Hello Comfy,
You can find my submission for the 250 cylinders challenge. It was harder than I expected, and the boxed cylinders really required a lot of mental fortitude to go through. I'm happy I made it through. I forgot to make the minor axis longer than the cylinder for the majority of my arbitrary cylinders, I hope that's not too much of an issue, sorry.
Hope you have a great evening.
Arch
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, you're hitting most of the notes I'm looking for here. Your ellipses are confidently drawn, using the ghosting method and from your shoulder, and you're fastidious in checking the true alignments of your ellipses, and learning from that analysis. You've also included a good bit of variety to your foreshortening and orientations, so there's a lot of good experimentation going on here.
One thing I do want to call out is just something I like to keep an eye out for. When we play with more dramatic foreshortening, certain discrepancies can show themselves more easily. You're obviously aware of how the ellipses' degree and scale both shift as we move towards or away from the viewer, but one thing you may be missing, is that the two shifts must occur in tandem. That is, to say, at roughly the same rate.
I noticed a few - such as 112, 106, and 97 - where the scale shift is quite dramatic (with the far end getting much smaller), but where the degree shift is fairly minimal. This can make a cylinder feel a little "off", as we're basically telling the viewer that the cylinder is undergoing both "very little" and "quite a lot" of foreshortening at the same time.
Aside from that however, these are looking really good.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, here you're doing a great job. As you well know by this point, the exercise is more focused on the construction and proportion of the boxes, and the cylinders themselves are just a means to test whether the two opposite faces are proportionally square. Throughout this exercise, you've applied that manner of analyzing your results to great effect, and I can see improvement across the set not only in getting the ellipses' lines to converge correctly, but also with the convergences of all your box's edges as well.
Beyond that, there's not really much else to be said. You're doing a great job, and I can see your level of comfort with both boxes and cylinders serving you well into the next lesson. You may consider this challenge complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 6.
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.
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