallen a little too far back. I'm not entirely sure, but I don't think the far front wheel should be quite so visible. Either way though, my interest is more in the construction as a whole, and you've applied it very well here, with an excellent balance between subdivision and spatial layout, and the line weights of the vehicle itself. At no point does it feel like you went back over it to separate the "real drawing" from your construction or subdivision - it all feels as though it is part of the same drawing, organized into individual levels.
Honestly the volvo's front definitely confuses me too. Looking at it, it's very clearly wrong - the far end of the front is longer than the end closer to the viewer, which fundamentally contradicts perspective as a whole. I feel that there was some underlying decision that, in M. C. Escher-esque style is difficult to pin down, but doesn't actually fundamentally make spatial sense. It was probably a good idea to ultimately move on from here, rather than investing more time to figure out exactly what it was, as finding out what's wrong with a specific drawing can be a huge time sink without considerable reward.
Moving onwards, I am noticing a tendency not to include the minor axis line of your ellipses. The ellipses are generally correct when I check them with my own tools, so I'm not calling out a mistake here - I'm just puzzled that you didn't include that line explicitly.
Rather than continuing to dwell on your volvos, I'm going to jump ahead. Your constructional skills continued to improve a great deal through these, though I did catch a few lines that weren't aligning correctly towards their intended vanishing point (especially along the front of this drawing. The deviations were pretty small, but given that we're allowed to work with a ruler in this lesson, you may have wanted to take a little more time to find their alignment relative to the other parallel lines around it. You can see what I mean here. The bottom most two (the underedges of the treads) should have been aligned to one another as well.
I quite liked how you handled the front of the VW bus, although the bottom of the side definitely started to feel a little simplistic relative to everything else. When it comes to these kinds of drawings, we can set the bar wherever we choose - for example with the first two model Ts, it was set to be very simple, and as long as we stick to that standard in a consistent manner, the drawing will look good. As soon as we start mixing levels of complexity to the construction, we start to end up with conflicts. Keep in mind that this isn't really about detail, but rather the actual complexity of the construction itself, and how much you decide to break it down into smaller and smaller forms.
The formula 1 car came out remarkably well. Your tires feel wonderfully bubbly, and the level of complexity of the construction is both fairly deep, while also remaining quite consistent. It's not hyper-developed, but it does come down to a realistic, balanced level of visual information across the whole thing. As we continue to practice, do studies, and learn to identify particular kinds of information that our reference contains, we can steadily increase into the territory of super-complex mechs with all kinds of gack in the joint areas, but for now this is solidly moving in the right direction.
Same goes for the P51 Mustang - very balanced, slick construction with a nice touch of detail that does not take away from the overall drawing, but rather reinforces it ever so slightly. The rivets are a particularly nice touch - as I've explained to Sven in the past, these are actually key to establishing the scale of an object, because they tell us about how humans interact with it. Rivets will never exist beyond a certain size, because they generally have to be installed by humans (even if it's all roboticized, the viewer is going to assume a human construction), and so they have to be scaled appropriately for our use. Similarly, the seat also lends to this effect. This is how we can differentiate a large scale object from a toy.
I can definitely see you getting pretty confident with your linework and detail with the millennium falcon. Here you're perhaps a little less exact and precise with the details, but it still comes out well. You're implying the presence of certain kinds of details, although starting to loosen the reins in how precisely they're positioned. This is actually very effective here, but it does cause me to get a little wary as to the trend it may be establishing. It's easy to get a little too confident, and eventually slip into being generally imprecise, or skipping steps.
That said, I am very pleased in how you're implying many of those details primarily through the use of the shadows they'd cast, rather than attempting to construct every little thing. Using this approach, you're able to avoid getting too noisy and heavy handed.
The locomotive honestly takes us back to the really nice, solid, reliable construction you've demonstrated elsewhere. Your details are once again on target and precise, anchoring onto your construction and reinforcing it without any signs of contradiction. My only suggestion here would be to add just a little bit of line weight to reinforce the silhouettes of the wheels - they're a little light against the heavy blacks around them, which can easily cause them to get a little lost.
Now, as much as I do like your electric scooter's overall construction, this one definitely feels a lot sloppier than the last, and for that I blame the loose hatching you've added here and there. Previous constructions felt really bold and strong, due to the pure reliance on solid blacks and solid whites. This hatching crosses a little too much into the territory of greys, which weakens the overall impact of the result. Generally speaking, I've always dissuaded people from using hatching in any of these constructional drawings, and to rely either on making firm decisions of solid areas, or using complex textures that incorporate, again, solid black/white alternating in a more interesting way than basic hatching.
For your stealth bomber, I think the simplicity is one of its greatest strengths. Some things simply are sleek and sharp, with minimal detail along its hull. If you look closely enough you probably can find elements to add, but our goal is always focused on communicating with the viewer. With this kind of aircraft, that simplicity is exactly what we're after.
Your first bulldozer is probably the last one with significant issues, and it's not because of the vanishing points. I mean, they don't help - having the leftmost one that close is definitely stretching things a little, but the biggest issue is that your general approach here has gotten a little sloppy. It feels as though in this drawing, you were less convinced of the solidity of your overall construction, and less convinced of the illusion you were trying to create. Like a liar who doesn't believe his own story, your assertions weren't as strong, and the particular choices you made didn't always further the goal of convincing the viewer.
To put it simply, your forms feel less solid here, causing me to lose my suspension of disbelief. I can see edges that don't align with the vanishing points, and linework that seems a little halfassed. Additionally, for the texture along the tread, you definitely attempted to construct those raised sections rather than treating them more like a texture (where we focus on implying their presence through cast shadows, rather than relying on outlining and enclosing them each individually and explicitly).
Ended up running up against reddit's character limit, so I'll continue on a reply to this comment.
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