Thanks in advance for the critique. I struggled a lot with narrow ovals (I kept making flat tops/bottoms IMO), so perhaps I spent too much time on those...
Also, I went to the Hilma af Klint exhibition in Tokyo this week and had a chuckle seeing two of her paintings featuring boxes. I put photos of them at the end, if you want to check them out. Who knew you were training us to become world-famous abstract artists!
Hahaha. The Hilma af Klint pieces are very interesting! Thanks for sharing them.
Anyway! Jumping right in with the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, your work here is coming along pretty well. You've done a great job of executing smooth, consistent side edges with no visible wavering (even with the longer ones, which is quite remarkable). Your ellipses are admittedly a little uneven at times - that's usually the result of drawing them more with your wrist and elbow, and not quite engaging the whole arm from your shoulder. The more limited range of motion can interfere with the shape, forcing a change in trajectory and the balance of how those pivots are used when you hit the limits of what the pivots you're using can provide. It can definitely feel awkward to draw narrow ellipses from your shoulder, but the nature of that pivot is still much better suited to the task.
You're doing a good job of checking the alignment of your ellipses after the fact - I can see that you're catching not only the more obvious discrepancies, but also those smaller ones that can be more easily missed. This suggests to me that you're positioning yourself well to avoid plateauing in your growth with this exercise, which can happen once we generally reach the range of being "good enough".
One point I did want to share - and this isn't something you did incorrectly, as it's not stressed in the lesson material, but rather I prefer to give students the opportunity to pick up on this themselves (when they do, it sticks better, and for those that don't, I can always address it as I am doing here). Basically, the two "shifts" our ellipses experience as they slide from one end of a cylinder to another, occur in both the overall scale of the ellipse (where the end closer to the viewer is larger, and the end farther from the viewer is smaller), and in the degree (where the closer end is proportionally narrower, and the farther end is proportionally wider). The shifts both convey to the viewer a visual cue of how much of the cylinder's length can be measured directly on the page, and how much exists in the "unseen" dimension of depth. Because they signify the same thing, that does mean that they have to operate in tandem.
All that is to say, is that the more of a scale shift the far end of your cylinder experiences, the more of a degree shift it should also experience. So the smaller that far end is, the wider it should get. This will help avoid cases where things might feel "off". A good example of this issue can be seen on 125 on this page, whereas 123 on that same page, having its far end being a little wider, handles it a bit better.
Anyway, that's just something to keep in mind going forward.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is quite well done. 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.
I can see that you've gone to great lengths to consistently apply those line extensions to each instance of the exercise, and have as a result been working with ample information to consider how to adjust your approach from page to page. I can also see this reflecting in the proportions of your boxes, which visibly improve across the set. There is always further room for improvement on this front, but you should be well equipped to tackle Lesson 6, and to continue to improve on these skills with the use of this exercise going forward.
So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto Lesson 6.
A lot of folks have heard about Scott Robertson's "How to Draw" - it's basically a classic at this point, and deservedly so. It's also a book that a lot of people struggle with, for the simple reason that they expect it to be a manual or a lesson plan explaining, well... how to draw. It's a reasonable assumption, but I've found that book to be more of a reference book - like an encyclopedia for perspective problems, more useful to people who already have a good basis in perspective.
Sketching: The Basics is a far better choice for beginners. It's more digestible, and while it introduces a lot of similar concepts, it does so in a manner more suited to those earlier in their studies.
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