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1:03 AM, Saturday October 30th 2021
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, I think you've done a pretty great job with these. I can clearly see that with each ellipse, you've executed them with confidence and from your shoulder, helping you to maintain more even shapes. You've also been quite fastidious with checking your ellipses' alignment, and I can see steady improvement over the course of the set due to your careful and regular analysis.
When it comes to foreshortening, I do think you could have included more variety and a greater range (most of yours stayed pretty shallow, though I am pleased to see that you were still ensuring that those side edges did converge - some students incorrectly try to force vanishing points at infinity, which wouldn't actually make any sense given the entirely random orientations of the forms). Bringing the vanishing point closer however, to yield a more dramatic convergence as well as a more significant degree shift from one ellipse to the other would definitely be useful in the context of practicing a wider variety of configurations. All the same, you still did a pretty good job here, and I can see that you kept the relationship between the scale shift from one end to the other (caused by the converging edges) and the degree shift fairly consistent, helping maintain a sense of cohesion.
Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, I am similarly pleased with your work. You've shown considerable patience and care with all of your line extensions, and I'm thrilled with how well your boxes' line convergences have come along.
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 honed your instincts in this regard quite well, and that you should be well prepared for the kinds of proportional estimation Lesson 6 will ask of you. So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep up the great work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto Lesson 6!
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