250 Cylinder Challenge
1:10 PM, Monday November 13th 2023
Pages 4 to 27 the blue lines are for far away ellipses and red ones are for close ellipses
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8:45 PM, Tuesday November 14th 2023
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, overall you're doing well. You're varying your rates of foreshortening for the most part, and you're fastidious in checking the alignment of your ellipses to the initial minor axis line. I'm also pleased to see that you're catching both more notable, and the less obvious discrepancies in these alignments, which will ensure that you don't plateau in your progress as you continue to practice this exercise.
One thing I did notice, albeit not very often, came up towards the end of the set. Looking at 191 and 195 on this page shows cylinders with side edges that are basically parallel on the page, meaning that they converge towards a vanishing point at infinity. As explained in this section of the instructions, this is actually incorrect, since our cylinders are freely rotated in space, and not aligned in any way to the viewer's angle of sight. Given that this didn't come up very often, it's not a big deal, but it is something I wanted to draw to your attention.
Before I continue onto the next section, one quick point - using complicated numbering schemes as you have here makes things a lot harder when it comes to giving you feedback, as I can't really figure out any way to ensure you've actually done the quantity that was assigned without counting each and every one... which is pretty ridiculous. And I did count. In the future, stick to simple numbering. In this case, first cylinder should be number 1, and your last cylinder for the set should be 150.
Carrying onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here was similarly well done. 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 being so mindful of marking out each line extension, you've armed yourself with ample information to analyze each page and identify ways in which your approach could be adjusted to yield better results for the next - and the results by and large do demonstrate a solid sense of proportion by the end.
So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto Lesson 6.
11:42 AM, Thursday November 16th 2023
Thanks for the feedback!! Sorry for the weird numbering system I won't do it in the next lessons ????
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