Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, great work! You've done an excellent job of drawing your ellipses with confidence, such that they come out evenly shaped without any unnecessary complexity or wobbling/hesitation to them. Similarly, you've done a great job with your side edges, ensuring that they remain straight and and precise.

Continuing onto the actual convergences and foreshortening, I'm really pleased to see that you by and large avoided any situations where your side edges would remain extremely parallel on the page (which would be 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). Additionally, you've been quite conscientious and fastidious in checking your ellipses' minor axes, even catching a lot of very slight misalignments (like on the far ellipse for 59, which was so minimal, but still valuable to catch in order to avoid plateauing).

The last point about these that I wanted to mention is that by and large, you are demonstrating an understanding - whether subconscious or conscious - of how the two shifts from one ellipse to the other need to operate together. These shifts include the shift 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.

So, with this section, you've done a great job. Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, it is perfectly normal for this exercise to be considerably harder and more demanding than the first. Sure, we only do 100 instead of 150 of them, but it has so many more moving parts - although at its heart, it is still a fairly simple exercise with a simple goal, which you mentioned yourself. To construct boxes with two opposite faces which are proportionally square. 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.

To this effect, you've actually done a great job, and I feel that you might be a bit hard on yourself. You've done a great job for two basic reasons:

  • You've applied the ellipses' line extensions correctly

  • You've allowed yourself to learn from those line extensions, thinking about what they've revealed about the proportions of the box, and then making tweaks for the next set. This doesn't mean that your boxes are going to be perfect by the end of the challenge - far from it. Rather, it means that your instincts in this regard are better now than when you started this exercise, and that's something that is going to help you in small, subtle, but important ways throughout the next lessons.

So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep up the great work.