250 Cylinder Challenge
4:13 PM, Monday February 17th 2025
Accidentally put this up as a non official subbmission oops.
No worries - I went ahead and removed the accidental post.
Jumping right in with your cylinders, though you struggled in the first couple in terms of getting your side edges and the far end ellipse to line up cohesively, overall your work throughout the set is fairly well done. Your linework is confident and consistent, allowing you to produce smooth edges and evenly shaped ellipses. You're also generally mindful and attentive when identifying your minor axes, though there are some cases where you forget that the minor axis goes down the narrower span of the ellipse - as shown here. Also, note that when your photos are blurry, it does make it harder to use those pages to bolster your critique - I know with challenges like this the sheer volume of photos you have to take is a lot on its own, but ultimately it's in your best interest to make sure they're as clear as possible.
Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes, your work here is coming along similarly 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.
You've been pretty good about applying the line extensions in a manner consistent with the instructions, and throughout the process you've generally given yourself a good bit of information to help you understand how to adjust your approach - although I did notice some cases where your ellipses didn't always touch all four side edges of the planes enclosing them. For example, 204 and 207 have some sizeable gaps between them and two of their edges. 206 has one gap, though it's fairly small, so less of a concern - ultimately it's not abnormal to have cases where you fall short of the edge or overshoot it, but what is critically important is that we don't toss aside the intent to touch all four side edges in favour of trying to make the ellipse "fit" better in another way. We need the ellipse to "describe" the plane enclosing it, so that its line extensions can tell us about the box itself and its proportions. By and large you do appear to have been holding to that.
All in all, solid work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto Lesson 6.
Thanks for the feedback.
Though it was logical I don't think I caught onto the fact that the perfect ellipses (circles in 3d) represented perfect squares in 3D. ( I think I was just so focused on trying to get the ellipses correct. )
Either way I understand that now thank you.
Stan Prokopenko's had been teaching figure drawing as far back as I can remember, even when I was just a regular student myself. It's safe to say that when it comes to figure drawing, his tutelage is among the best.
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