250 Cylinder Challenge
4:43 AM, Tuesday February 13th 2024
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11:24 PM, Tuesday February 13th 2024
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, by and large your work here is pretty solid. I can see clearly that you've been varying the rates of foreshortening to experiment with different situations, ranging from dramatic to shallow (never ending up with the side edges being fully parallel on the page, which I'm glad to see). You've also been very fastidious in checking the alignments of your ellipses, and I can see that they've become more and more consistent throughout the set.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, overall you've done well, although there is a notable issue I wanted to call out to ensure that you are continuing to apply this exercise correctly going forward. 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.
The key issue I'm seeing is that more and more as you progress through the set, you end up with ellipses that don't quite touch the plane enclosing them on all four sides. Generally you'll have your ellipses touch on three sides, but leave a larger gap on the fourth. This impedes the intended use of the ellipse to "describe" the plane itself, so that those line extensions are relevant to the box as it's been drawn. If you're leaving those gaps because you're trying to draw an ellipse that would fit the criteria of a circle in 3D space given that orientation, then that would not actually help us in developing a better sense of the boxes' proportions.
Anyway, keep that in mind going forward, but all in all, you've done well. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 6.
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Sakura Pigma Microns
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.