Unfortunately this critique is going to be rough, and it may be a very bitter pill to swallow. I've included a little anecdote at the end however, that hopefully will put it all into context - so I highly urge you to read through the whole thing, frustrating as it may be.

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, I noticed right off the bat that your cylinders fall into two main categories:

• Cylinders with side edges that are entirely parallel on the page

• Cylinders that are close to parallel on the page, but converging slightly

There are two main issues that arise from this. The first being that the assignment section requested, in bold, that you include a wide variety of rates of foreshortening across the set. Unfortunately, that requirement was not met.

The second, and bigger concern however, is that the first category (cylinders with side edges that are entirely parallel on the page) are actually incorrect. Reason being, you're effectively forcing the vanishing point governing those side edges to infinity (in the manner discussed back in Lesson 1) - something that you do not actually have direct control over. You control how you want your given cylinder to be oriented in space, and that determines where the vanishing point will go.

Vanishing points only go to infinity in a very specific circumstance, when the edges they govern in 3D space are aligned perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight, rather than slanting towards or away from them through the depth of the scene. In essence, when they're running across the viewer's field of view, whether it be from left to right, top to bottom, etc. Just not angling towards us.

This challenge however has us rotating our cylinders freely in 3D space, and it's pretty clear based on how you've drawn your cylinders here, that it is your intent to do so, but in keeping those side edges parallel, this leaves a big contradiction, where the different elements of the cylinder do not line up. In essence, it seems that you've tried to force the challenge into becoming a simpler problem, and in so doing, you've unfortunately sidestepped the challenge itself.

Now, the reason that the absence of much variation in your foreshortening is an issue is mainly because of something I try to look out for. It has to do with the two manifestations of foreshortening - the shift in scale from one end to the other, and the shift in degree. These help the viewer to understand just how much of the cylinder's length is visible right on the page, and how much of it lies in the "unseen" dimension of depth. Because both shifts represent the same thing, they have to work in tandem - if the scale shift is more significant, it should be matched with a more dramatic shift in degree, and if they do not match up, the viewer will know something looks off, even if they can't specifically pinpoint what that is.

Without any real variation in foreshortening, I cannot gauge whether or not you understood this already (whether consciously or subconsciously). It's one of those things I prefer not to mention in the material, but bring up in the critique, because concepts we infer naturally tend to have more of an impact, than those that are explained - providing the explanation afterwards then merely solidifies what's already there.

Unfortunately, while you've certainly applied the line extensions to your cylinders in boxes well enough (except for a few cases where you extended those lines in the wrong direction, like 92 and 96 for example), the same problem (lines being overly parallel) is extremely present in your boxes here, which undermines the core focus of the 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.

Since all the lines are parallel, we end up losing the benefit of those line extensions in this manner, again rendering the exercise ineffective. Looking back on your 250 box challenge, it seems that there you did incorporate some convergence to your boxes - it was pretty slight, but it was enough. Here, I'm not sure what changed

While I'm sure you've invested a great deal of time into this challenge, I am going to have to ask you to redo it in its entirety. While this issue is not common, you are not the first to be saddled with a full redo at this stage. It will sting to have read through this critique, so I'd like to offer you a bit of solace.

I had another student a ways back who made a similar mistake - Grain00. They put a ton of time into their cylinder challenge, but made the same mistakes. When I told them they needed to redo it in full, they were... well, heartbroken, and could barely bear the thought of going through it again. Honestly, I didn't expect that they would.

But, they did. And not only did they, but they went on to knock it out of the park the second time around, and then continued forward to do the same for Lesson 6. They admittedly didn't complete the course (their last submission was a year ago, just one short from completing, although admittedly Lesson 7 is a very, very daunting prospect), but I can confidently say that they grew a ton, and a lot of it came from making the choice to accept that they'd taken a wrong turn, as we all sometimes do, and get back on track.

Like him, you made a mistake. A big one, and it's cost you time, and a credit - but in the grand scheme of things, it's an opportunity to come back stronger.

That said, I'd recommend taking a little breather before you take another swing at this challenge. When you do tackle it, and complete it, you'll be sending it in as a new submission, which will cost you an additional credit.