250 Cylinder Challenge
9:41 AM, Thursday June 16th 2022
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12:26 AM, Friday June 17th 2022
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, there are two main issues I wanted to call out:
Firstly, your ellipses are rather hesitant, and I can see that you appear to draw them in more roughly, then trace back over them to kind of reassert them. This is not the correct approach - use the ghosting method, investing your time into the planning and preparation phases, and then execute with a singular confident stroke. This may undermine the accuracy of the mark, but as discussed back in Lesson 1, your first priority is the confidence and smoothness of the mark. Accuracy is a secondary concern.
Keep in mind - tracing of any sort (by which I really mean, tracing back over your own lines) and any sort of looser sketching/underdrawing is not something we do in our drawings for this course. Always fall back to the techniques we've introduced, and do be sure to practice them regularly in your warmups.
I am pleased to see that this sort of undersketch/clean-up pass approach does diminish as you progress through the set, although it does still show up on occasion (like 146 on the last page).
The other point I wanted to mention isn't so much a mistake, in the sense that it wasn't mentioned in the lesson material. Rather, I leave room for students to pick up on this themselves if possible, as things you identify yourself tend to stick a bit better than things you're told. It's about the relationship between the shift in scale from one ellipse to the other, and the shift in degree, as we move from the end closer to the viewer to the end that's farther away.
Both of these shifts are manifestations of foreshortening - basically, they tell the viewer just how much of the cylinder's length exists right there on the page, and how much of it is in the 'unseen' dimension of depth. This does however mean that, since they both represent the same thing, these "shifts" have to operate in tandem. If the far end is considerably smaller in scale, then it should also be met with a significant widening of its degree.
In your work, you tend to choose the shift in your degree more arbitrarily, and so we do see quite a few cases (like 142 for example) where the degree shift is negligible, but the scale shift is far more dramatic.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is generally much better all around. You're executing your ellipses more confidently, and your lines are ghosted and consistent. 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.
In doing the extensions correctly for most of your boxes (I noticed a handful where you specifically put one of your vanishing points at infinity, and then did not extend those lines - generally I wouldn't put any vanishing points at infinity for this challenge, simply because we're rotating these forms entirely randomly, and the chances that they'd align in such a way that the vanishing point would go to infinity is gonna be pretty slim, but regardless you should still be extending them), you have indeed made good headway in improving your instincts as far as these proportions go, regardless of the orientations of the forms.
So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete - just be sure not to trace back over your linework at any point in this course. Everything should be executed using the ghosting method, whereas tracing lends itself to focusing way more on how the lines exist on the flat page, rather than how they exist in 3D space (which we can focus on more when drawing confidently).
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 6.
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