250 Cylinder Challenge

4:23 AM, Wednesday August 4th 2021

250 Cylinders - Google Drive

250 Cylinders - Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yfEyg-tIRQIfGC4SoKg3ioiaz86HFTm6?usp=sharing

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This was a very hard challenge to tackle! The most difficult part I had is trying to fit the ellipses inside the planes of the last 100 boxes.

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8:40 PM, Wednesday August 4th 2021

Starting with the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, here you've done a pretty good job. You've executed each ellipse with confidence, have included a variety of different rates of foreshortening, and consistently applied the error checking techniques to each ellipse to find its "true" alignment, so you could identify what needed to be improved on the next page.

One thing I often look out for with this exercise is whether students are maintaining a reasonable relationship between the two ends of the cylinders. There are two ways in which these ends can change, from one to the other. There's a shift in scale that we naturally see due to the convergence of the side edges, where the far end is smaller in scale than the end closer to the viewer. Then there's also the shift in degree, where the far end is generally drawn to be wider in proportion than the end closer to the viewer.

These two shifts are both aspects of foreshortening, and should happen in tandem - meaning that as the far end gets smaller in scale, it should also get wider in equal measure. Unfortunately, looking at yours it seems that you focused primarily on the shift in scale, and didn't really incorporate much - if any - intentional shift in degree.

This shift in degree is explained in the cylinder challenge notes, but it's also more thoroughly explained in the lesson 1 ellipses video with the use of props to demonstrate the phenomenon in the real world. It's also something that was called out to you in the critique of your organic forms with contour lines in Lesson 2.

Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, while you've certainly done part of the exercise fairly well (that is, drawing the boxes and placing cylinders inside of them), I get the feeling you may not have read through the instructions as carefully as you should have - because you left out an entire, extremely important part of the exercise. Just as the first section of this exercise featured an approach for checking how "correct" a given attempt was, or more accurately, how far off it was.

I mention in the video that this exercise is all about developing students' instincts when it comes to judging proportion in 3D space. Specifically, it trains them to construct boxes which feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square in the 3D world. We do this by, just like in the box challenge, extending our lines. We extend the lines of the boxes, just as in the box challenge, to test their convergences towards their shared vanishing points. Then we extend three lines for each ellipse - the minor axis, and the two contact point lines. The closer these are to aligning to the box's vanishing points, the closer the ellipse is to representing a circle in 3D space, and therefore the closer the plane enclosing it is to representing a square in 3D space. Through iteration, and through checking each time, we're able to hone our judgment and instincts in this regard to better determine how wide a box should be, given its orientation in space, to still get close to representing a square.

Unfortunately, you didn't do any of that - though it was demonstrated in the video, and in the notes, I can only assume that you forgot. Perhaps you only reviewed that material towards the beginning, and by the time you reached the second part of the challenge, perhaps you didn't go back and review those instructions.

I'll give you an opportunity to correct this through some revisions, which you'll find assigned below.

Next Steps:

Please submit the following:

  • 25 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, focusing on maintaining an equal shift in both scale and degree rather than just the scale.

  • 60 cylinders in boxes. Upon the completion of each page, apply the line extensions to analyze your work, so you can adjust your approach for the next page.

And of course, watch the video and read the notes before each section of the revisions.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
4:44 AM, Thursday August 5th 2021

Thank you, Uncomfortable! I'll go back and review the notes and video before I redo the challenge.

3:37 AM, Wednesday September 8th 2021

Hello, Uncomfortable! I've finished working on the cylinders and followed your advice. Let me know what you think. Thanks!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-7FToQutHG74m5PtWP-NawUgtpfp7ysQ?usp=sharing

6:12 PM, Thursday September 30th 2021

I got your new submission, and saw that you were trying to submit revisions - looks like you replied to your own comment, rather than to mine, so I was never notified of it. I've gone ahead and cancelled your new submission so the credit should have been returned to your account.

So! Looking at your work here, this is much better than before. I can see that you've been more mindful of that degree shift, keeping it proportional to the shift in scale in your first set of cylinders. You've similarly done a good job with the second set of cylinders in boxes - you've employed the line extensions quite well, and I can see that across the set your instinctual sense of proportion, regardless of how the boxes themselves are rotated in space, has certainly moved in the right direction.

There's just one little adjustment I would recommend - right now it seems you're neglecting to extend the minor axis lines for the ellipses. You're relying instead on the original line that had been drawn prior to putting down the ellipses. Instead, once the ellipses are down, you should be drawing a new line based on where that ellipse's true minor axis is, being sure to extend it all the way back. This will ensure that you don't end up with any errors going unnoticed in that area.

Anyway, all in all, great work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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Staedtler Pigment Liners

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These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).

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