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.