250 Cylinder Challenge

10:58 PM, Saturday July 10th 2021

250 cylinders - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/8nzEUIm.jpg

Post with 14 views. 250 cylinders

sobbing here it is.. Felt like it was clicking at ~230 boxes and then my mind to shoulder muscles went blank a bit.

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2:39 AM, Monday July 12th 2021

Starting with the cylinders around arbtirary minor axes, I can definitely see progress in your attempts to draw ellipses that match your intended minor axis alignment (or at least getting closer to it). I'm also pleased to see that there's a good variety of rates of foreshortening here. There are however a few things that I noticed:

  • Most notably, you're drawing these cylinders pretty small, and that really isn't doing you any favours. Drawing smaller tends to cause us to draw more clumsily - specifically because it limits the space our brain has to think through spatial problems, and perhaps more importantly in this case, makes it harder to engage our whole arm while drawing. You've got a lot of blank space in between these cylinders, and there's no real reason those cylinders couldn't have been bigger.

  • I think this definitely contributed to some clumsiness in your linework - some of your ellipses were fine, but a lot of them tend to be quite loose, in ways that suggest that you may be drawing them more from your wrist or elbow, rather than from your shoulder. It does vary, as there are still some that came out quite nicely (like 129), but you really need to take more time with each and every one of these, and make sure that you're applying the underlying techniques you've learned so far. Don't let your eagerness to finish things get in the way of that.

  • This really is just an extension of the previous two points, but you're definitely varying in your cylinders' quality. Comparing this page to the one immediately after it for instance. This definitely shows that sometimes you're taking your time, following the little steps, etc. and sometimes you're... well, not.

From what I can see, you're generally doing a good job of applying foreshortening. Foreshortening manifests both in the shift in scale from one end of the cylinder to the other (the far end being smaller than the closer end), as well as the shift in degree (far end being wider than the closer end), and these two work in tandem with one another - so the shift of scale won't ever be way more dramatic than the shift in degree, or vice versa. You seem to be holding to that pretty well, without many instances of them falling out of sync.

Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, I definitely feel that the small scale of these is hindering you as they did in the previous section, but I won't beat that dead horse. Aside from that, you're doing decently well, but that it definitely has its impact.

I'm also a little unsure of whether you're actually adding the minor axis lines for each ellipse to your line extensions, and I suspect that you may be missing it. This is troublesome, because of exactly why we're extending these lines. This exercise basically focuses on training students to develop their instincts when it comes to constructing boxes which feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square.

We do that through this analysis - by adding the ellipses' lines (all three, the minor axis and the two contact point lines) we're able to test how far off each ellipse is to representing a circle in 3D space, basically based on whether or not those lines converge towards the box's vanishing points. This in turn tells us whether the plane enclosing said ellipse represents a square, or at least how far off it is from doing so.

If we're only checking 2 out of 3 of the ellipses' lines, then there's a pretty big hole where errors can accumulate, while the others are made to fall more in line - so make sure to check all three each time.

The other thing I wanted to call out was that when your cylinders get longer, you have a tendency to have a given set of parallel lines coverge in two separate sets, one for each extremity of the form. Keep an eye on that - it's a common issue, but one we can only address by being more mindful of it while we construct our box.

Now, due to the issues I've called out - mainly the fact that I do feel these could be done a little better, I'm going to assign some minimal revisions below. It's not too much, but I do expect you to take a lot of care in the execution of each and every one.

Next Steps:

Please submit 10 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, and 10 cylinders in boxes.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
3:17 PM, Thursday July 15th 2021

bangs head I can't believe I didn't put the minor axis I'm so sorry. Made a huge difference when I started checking that and drawing bigger helped me control the ellipses WAY more.

I noticed when I drew "square-ish" ellipses in boxes the contact point convergences were good but I tried look more elliptical by to make narrowing and rounding out the edges towards the end only for them not hit the points in a way that converged despite ghosting several times :'(

I can't tell if its being a n00b at drawing circles in perspective or that I shouldn't be narrowing the edges like that because its making the contact off where I want it to be.

Thank you so much again for your help. Still can't believe how many of these you have to go through by yourself. Looking forward to seeing DaB grow!

https://imgur.com/a/dAVZcRX

9:20 PM, Thursday July 15th 2021

Definitely better. Just be sure to extend the minor axes all the way in your cylinders in boxes, so you can actually compare them with the lines towards whose vanishing points they're meant to converge. Don't just mark them out in a more limited fashion as we do for the first section of the challenge.

Also, make sure you're drawing your ellipses more confidently and evenly. Some of those in your boxes are getting really stiff and uneven, and aren't actually ellipses. I will however leave that to you to resolve on your own.

I'll go ahead and mark this as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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