Hello,
Congrats on finishing the 250 cylinder challenge! I thought that I'd quickly look at your work, just incase I can offer anything helpful.
CYLINDERS:
Some of your ellipses aren't too confident (see first 5 pages). Remember to take your time when ghosting, as well as committing to your lines once they've been drawn. Remember to try to only draw through your ellipses two or three times over.
You're doing a good job at aligning your ellipses to the cylinder's minor axis, while identifying where you might've gone wrong. That being said, a recurring pattern that I've noticed is that, for the ellipses that were misaligned, their minor axes' were still parallel to the cylinder's minor axis. Because of this, I recommend to spend extra time making sure your ellipses are being cut in half by your cylinder's minor axis.
All-in-all, you did well, especially when recognizing and trying to fix mistakes. The main thing I want you to take away is that you should be spending more time making sure what you put on your page ends up being clean while not being overdone. Remember, you're using pen, so your marks are very permanent and apparent to an onlooker.
CYLINDERS IN BOXES:
Aside from one of the boxes in the first page, all of your cylinders in boxes are well-marked. The use of different colors and dashed lines makes it easy to tell where you made a mistake and what you need to improve upon.
Some of the edges of the boxes that you've made are diverging away their neighboring edges (see p.34's leftmost box, p.29's middle box, p.44's middle box), and, conversely, some converge too harshly to their neighboring edges (see p.31's middle box, p.32's leftmost box). It's really important to make sure your boxes come out clean, since, in this context, they're the backbone of what we're creating. Before making a mark representing one of your box's edges, it's good to imagine what the line you're setting up actually looks like. This lets you compare that line to the other lines that you've made, allowing you to do some course-correcting before you make a mark.
Some of your box's planes appear to be stretched or compressed (p.41's rightmost and middle boxes), which, in turn, makes the resulting cylinder look tapered on one end. Of course, these have their uses, but for consistency's sake, I would say to avoid doing this in the future if you were to use this challenge as an exercise, as it may make it more difficult to align your ellipses to your cylinder's minor axis.
One thing I strongly recommend you to do is to spend more time warming up using exercises from lesson 1 and 2; especially the ones involving drawing ellipses and box-like forms. This helps you get in the groove for tasks that require skills that these exercises focus on, such as fitting ellipses snugly between lines, or trying to estimate a box's convergence in perspective. This not only warms up your hand and arm, but also your mind; you may be more prone to recognizing a mistake in what you're doing before making a mark on the paper.
All-in-all, I think you've gained a lot of mileage from doing this challenge. Remember to use warmup exercises to help you work on tightening your ellipses, reducing the amount of passes you make per ellipse, and refining how you represent forms in persepctive.
Next Steps:
- spend more time warming up using exercises from lesson 1 and 2 that help you with your given task
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.
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