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7:53 PM, Friday July 1st 2022

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, I noticed that you did not number your cylinders. I'll have to take your word for it that they're all here, but as you can imagine, numbering them would have been very helpful.

Looking at the cylinders themselves, yours fall into two main categories. You've got cylinders where their side edges are running effectively parallel to one another on the page (suggesting a vanishing point at infinity, in the manner discussed back in Lesson 1), and cylinders with a bit of convergence to the side edges. In this regard, you ended up missing one critical point from the assignment section, as pictured here - in bold, it states that you should be varying the rate of foreshortening across your cylinders.

Of the two categories in which your cylinders fall, the second is fine, but the first is actually incorrect. That is because we do not actually control where the vanishing point goes - it is determined by the orientation of the edges in 3D space it's meant to govern. We do control how we want our cylinder to be oriented (and in this challenge they're all rotated randomly and freely), but the only situation in which our vanishing point ends up at infinity is if the set of lines it governs in 3D space run perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight - that is, going straight across their field of view, not slanting towards or away from them through the depth of the scene. For anything else, there must be a convergence, even if only slightly, towards a concrete vanishing point.

Since our cylinders here are freely and randomly rotated, we can pretty much assume that we're never going to end up with such a perfect alignment, and thus, to have any of your side edges run parallel on the page (towards an infinite vanishing point), that would be extremely unlikely at best. To have a significant number across the set be that way would be fundamentally incorrect.

I also noticed a few cylinders scattered across the pages where you skipped on starting with a minor axis, and some where you skipped doing the error checking (as well as cases where you neglected to do both). As a whole, I feel you're definitely struggling when it comes to following the instructions that are laid out in the challenge, so unfortunately this section is going to require a redo.

As to the cylinders in boxes, there are definitely some here where you're once again forcing the vanishing points to infinity, but overall most of them are reasonably well done. 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 applying the line extensions correctly, you're allowing yourself to identify where your estimations can be adjusted to improve your proportions, ultimately rewiring the way in which your brain perceives those 3D forms, and developing your ability to draw squares in 3D space regardless of how they're oriented. Just be sure to avoid forcing edges to be parallel - for any exercise where you've got freely rotated forms, always work with convergences towards concrete vanishing points, even if those convergences are gradual.

Anyway, as I said, I am going to require you to redo the first part of the challenge. Be sure to include lots of variation in your rates of foreshortening, including both shallow convergences (not fully parallel side edges) and more rapid, dramatic ones.

Next Steps:

Please submit an additional 150 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
11:44 AM, Friday July 8th 2022
4:28 PM, Friday July 8th 2022

Definitely better. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, just have two things for you to keep an eye on going forward:

  • You should be drawing through each ellipse you freehand twice before lifting your pen. You have a tendency to get into doing it more than that (which can get us into territory where we lose track of the ellipse we're trying to draw), and sometimes less than that (sometimes just once, sometimes 1.5 times). I think you're definitely trying to do this correctly, but you will benefit from being more conscious of exactly how those marks are going down. Try to stick as closely to two full turns of the ellipse as you can.

  • Both the scale shift from one ellipse to the other, and the shift in their degrees, are manifestations of the same thing - foreshortening. They tell the viewer how much of the cylinder's length exists right there on the page, and how much of its length exists in the "unseen" dimension of depth. This does mean however that the two shifts need to work in tandem - when you get a more dramatic shift in scale from one end to the other, it should be matched with a similar shift in degree. So if we look at 148 for example on this page (there are many on that page that have the same issue, I'm just picking one for specificity), there's a pretty significant shift in scale, but the degree doesn't change nearly as much. That far end should definitely be considerably wider in order to maintain a consistent sense of how much foreshortening is being applied here. Bear in mind, this is not something you technically did wrong, because it's not something I mention in the notes or video. I specifically allow students the opportunity to pick up on this themselves (some do, some don't), because things we identify on our own tend to stick around more deeply. So, I look for this when giving critique, and then provide an explanation to either clarify it or to solidify what the student may already grasp. So, just be sure to keep this in mind as you continue forwards, and when you practice these kinds of cylinder exercises as part of your regular warmup routine.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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How to Draw by Scott Robertson

How to Draw by Scott Robertson

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