Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your 250 Cylinder Challenge

-Starting with the cylinders around an arbitrary minor axis, you have drawn your ellipses with a good deal of confidence and the same can be said about the edges of each cylinder, this has definitely helped your cylinders to look more solid and believable.

I also like to see that you have spent a good deal of time in checking for the real minor axis, and you have caught even the slightest of misalignments, this will help you to keep improving and avoid plateauing in the “close enough zone”.

-During the first cylinders of your set I can see that you did not experiment too much with the rates of foreshortening, keep in mind that in order to get the most out of these challenges you have to experiment a good deal, with the rates of foreshortening , orientation and sizes of your forms, it seems that you became aware of this issue and corrected it as you went along but you can still explore this much further.

• Now I want to talk about the most important thing that we are looking to learn with the first part of the challenge, and that is the relationship between the rates of foreshortening and the degree shift of each ellipse. This two things cannot behave independently of each other, that is to say that if we have a cylinder with a dramatic rate of foreshortening, it should be accompanied by a dramatic shift in the degree of the ellipses, with the ellipse furthest away being much wider than the one that is closer to us, if you need a reminder of how this works you can revisit the lesson 1 ellipses section. The reason for this is that these two things tell us the information about the orientation of our cylinder and they cannot contradict each other. Taking a look at your work you did start to build an awareness of this relationship either consciously or unconsciously. However I do think that you may need more practice in order to fully understand this concept, but you are moving in the right direction so far, I suggest you try to draw more cylinders with dramatic rates of foreshortening during your warm ups.

Moving on to the cylinders inside boxes, this exercise is all about helping the students to build boxes which feature two opposite sides that are proportionally a square in 3D space, regardless of its orientation in 3D space, we don’t do this by memorizing every possible orientation, instead we do this by continuous repetition and by analyzing with our line extension. In the box challenge the line extensions served to get a better sense for how to make our sets of lines to converge more consistently and accurately, here we are adding 3 new lines 2 for the contact points of the ellipse with the plane that encloses it and one for the minor axis of each individual ellipse. Checking how far off these new sets of lines were from converging with our box vanishing points we can tell if our ellipse really represents a circle in 3D space , and in turn how far off we were from having each plan representing a square in perspective.

I think you nailed this exercise and you show a good understanding of how to build boxes with square faces from the very beginning, I also like to see that you were not overly concerned with having the ellipses to touch the contact points perfectly, we can do this because mistakes do not necessarily take away from the value of completing this challenge all the way to the end. The only thing I want to suggest so that you may keep using these exercises more effectively, is that you should extend your lines all the way through to get a better understanding of the mistakes that you are making, and that way you can change your strategy to keep getting better and more consistent results.

Okayy that’s about it, I think you are ready to move on to lesson 6. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, good luck!!