250 Cylinder Challenge
1:57 PM, Tuesday March 19th 2024
This was a fun challenge, although prepping the pictures for this submission took SO long :(
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6:51 PM, Thursday March 21st 2024
Jumping right in with the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, I'm not sure I follow your numbering scheme here, so I'm working under the assumption that the album is indeed in order. Imgur isn't the most reliable when it comes to the ordering of images (we still prefer it for other reasons), so it is important to ensure you're using a standard numbering scheme to avoid confusion.
Aside from that, your work on these cylinders is looking solid. Your ellipses are confidently executed - although I did notice that you tend not to draw through your ellipses two full times, which is still required for every ellipse we freehand throughout this course as noted back in Lesson 1 - but as a whole, they're still very well drawn. I'm also pleased to see that you were fastidious in checking the alignment of your ellipses' minor axes, catching not only the obvious mistakes but also those discrepancies that could easily be overlooked. Lastly, I noticed that alongside varying your rate of foreshortening throughout the set, you were mindful of maintaining a consistent relationship between the two manifestations of that foreshortening - the shift in scale and the shift in degree from one ellipse to the other. You ensured that as one such shift was pushed towards being more dramatic, the other matched it, which helped to avoid cases that would look "off" to the viewer (even though they wouldn't necessarily understand why).
Carrying onto your cylinders in boxes, I'm glad to see that you switched to a more standard numbering scheme, and that you shifted to uploading complete pages rather than close crops. This definitely makes the feedback process easier.
As a whole these are similarly well done, although I noticed that due to your not drawing through your ellipses (which I noted above), you did run into more issues in getting your ellipses to fit snugly within their enclosing plane, which likely would have been easier with the second pass of the shape.
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.
As a whole you did this quite well, although in cases where the ellipses don't quite fit snugly, it does reduce how accurately the ellipse and its own extension lines describe the plane in question. This is an issue that'll occur to some degree anyway, since we're not perfect machines and it's natural to have issues fitting the ellipse correctly, but in this case being sure to draw through all of your freehanded ellipses going forward will help mitigate this through process, rather than simply requiring more mileage and practice.
Anyway, all in all, very solid work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 6.
9:23 AM, Saturday March 23rd 2024
Nice to hear from the man himself!
I followed this weird numbering scheme because I was facing this issue where I chose some cylinders to include in the homework, but on a second look I decided not to include them because I had spares that were better (drew quite more than 150), so I had to revise the numbers for all subsequent cylinders, and because I wanted the numbering to be penciled in rather than adding it digitally, I had to erase and rewrite the numbers. Basically the moment I decided to drop or include a cylinder that previously wasn't, I had to horse around with the numbering a lot. So I numbered them this way and now it doesn't matter if I choose to drop or include a cylinder as the sequence isn't numerical anyway (but they are presented in the correct chronological order on the imgur album).
I drew a handful more than 100 cylinders in boxes, so I numbered them normally. And since the extension lines of one cylinder were quite close to those of another, I decided to uploade complete pages. Although in doing so I was a bit worried about the color accuracy, focus and resolution, it seems to be just enough. It was probably difficult to make a distinction between the magenta extension lines and the red lines for edges of the boxes themselves.
I have a really hard time drawing an ellipse two full times in a single run. For some reason my brain either always wants to fall short on that or go overboard, but it's rarely ever two full times. And when I do go overboard it seems I've undermined the work done with the first full ellipse.
I did feel that I couldn't get a lot of variety in my angles in the 100 cylinders in boxes, and it seemed largely due the constraint of a pair of opposite faces being a square, which of course they need to be if we want to draw cylinders in them.
I have to say, the one example of drawing cylinder in a box that was included in the lesson material was a very odd angle. I found it very difficult to identify the "Y" of that box as two arms of that Y were almost conjoined as a single straight line on account of one face of the box being quished into a tiny sliver due to the angle.
Thanks again.
5:23 PM, Saturday March 23rd 2024
Two things to keep in mind, then:
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What you described about doing extra cylinders is grinding, which goes against the spirit and instructions of the course. I'd recommend reviewing the material (mainly the video) on this page of Lesson 0, as it explains that you should only be completing the assigned quantity of work. This newer overview video for the box challenge which was released last month also discusses grinding and further defines what we consider to be grinding, and what we don't.
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Insofar as having trouble drawing through your ellipses, it's perfectly okay to struggle with something as long as you continue to make the effort to do it - as that's the only way such things become easier. It's fairly easy to slip into the mindset that we'll avoid doing something because it's difficult, but ultimately everything we seek to learn starts out that way. If you find yourself undershooting, try to draw through a little further to counterbalance it (which hopefully your brain will continue to overshoot, accomplishing something closer to two full turns). Then later, if you find yourself overshooting too much, do the opposite - this is similar to the solution to arcing lines that's explained in the ghosted lines exercise page. That is, where we intentionally try to draw a line arcing in the opposite direction. Over time this rewires the brain's understanding of the relationship between the intent, the action performed, and the result achieved.
2:51 PM, Tuesday March 26th 2024
I see.
I didn't plan on doing the extra cylinders. It just happened that when I stopped to take count I found out that I drew more than what was asked. So I thought might as well select the ones that are objectively better.
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