250 Cylinder Challenge

3:41 AM, Tuesday July 16th 2024

250 Cylinder part 1 - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/250-cylinder-part-1-upfcJd8

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Here are the rest: https://imgur.com/a/250-cylinder-part-2-ya8IDEU

I want to preface the homework with a couple of things:

First, I didn't realize until a second read of the lesson material that I was supposed to do the 150 cylinders around the arbitrary minor axis to completion first, then do the boxes after. I apologize for the mishap and will be sure to be more mindful in the future.

Second, I didn't realize I had to check the minor axis on the boxed cylinders until my second read, although I'm not sure I did a particularly good job at that.

This challenge had a lot to take in, so I apologize if there was anything else that I overlooked or misunderstood.

I don't think that this is the place for this, but after this challenge, I'm going to finally join the Discord! I'm ready to take my art journey more seriously, and having more eyes and critical input on my work will help me push myself to grow.

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7:47 PM, Tuesday July 16th 2024

Your submission unfortunately puts me in something of an awkward position, specifically because of the significant number of instructions that you did not follow at various points in the set. You do acknowledge some of these, and I'm glad you do, but it essentially results in a set of homework that is far too mixed up for me to really get any real sense of what you do understand and what you don't - that's essentially why it is so critical for students to take all the time they need to go through the instructions thoroughly, and to use the resources that are made available (like the help of other students on our Discord chat server) in between submissions, especially if you're not certain of what you're doing.

I spent some time thinking about how to tackle this problem, and I think the best solution is as follows:

  • I briefly point out all of the kinds of issues I see. This may include issues you already referenced in your submission, as I've found it's a bad idea to rely on students' own assessments as that can lead to blind spots in my critique.

  • I will then assign a set of revisions for both exercises that will allow you to create a separate set of work that I can work with. What we have now is simply too mixed up with issues in missed instructions and misunderstandings at different points that I can't be confident I'm assessing your work properly. I will try and keep these revisions limited, but they will have to be enough to properly demonstrate that you understand the material.

So to start, here are the main issues I see in regards to your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes:

  • You don't appear to be using the ghosting method when executing your linework (I'm not seeing the usual signs of the planning phase, and while your linework is confidently executed, it seems like you're not applying all of the ghosting method's steps), which is required for all of the lines we freehand throughout this entire course. It's possible this is something you forgot, as your work seems to be spread out over a long period of time. Spreading out your work is not a problem, but it is your responsibility that you account for the fact that you may forget things - whether that means reviewing the lesson material periodically, taking notes and reviewing those, or whatever else it is you need to mitigate the issues that might arise from a slower or more irregular pace.

  • I'm also seeing a lot of cases where your lines curve a great deal. Sometimes this just looks like a mistake in execution, but cases like 101 and 102 on this page honestly make it seem like you're doing this intentionally. You might be trying to interpolate between the different orientations of your ellipses - but as this is not done in the instructions, it is not something you should be deciding to do on your own. Another prominent case of this is 130 on this page.

  • I also noticed that on occasion you would double up your lines (101 and 102 are examples of this). Fortunately you don't do this very much at all, but I figured I'd call it out as that is not something you should be doing in this course. One line, one mark.

  • In this section of reminders from the lesson material, we specifically stress the importance of avoiding having your side edges run parallel to one another on the page (in other words, avoid forcing your vanishing points to infinity arbitrarily, as this isn't something we can just choose to do, it's dependent on the orientation of those edges in 3D space - Lesson 1's boxes section goes into this in more detail). You did this a fair bit earlier on in the set (70 and 71 here are good examples of it, although it did still come up on occasion so I'm unsure if you caught this mistake, or just happened to do it less as time went on.

  • Generally you identify the minor axes correctly, but there are cases - like 128 on this page where you seem to go on auto-pilot rather than actually checking. For both of the ellipses on 128, the minor axis would be a 90 degree turn away from where you've got it.

  • There are other cases where your cylinders' ends get very circular, and so identifying the true minor axis becomes very difficult - that isn't an issue of its own, but looking at cases like 113 on this page, I suspect you may not be actively thinking about the cylinder you're constructing. When the ellipses' degree gets wide/circular, it's because the ellipse is pointing towards the viewer. If that is the case, that we're looking down the barrel of this form, then in order to have that much space between the two ends, the cylinder would have to be extremely long, which would also result in the far end being smaller - but I don't think this was your intent. This diagram explains this a little further - but basically the perspective there is inconsistent, and not possible.

Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes,

  • As mentioned above about the reminders section, the cases like these here where you're drawing your boxes such that all of their sets of edges run parallel on the page (or appear to attempt to - sometimes they end up diverging) is incorrect. As noted here in Lesson 1, "0 point perspective" does not exist. You tend to jump back and forth between areas where you're more likely to just force the vanishing points to infinity (whether some or all of them), and where you're actually thinking about convergences on all three axes, but as the reminder section states, you need to be doing the latter consistently for all of them.

  • While it does seem like you started factoring in the minor axis for your ellipses in this exercise, you are doing so in the same manner we do this for the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes. The instructions for the cylinders in boxes have us extending the minor axis lines all the way back so we can very easily compare them at a glance to the boxes' lines with whom they're meant to share a vanishing point.

  • Your boxes are coming along okay, although I do get the feeling that you may not have been including your freely rotated boxes with line extensions from the box challenge in your warmup routine (or you may not have been as fastidious about revisiting those other exercises as part of your regular warmup routine, as instructed here in Lesson 0, which would explain a lot), and so you do appear to be unsure of where to spend your time as you construct those boxes. Some months ago, the box challenge material was updated with new videos and demos - I would recommend reviewing them, as well as this video focusing on the Y method from Lesson 1. Pay special attention to the parts talking about "negotiating your corners", so that you know how to spend your time most effectively.

As noted above, I'll be assigning revisions to get a better sense of what you do understand and what you don't, without contamination from where you may not have been as aware of the instructions as you could have been. You'll find them assigned below.

Next Steps:

Once you've had the opportunity to thoroughly review the material you may have forgotten or missed, please complete and provide the following:

  • 50 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes

  • 30 cylinders in boxes

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
1:58 AM, Tuesday July 30th 2024

First, I'd like to thank you for your detailed feedback, as always, especially given my unique circumstances. I really appreciate you going out of your way to navigate my clumsy submission. I did initially stick to the warmup grab bag but fell off after some time. I've now gone back and extensively reviewed those previous lessons and begun doing warmups again before my homework, so I appreciate the call-out! I've also begun to catch myself when I go into autopilot, and I am focusing more on being aware and critical while I'm drawing again, if that makes sense. I would also like to mention one more thing here. While I believe I've improved with the assigned revisions, I've noticed that some pages have a considerable dip in quality compared to others. My intention is not to make excuses, but I'm in the midst of leaving home to enter university, so stress and anticipation have undoubtedly affected my work. My plan is to at least do the warmups for DAB as well as my personal work until I get settled into uni, then tackle whatever is next for homework or revisions.

https://imgur.com/a/cylinder-revisions-6uI1z8P

2:22 PM, Tuesday July 30th 2024

Mistakes happen, and it's not at all uncommon for students to forget aspects of their responsibilities. What matters is how we move forward, once the issue is called out, so it seems your plan for doing so is sound.

As to your revisions, they are considerably better this time around. There's just one point I wanted to call out in regards to the cylinders in boxes for you to keep in mind 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.

Looking at number 12 on this page, the box drawn here is very narrow, and so is certainly way off from those ends having the proportions of a square in 3D space. That in itself isn't a problem - the process described above serves to help us identify such cases, so we can correct our approach accordingly. Where things get tricky however is that in cases like this where the proportions being off is so extreme, we can get into territory where the minor axis actually starts aligning to an entirely different set of lines (meaning, instead of running down the length of the cylinder, it might start pointing to one of the other two vanishing points).

I've noticed that students, when running into this kind of issue, tend to not actually realize just how wildly off their minor axis line is, and so they end up assuming that it's actually much more correct, resulting in the minor axis line they identify being incorrect. So in the case of 12, the minor axis is actually more similar to the contact point line you drew going up and to the left - a far ways away from the red minor axis line that was included.

All of this is to say, watch out for situations where your brain may trick you into not taking as much time as you might require to identify the "true" minor axis line, and watch out for those really narrow boxes. Always remember that since a cylinder has circular ends, that means that when drawing a plane to enclose it, you want to be consciously aiming to make those proportions more square (in 3D space). If you forget, that's not a problem, but it does mean you'll have to keep a closer eye on the "true" minor axis alignment.

Anyway, all in all you're back on the right track, so I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto Lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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