250 Cylinder Challenge
8:08 AM, Saturday November 6th 2021
I'm finally done with those cylinders, took me a while to get them done, especially the ones enclosed in boxes. I finally got the hang of it for the last 2 pages...
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, there's a lot here that's coming along well:
Your linework is smooth and confident - you're clearly making good use of the planning/preparation techniques we've explored throughout this course to ensure evenly shaped ellipses and greater precision with your lines.
You're fastidious and patient in the analysis of your true minor axes, identifying even fairly small deviations so as to continue improving and learning from those mistakes.
You're doing a good job of incorporating a variety of rates of foreshortening
There are also one main thing that could be improved upon:
Aside from that, your work throughout this part of the challenge is coming along well.
Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, 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 regards to the use of the line extensions/analysis to help push your boxes towards the correct proportion, you've done well. I do think that there's still plenty of benefit to continuing to focus your practice on the core 6 edges of the boxes themselves however, especially when your boxes get a little longer in one dimension. For example, as we can see on this cylinder, when the form gets longer you tend to have the blue and purple lines converging in pairs.
This does improve however, and the severity of these issues decrease as you get towards the end of this set. Still, keep working to refine your estimation of those convergences and you should continue to see considerable growth - simply because it's such a core concept to the principles of perspective.
Anyway, all in all you're progressing well. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 6.
Thank you very much for this detailed analysis. I'll keep working on these !
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.