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10:09 PM, Thursday October 13th 2022

Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your 250 cylinder challenge.

-Starting with the cylinders around an arbitrary minor axis, you’ve drawn your ellipses with a good deal of confidence and the same goes of the edges of the cylinder and the hatching lines which look quite tidy rather than messy.

It also seems that you are spending a good deal of time checking for the real minor axis, which will help you to keep improving and avoid plateauing in the “close enough zone.

There’s one thing worth mentioning about this section of the challenge and that is the relationship between the shift in scale, where one end becomes much smaller due to the perspective and the shift in degree where the ellipse furthest away becomes proportionally wider.

Basically these two things are a manifestation of the same thing which is foreshortening, and thus they cannot work independently of each other, which means that if we draw a cylinder with a very dramatic rate of foreshortening it should be accompanied by a dramatic shift in the degree of the ellipses.

There are definitely some cases worth calling out like number 115 and 127 where you drew a cylinder with a very dramatic rate of foreshortening but the shift in degree is very small, they still turned out okay but it is definitely something to bear in mind.

And lastly I want to recommend that you should keep experimenting with more orientation for your cylinders right now it seems that they are mostly drawn from a side view, so instead try to draw more cylinders that are closer to a front view.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is by and large done quite well.

The only thing I want to point out is that you may have taken it too far when drawing those points, after having gone through the 250 box challenge you already have a good intuitive sense on how to draw boxes. Anyways, 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 the error checking here, you've given yourself ample opportunity to adjust your approach and develop your instinctive grasp of how to alter the way in which you draw your boxes so as to maintain those proportions, regardless of the orientation of the form. There's certainly more room for improvement on this front, as is expected, but as it stands you should be well equipped to tackle Lesson 6.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Next Steps:

Lesson 6

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
3:50 AM, Friday October 14th 2022

Understood! I'll be playing more with orientation and attempt to draw more front view instead of side view in my warm-ups. I'll also keep in mind that dramatic foreshortening will always be accompanied by dramatic degree shift too. And I believe you're right that I should be lowering those marks when I draw boxes too because I already have intuitive sense of how they worked.

Thank you as always! Beckerito.

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