Uncomfortable

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Does it state that I have to choose only two specific animals, and making two pages of the first animal, and then the two of the second animal? (so I would do 2 animals for non-hooved and 2 animals for hooved?)

Correct.

If so, should they be the same animal from a different angle or what? I am so confused...

Yes, you'll be picking different references of that species of animal, and doing studies based on them. Despite being the same animal, each reference is going to involve looking at the animal from different angles, or different poses, and as such will have you solving different spatial "puzzles" - since the simple forms that make up those animals will be arranged/positioned in different ways, with different relationships between them in 3D space.

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, your work here is by and large looking pretty good, with a couple things to keep in mind:

• Keep an eye on whether or not you're consistently drawing through your freehanded ellipses two full times - it's clearly your intent to do so, but it's easy to fall a little short, and I am noticing cases where you're stopping at around 1.5 turns of the shape. Not a big deal, just something to be aware of if you didn't notice it yourself, so you can consciously push yourself to complete the two full turns.

• A similarly minor point, since I'm not noticing issues as a result, but generally we do encourage students to draw larger where they can (so for example in the box challenge it was 5-6 boxes per page), as this helps give the brain more room to engage its spatial reasoning skills. It just makes the exercises more impactful than having a lot of small forms crammed into a page.

Additionally, keep in mind that as our cylinders are foreshortened, it manifests in two main ways - the shift in scale from one ellipse to the other, and the shift in degree. Because these both work to signify the same thing, it does mean that they work in tandem - so as the scale shift increases, and those side edges of the cylinder pinch together to achieve a more dramatic convergence, so too would the far end get more notably wider, as its degree shift matches the shift in scale. So for example, if you look at 149, you'll see that while the degree doesn't change much from one end to the other, the scale shift/convergence of the side edges is more significant, causing it to look a little off. This is because the two different "shifts" aren't entirely agreeing with one another.

Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes, your work here is generally coming along quite well - except for one notable issue. This exercise is really all about helping develop students' understanding of how to construct boxes which feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square, regardless of how the form is oriented in space. We do this not by memorizing every possible configuration, but rather by continuing to develop your subconscious understanding of space through repetition, and through analysis (by way of the line extensions).

Where the box challenge's line extensions helped to develop a stronger sense of how to achieve more consistent convergences in our lines, here we add three more lines for each ellipse: the minor axis, and the two contact point lines. In checking how far off these are from converging towards the box's own vanishing points, we can see how far off we were from having the ellipse represent a circle in 3D space, and in turn how far off we were from having the plane that encloses it from representing a square.

The notable issue is that it doesn't seem you're extending your minor axis lines at all - or at least, not that I can see. Generally in the direction running down the cylinder, you tend to have 4 lines extended, and they match up with the boxes' 4 edges, without any visible extensions of the ellipses' individual minor axes. There are cases where you appear to perhaps be extending the black line you drew for the minor axis before drawing your ellipses (the one we use to help us align our ellipses correctly), but that is not the same as checking the true alignment of the ellipses themselves.

Skipping over one of the three line extensions applied to each ellipse is a lot like checking a dark room for monsters with a flashlight, but skipping one corner - they can always be hiding in the spot you skipped, so it's very important to ensure that you are applying the error checking strategy in its entirety.

Be sure to do so going forward, when practicing this exercise as part of your warmups. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, overall these are coming along well. Your linework is excellent, and you've been quite fastidious in checking the alignment of your ellipses. One thing I did notice was that for the most part you tended to stick to cylinders with fairly shallow foreshortening, and didn't do a ton of experimenting with more dramatic foreshortening, so that is probably something you'll want to do more of in your warmup exercises.

Additionally, keep in mind that as our cylinders are foreshortened, it manifests in two main ways - the shift in scale from one ellipse to the other, and the shift in degree. Because these both work to signify the same thing, it does mean that they work in tandem - so as the scale shift increases, and those side edges of the cylinder pinch together to achieve a more dramatic convergence, so too would the far end get more notably wider, as its degree shift matches the shift in scale. If you take a look at cylinder 130, you might notice that something about it feels ever so slightly off - it's because the far end isn't quite wide enough to match.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, unfortunately it appears you may not have taken as much care as you should have when going through the instructions, and as a result, you skipped over a pretty significant part of the exercise. As explained here, and in the video at the top of the cylinder challenge page, the line extensions for this exercise involve extending the 6 lines in each direction. For each direction, 4 come from the box itself, and then 1 comes from each ellipse. You seem to have only extended the boxes' edges, as well as the cylinder's side edges, and did not include any of the ellipse-specific lines.

This exercise is really all about helping develop students' understanding of how to construct boxes which feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square, regardless of how the form is oriented in space. We do this not by memorizing every possible configuration, but rather by continuing to develop your subconscious understanding of space through repetition, and through analysis by way of the line extensions - which is why they're so important.

