250 Cylinder Challenge
1:08 AM, Saturday December 3rd 2022
Damnn this was alot harder than i thought, alot of the ones i did were really bloody bad, made many mistakes. Oh well did it nonetheless.
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, generally you're approaching the overall focus of the challenge (the construction of the cylinders) well, although the main thing that stood out to me was just that there are signs that you may not be adhering to all of the elements of the ghosting method as strictly as you could be, resulting in linework that, while still generally good, does at times give way to a touch of sloppiness that could have been avoided - likely with simply putting more time into the planning and preparation phases. I am noticing that the tell-tale start/end points we'd use when applying the ghosting method to straight lines are missing, which suggests that you may be using the approach in a looser, less specific manner. While that's fine for your own work, the purpose of stressing the specific use of the ghosting method throughout this course - time consuming as it may be - is to ensure that the procedure is drilled into your brain to such a degree that you continue to benefit from it as much as possible even when not thinking about applying it.
The only other point I wanted to mention - and this is just more of a piece of advice, something to keep in mind - is that when your cylinders have more dramatic foreshortening - for example, 111 here - that tells us that between the two ends, there is a fair bit of physical distance that isn't being represented through the length of the cylinder that is visible on the page. So in other words, we can see that the cylinder's already really long based on what's there on the page, but the foreshortening also implies that there is more length in the "unseen" dimension of depth.
I'm guessing that your intention with 111 wasn't to create a super long cylinder, so in such a situation you'd probably make the physical length of the cylinder on the page shorter, even allowing for some overlap between the ellipses at the ends. In addition to this, also remember that as the overall size of the far end shrinks down (again, due to foreshortening), make sure that you're also matching it with a similar widening of the far end's degree, as they both work to represent the same thing, and thus need to occur in tandem.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is coming along quite well. 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.
In applying these line extensions correctly, as instructed, you've been giving yourself a continuous stream of information regarding how you're approaching picking your proportions, and where that approach can be adjusted to yield better results. And so, over the course I can see that guesswork (in terms of the proportions) becoming more consistent and correct, showing us that while there's certainly continued room for growth, you're developing that instinctual sense of the proportions nicely. This should serve you well into the next lesson.
So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto Lesson 6.
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