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3:08 PM, Friday April 29th 2022

Hello Cytori, I’ll be handling your cylinder challenge critique.

It’s great to be frugal and use the pens you already have lying around instead of buying new ones. Do try to stick to darker colours though, I found your orange lines hard to see sometimes, which makes it trickier to give you a helpful critique. For lesson 6 and 7 the use of ballpoint pen is encouraged, so hopefully you’ll have some dark ballpoints handy for the next lessons.

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, good work. It’s great to see you drew cylinders with a wide range of viewing angle, size and proportion, and that you varied the amount of foreshortening too. Your mark making is looking good, your straight lines are smooth and confident, your hatching is neat, and I’m pleased to see your remembered to draw through your ellipses. It looks like you struggled a little bit to draw your ellipses confidently at the start, especially when the degree is small, but you got more confident as your progressed, well done. You’re doing a good job of checking your ellipses' minor axes.

Throughout this portion of the challenge you’ve shown a solid understanding of how foreshortening operates on cylinders. Applying both a shift in in scale, where due to the convergence of the side edges the far end becomes smaller overall, and the shift in degree where the far end gets wider than the end closer to the viewer.

The thing is, we need to make sure that both of these "shifts" occur in tandem. Should one shift be dramatic and the other shallow, it creates a contradiction that the viewer will pick up on, noticing that something's "off" even if they don't specifically know why.The reason for this is that both of these shifts are manifestations of foreshortening, and they convey to the viewer just how much of that cylinder's length is visible on the page, and how much exists in the unseen dimension of depth, which cannot be conveyed as distances on the flat piece of paper.

Looking at cylinder 25, it does look strange but I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong in terms of what we’re going for in this challenge. Extreme foreshortening can look unnatural if you push it too far. I think making the near ellipse have a wider degree, or the far ellipse having a narrower one would have made it look more natural. But it’s good to see you experimenting through the challenge, and noticing when things look off, good job.

There are a couple of instances (such as 15 and 20) where your side edges remain extremely parallel on the page (which is incorrect, given that this only occurs when that set of edges runs perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight, not slanting towards or away from them through the depth of the scene, and this challenge has us rotating cylinders randomly so that perfect of an alignment is unlikely to occur)

Moving on to your cylinders in boxes, you’ve done a good job.

Your markmaking looks good, and aside from a couple of blips (red lines on 153 and orange lines on 193 coming towards the viewer) you’ve applied your line extensions correctly. You seem to be continuing to experiment with different rates of foreshortening, proporions and veiwing angle, good work.

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.

I confess I found it a little challenging to assess how your perspective estimations are improving across the set, what with the page order being a bit random and most of the numbers being sideways or upside down.

And.... Looking through this I’m not seeing 100 cylinders in boxes. I see 48. I may have miscounted but it a long way off 100.

I suspect Imgur may have played a trick or two on you when you were uploading your work.

Could you please upload the remaining 50 cylinders in boxes to a fresh album so I can check them?

Next Steps:

Please upload the missing cylinders in boxes so I can check them.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
8:02 AM, Saturday April 30th 2022

Thank you so much for the detailed critique. I kind of struggled with finding the right balance between the "shifts" but it got better over time so I think if I practice more I should be fine.

I often hurried while checking for errors and didn't take my time like I should have done, I'll keep that in mind for the future.

I don't know what happened to my upload, I photographed it all in one setting so all pictures should have naturally been in the same format and correct order. I'm sorry I forgot to check and you had to find your way trough. Here're the last 50 Cylinders, hopefully in correct order: https://imgur.com/a/WaRHb3M

2:23 PM, Saturday April 30th 2022

Hi!

You're welcome. Yes, I'd agree that you got better at balancing the shifts as you progressed through the challenge, you did a good job.

Thank you for replying with the missing pages. Sometimes Imgur glitches and doesn't save all the images, thank you for uploading them again for me.

Your perspective estimations show improvement across the set, as you develop your subconscious understanding of space through repetition, and through analysis (by way of the line extensions).

A couple of little nitpicks while I'm here: 216, 237 and 234 you forgot to extent the sides of the cylinder, to see if they converge to the same VP as the minor axis. And also on 234 I'm looking at the minor axis of your ellipses and I feel like they might be closer to the initial red guideline you placed through the box than to the blue extension lines you placed. It's not a big deal, but being fastidious about finding the true minor axis of your ellipses will give you a better idea of whether the end faces of your box represent squares in 3d space.

The ellipses at the far end of 203, 232, 233, 238, 240 241, 242, and 250 aren't making contact with one or more edges of the box. The ellipses exist to test if the end faces are square, so try to get them to touch all 4 edges.

When you practice this exercise in warmups try to avoid making your end faces tiny (like 217, 243, 246 and 247) as it makes it harder to do your error checking accurately when your lines merge together through lack of space.

Overall you're going a good job so I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move on to lesson 6.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
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