Where the box challenge's line extensions helped to develop a stronger sense of how to achieve more consistent convergences in our lines, here we add three more lines for each ellipse: the minor axis, and the two contact point lines. In checking how far off these are from converging towards the box's own vanishing points, we can see how far off we were from having the ellipse represent a circle in 3D space, and in turn how far off we were from having the plane that encloses it from representing a square.

Unfortunately since you did not follow those critical instructions correctly, this part of the challenge will have to be redone in its entirety.

Having gone through your revisions, overall they're definitely greatly improved over the last attempt. There is still an issue present, and it's rather important, but I'm simply going to call it out so you can address it yourself, without assigning any further revisions.

Looking at your work, at first it appeared that you weren't extending your minor axes, although under closer inspection, I believe the issue is that while you are identifying your minor axis lines, you are not extending them all the way back, and they aren't as accurate as they could be. While it is normal for our assessment of minor axes to be a little imperfect, there are definitely cases here where you're missing some fairly obvious misalignments.

I marked out examples of this on this page, with 55 being an example of the alignment being off more dramatically.

In addition to taking more care when identifying your minor axes, it's also important that you ensure you're extending them all the way back, along with the others, as the purpose here is to be able to compare them and identify when they're converging consistently, and when they're not (since it's those inconsistent convergences that we need to adjust the proportions of our boxes in our next attempts). Make sure that there are a total of 6 line extensions in all three directions.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so keep that issue in mind and work to address it when doing this exercise as part of your warmups.

Much as we appreciate anyone who takes time out of their day to provide feedback, it is important that if you do not feel you have the time to provide a thorough and complete critique with recommended next steps, that you leave it to someone else. The system is not able to differentiate between feedback that is complete and feedback that isn't, and so it assumes once a response has been received that the student has been given what they need.

If you do have the time but are uncertain as to how to provide feedback, Lesson 1 has a critique guide that is linked directly above the textbox where you wrote your comment. But if you don't, it's really best to leave it to someone else to ensure you're not limiting the student from receiving feedback from someone that does.

I'll be removing your comment to ensure the system does not regard this submission as having received feedback yet.

The ghosting method itself kind of gives us an example - when drawing a straight line, we identify where we want that line to start and end, going as far as to mark those points out on the page. Not every situation - ellipses for instance - necessarily would have points actually drawn on the page in this way, but it's all about actually deciding "I want to draw this mark such that it specifically exists in this way" rather than just barreling forward with the hope that you'll draw the right line.

The ghosting method has us doing this for every mark we freehand, so it should already be baked into what you're doing in the course.

I know I replied to you previously to call out that you were spamming the same question over and over - so I wanted to make clear while that was me laying down the law, what I'm about to say is not meant in the same way. It's clear you're trying be helpful and provide advice, and that is always something we appreciate.

Unfortunately it's not really clear what you intended to say - I'm unsure if there's a language barrier or something.

Whenever a submission receives a reply, the system assumes that is a full and thorough critique, so the submission then is taken out of circulation so as to give other submissions the opportunity to receive feedback. I've gone ahead and removed this message so the submission can potentially receive other helpful responses from others.

This course as a whole is, as you noted, designed to develop students' spatial reasoning skills - not by just going through the motions, but by having them complete specific exercises, and being hyper-intentional in terms of the choices they make as they do them. It is easy to lose focus and fall into auto-pilot, but when you catch yourself doing so, it's important to stop and take a break, or in some other way get yourself back into focus so you're continuing to think about what you're doing. Ultimately that falls to the student, but it is important to keep in mind that the information is very dense, and so it is natural that you will find yourself going into autopilot on occasion. It's simply a matter of catching yourself and correcting that behaviour until your capacity for longer periods of focus expands.

To be clear though, what I mean by being hyper intentional is actually thinking about what you intend for each mark before you actually draw it, rather than just jumping in and relying on your instincts. To consider which edges you need the one you're drawing to converge with, and other such factors - again, instead of just relying on your instincts.

Additionally, keep in mind that the main tool this course uses to develop students' spatial reasoning skills are the constructional drawing exercises we perform from lessons 3-7, each of which forces the student to lay down forms in space, and think about how those forms relate to the other forms they're building upon them. They're 3D spatial puzzles, and each time we do one, it rewires our understanding of 3D space a little bit.

Prior to lesson 3, we're just getting to that stage and collecting/developing the tools we need to be able to engage with that kind of material - which includes strategies for executing controlled linework while doing so without hesitation, considering how different lines are meant to converge on the page (due to being parallel in 3D space) and improving one's ability to maintain the consistency of those convergences, and so on.

As a whole, it's unfortunately not something we can attack with any one simple exercise - at least not in a meaningful and generalized fashion, so if you look at any one exercise and try to tie it back to the core goal of the course, you may find that there are a few steps that sit in between, and make the connection less obvious.

Yeah, you've got the right of it, but it's not a conscious understanding, one that you're actively thinking about, but a subconscious one that influences the way in which you represent 3d forms on a flat page. There's a lot of internalized "math" they the brain does to understand the relationships between elements in three dimensions, and by default we're not used to applying it when drawing on a flat page. That's why when, as beginners, our drawings tend to come out flat.