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4:21 AM, Saturday March 25th 2023
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, while you've approached your linework with a fair bit of confidence which has helped you to maintain straight, consistent side edges and evenly shaped ellipses, there is a pretty significant issue with the vast majority of your cylinders that suggests that you may not have paid as close attention to the instructions of the task as you could have.
Most of your cylinders present with side edges that are parallel on the page - suggesting that you're forcing the vanishing point that governs them to 'infinity', rather than allowing them to converge. There are two major issues with this. Firstly, this is incorrect in terms of abiding by the rules of perspective (in that we do not control whether the vanishing point goes to infinity - the position of the vanishing point is determined by our desired orientation for that set of edges in 3D space). Secondly, it means that you didn't follow what was requested in the assignment section in regards to including lots of variation to your rates of foreshortening for this section of the exercise, which is mentioned in bold. While you included a handful of cases where the foreshortening was applied, these were truly few and far between.
I actually draw further attention to both of these issues in this reminder section, so I highly recommend that you read through it carefully. It goes into more detail as to why keeping all your edges parallel for this exercise is incorrect, in terms of the rules of perspective.
It is extremely important that you ensure you go through the instructions - and as it is very possible that on longer tasks such as these, one might read the instructions but forget about them throughout the process, reviewing them periodically to ensure you haven't missed anything critical will save you a lot of time in the long run, and avoid significant revisions.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, while there is a notable issue here as well, overall this work follows the instructions far more closely than the first section. 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.
You have applied the line extensions correctly by and large, although as I mentioned earlier there is one issue that did somewhat undermine their usefulness at times - and that is the fact that your ellipses frequently did not touch all four edges of the plane containing them. We use the ellipses to "test" the proportions of the plane, and so ensuring that the ellipse itself is touching all four edges (and striving to align it to the desired minor axis line) allows us to focus on just one variable - the degree of the ellipse (and therefore the width of the plane containing it), whose correctness is gauged by how far off the contact point lines are from converging consistently with the box's own vanishing points.
This is of course something you can apply going forward, and will not require its own revisions. The first section however, will unfortunately need to be redone - however, instead of assigning the full 150, I will assign only 75. As I'm sure you're aware, our seasonal promptathon event is about to start however (I snuck this critique in just before we packed up for the week), so I recommend you start on your revisions after it is over. While it's unfortunate that those significant instructions were missed for the first section, you did put a lot of work into this, and you certainly deserve a break (and may well have plenty of 50% rule debt to burn off as well, which is precisely what the promptathon helps with).
Next Steps:
Please submit 75 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes.
7:05 AM, Friday March 31st 2023
hey,
here's my revision
i tried to include a broader variety of foreshortening
i did some additional cylinders by accident as i split the task over multiple days and forgot i was "already done". i still included them 'cause i guess it won't hurt since they are already there :D
edit: o, i realized i submitted this before the prompathon ended. sorry of course feel free to ignore this until then
7:29 PM, Monday April 3rd 2023
Much better! There's just one thing I wanted to draw your attention to, just so you're aware of it - though to be clear, this is not a mistake as it was not explicitly pointed out in the instructions, and it is something I actually saw improvement with as you progressed through the set.
Foreshortening manifests in our cylinders through two means - the shift in scale from one end to the other, where the convergence of the side edges squeezes the farther end down, making it smaller in its overall scale, and the shift in degree where the far end ellipse gets proportionally wider. These are the visual cues we use to interpret just how much of the cylinder's length exists to be seen right there on the page, that we can measure with our eyes, and how much of its length exists in the "unseen" dimension of depth.
Because they represent the same thing, they have to operate in tandem - meaning that in cases like 23 on this page where the far end maintains roughly the same degree while becoming considerably smaller in its scale will read as being "off" to the viewer, even though they aren't necessarily aware as to why. Conversely, if we look at 69 on this page, as the scale shifts dramatically, so too does the degree, making that far end proportionally much wider. This has the two shifts operating together, giving us a more natural impression that the bulk of this cylinder's length exists in that unseen dimension of depth.
This is something I, as of yet, have left to the students to pick up on themselves, because lessons we learn through our own inference tend to stick a bit better - but of course, I still make a point of explaining it afterwards. From what I can see here, it does seem like you developed this understanding more naturally, with your later cylinders demonstrating this more consistently.
Anyway, good work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 6.
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Ellipse Master Template
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I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.