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10:19 PM, Thursday October 30th 2025

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, while your linework is coming along reasonably well, I did immediately notice that the vast majority of your cylinders appear to all fall within a fairly shallow range of foreshortening, with some (like those on this page) even going as far as to appear as though the intent was to keep their side edges parallel on the page (though this, in the case of 102, resulted in edges that diverged as we move back along the cylinder's length). This suggests to me that you may have missed, or not taken entirely to heart, the reminders highlighted here in the lesson material which stress the importance of varying your rates of foreshortening from shallow/gradual to dramatic/rapid, and further goes to explain why having your cylinders' side edges parallel on the page would be incorrect for this exercise.

Aside from that - though it is a notable lapse that will have to be addressed - you're doing a good job of being fastidious in checking the alignment of your ellipses, and catching both more obvious discrepancies, as well as those that can be easily missed.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, there are unfortunately some notable issues here as well. I'll point out what they are, but first I'd like to give you some additional context in regards to this exercise. 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.

Ultimately the issues I'm noticing have to do with your line extensions, which as explained above, play a deeply important role in this exercise. To start, I noticed that in the earlier part of this exercise, you frequently had cases where some of your sets of lines appeared to be extended in the wrong direction. For example, on this page the purple lines for 172, 173, 174, and 175 are all pointed in the wrong direction. Note that as discussed in the box challenge, you can identify the correct direction for a box's line extensions by working off the initial Y used to construct the box.

This admittedly would be a pretty significant concern however, given how far into the course we are, but you do appear to have caught onto the issue and corrected it yourself, with the last instances that I can find being on this page in the 180s, so rather than there being an underlying misunderstanding, it's more likely that you may simply not have given yourself as much time to think through these problems as you could have.

The other critical issue in how the line extensions were applied is that when it comes to the lengthwise direction of our cylinders, where the minor axis lines of both ellipses should be extended back along with the box's lines, you appear to have gone about this differently. Instead of extending your ellipses' minor axes, you appear to have extended the cylinders' side edges, which is not included in the instructions. As a result, though you had the correct number of line extensions (6 in each direction), two were unfortunately not relevant to the exercise.

Ultimately the minor axis lines, though not the stars of the show (the stars would the contact point lines, whose convergences with the boxes' edges tell us how far off the planes enclosing the ellipses' proportions are from being square in 3D space), they do still play an important role. Specifically, they allow us to understand when the contact point lines should be trusted, and how much weight to give them in assessing those proportions.

For example, a situation where the contact point lines are way off, but the minor axis line is correct, tells us that the proportions are way off. One where the contact point lines are correct, but the minor axis line is way off, would similarly tell us that the proportions are way off, but wouldn't give us a clear idea of how to address it. And a situation where the contact point lines are way off, and the minor axis line is way off, simply has no valuable information to provide one way or the other, and thus shouldn't be given much credence. Without the minor axis line to tell us how much to trust the other line extensions, we're left assuming that our contact point lines are always entirely truthful - which doesn't ruin the exercise altogether, but it does diminish its effectiveness quite a bit.

All in all, there's a lot here you've done well (your linework in the cylinders in boxes is especially well done), but I do still have to confirm that you understand how to apply these exercises correctly, and so you will find some revisions assigned below.

Next Steps:

Please submit the following:

  • 50 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, being sure to widely vary your rates of foreshortening across the whole set, and specifically avoiding any case where your intention is to draw the cylinders' side edges as being parallel on the page.

  • 30 cylinders in boxes, taking care to apply the line extensions as instructed.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
1:45 PM, Friday November 7th 2025

Thank you very much for your helpful feedback. You're right that as well as misunderstanding which lines to check, I just didn't give myself enough time on the cylinder in box checking. I've attached my updates.

4:55 PM, Monday November 10th 2025

Your work here is looking much better, and is doing a considerably better job of applying the instructions consistently and correctly. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto Lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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