Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your 250 cylinder challenge,

-Starting with the cylinders around an arbitrary minor axis you are doing a great job drawing confident ellipses and lines, which means that you are using the ghosting method correctly, I only have one critique when it comes to your mark making. It seems that as you advanced you got more careless with the hatching adding a lot of lines that cause a lot of visual noise and some of them end up overshooting the edges where they should end. It is important that you give these lines as much time and attention as you would with any other mark, even these small things contribute to your improvement in the long run.

When it comes to the main purpose of this exercise I think you need to keep some things in mind, first of all there are many cylinders where you will end up drawing the edges of the cylinder close to parallel, which is a mistake just as we explained in the box challenge.

And there are also some cylinders where the sides end up diverging instead of converging, I think this is due to your having some issues controlling the size of the ellipses you drew. Always do your best to draw the ellipse furthest away smaller which will help you to avoid both of the issues I have mentioned here.

But now I will explain to you the main purpose of this exercise and that has to do with the relationship between the two manifestations of foreshortening - the shift in scale from one ellipse to the other (where due to the convergence of the side edges, the far end gets smaller), and the shift in degree from one end to the other. Because both of these represent the foreshortening applied to the form, which serves to help the viewer understand just how much of this form's length can be seen right there on the page, and how much exists in the "unseen" dimension of depth, both shifts (scale and degree) must work in tandem with one another. For example if we have a cylinder with a dramatic shift in degree it should be accompanied by a dramatic shift in scale,which would result in the ellipse furthest away being much smaller in comparison to the other one.

Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes, 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.

I think you did a good job with these

so I’ll only go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, good luck on the next lesson!!!!!!