Looking over your work here, there's definitely a few things I want to draw your attention to. First and foremost comes down to the actual quality of your lines.

This is something that varied a fair bit over the course of the set. At the beginning, there were many cases where your linework was more hesitant, resulting in notable wobbles. The ellipses themselves were generally pretty well done, but the straight lines for the edges of your cylinders did not show that you were adhering to the principles covered in Lesson 1. While that may have been quite a while ago, it is still extremely important that throughout this entire course you continue practicing the exercises from the lessons you've completed in order to keep sharpening those skills, rather than backsliding and getting rusty.

In this case, I don't believe it was a matter of actually getting rusty in terms of technical skill, but that you don't appear to be showing signs of actually going through the steps of using the ghosting method in the execution of each of these lines. The ghosting method exists entirely to separate the process of drawing a mark into separate stages, each having its own priority. As explained here, that ultimately frees us up to execute our marks with confidence, free from hesitation or fear of making a mistake.

Now, there was a marked improvement in this regard when you hit #52, with your lines from that point onward coming out much more confidently. Unfortunately, as you started to hit the cylinders in boxes and struggled more with them (specifically starting with box 179) you showed a drop in that confident execution, and the line quality dipped once again.

While line quality is not a major focus of this challenge, it is imperative that I point this out. Whenever you execute any mark, it is critical that you focus on executing it, that you think about precisely what you're doing at that moment and how to do so to the best of your ability, rather than letting the whole of the task ahead of you distract you. Whether you're drawing one line out of five, or one line out of a hundred, the same amount of effort should still be going into each individual stroke.

Getting back to your cylinders, I do believe that you've shown a good deal of improvement over the first section - the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, and as the line quality did improve for the last hundred of this section, the overall construction of those cylinders also came out fairly well. One thing I did notice however was that the cylinders generally all seemed to have the same rate of foreshortening - whenever practicing an exercise like this, it's best to be sure to vary them in a variety of ways - not just orientation.

There is an issue that comes up - albeit infrequently - that makes some of your cylinders look a little inconsistent. Our cylinders are subject to two different kinds of shifts:

  • The shift in scale between the ellipse closer to the viewer and the one farther away (closer one is bigger, farther one is smaller).

  • The shift in degree between the two ellipses (closer one is narrower, farther one is wider).

In most cases you've demonstrated a decent grasp of how each of these shifts relate to the foreshortening, and serve as a way for the viewer to judge whether one end is relatively close to the other, or if it is actually quite a bit farther away (suggesting a longer cylinder). There are a few cases however - like cylinders 85, 99, 104, etc. - where you end up pushing the shift in scale, but not the shift in degree. Looking at the shift in scale, the far end being much smaller than the closer end tells us that it's a longer cylinder, but the shift in degree (where they are roughly of the same degree) tells us that it's a shorter cylinder. This kind of inconsistency can easily be noticed by the viewer, though they may not be able to pinpoint what exactly about the cylinder looks off.

Moving forward to your cylinders in boxes, aside from the linework itself honestly not being your best, I did notice a tendency especially as your boxes got longer to forget that you should be thinking about how a given line is meant to be oriented such that it would converge more consistently towards the other lines of its "set" - that is, the fact that each box consists of three sets of parallel lines, each sharing a vanishing point. This was especially notable on the "length" dimension, where it became easier to ignore the relationship of one end of the box to the other due to the distance between them. This is precisely why this diagram (which was shown as part of the box challenge critique) is so important. Thinking about all 4 lines of a given set, rather than just the two on the plane you're working with, is critical.

This, along with the line quality, did improve, however. At around box 214 you did start to show more consideration for how you were executing your lines and planning out your boxes, although both did still continue to be an issue here and there. For example 228 still has the same issue with the sets of lines not converging consistently, and we can also see it with 250.

As a whole I think that this is something you are clearly moving in the right direction on, but that you really need to invest more time into every single action you perform. Whether it is planning and preparing before the confident execution of a mark, or thinking about how a line is meant to be oriented and all that is being asked of it. I am going to mark this challenge as complete, but this is absolutely something you need to keep working on your own.