Hello Lerin, hope you are well.

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axis, you’ve done a good job of varying the rate of foreshortening, viewing angle, and proportions of your cylinders, great work! You’ve also done a good job of error checking your minor axis of your ellipses, catching even small deviations that can, if overlooked, cause us to plateau when we get into the "good enough" territory. You’ve been conscientious with drawing through your ellipses twice. I did notice that some of them looked a bit hesitant (or egg shaped, with one end wider than the other) early on in the challenge but show some improvement as you progressed. Remember to prioritise confidence over accuracy and ghost as much as you need to. I know this challenge can be quite stressful and that doesn’t help with keeping your ellipses confident but I thought is was worth mentioning as you’re doing so well I wouldn’t have much else to tell you to work on in this section.

You’re showing a good understanding of how to apply foreshortening to your cylinders, making sure that there is a shift in scale where the far end is smaller overall, and the shift in degree where the far end is wider than the end closer to the viewer - both serve as visual cues to tell the viewer how much of the form's length is visible on the page, and how much of that length exists in the "unseen" dimension of depth.

As they represent the same thing, they have to operate in tandem. As the scale gets smaller, the degree needs to get comparatively wider. Not perfectly in sync, but roughly similar. So for example, in situations like number 70 (where there is a dramatic shift of degree, but only a slight shift in scale) the viewer will pick up on the fact that it looks off, even though they won't specifically know why. Be sure to keep that in mind when applying foreshortening in the future.

Moving on to your 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 memorising 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.

And here I think I may be able to theorise why you felt that you weren’t improving as much as you might do. Although you are marking the minor axis of your ellipses, you haven’t extended them far enough to asses whether they converge to the same vanishing point as the sides of the cylinder, which they should do if the end faces of your boxes represent squares in 3d space. So we get situations like 175, where the cylinder looks squished, but without using the minor axis extensions as a diagnostic it’s harder to know why.

There’s a lot you’re doing really really well, your box convergences are coming along great, and you’ve done a good job of extending the contact points for your ellipses and the sides of the cylinder too.

So, when you continue to practice these in your warm ups make your minor axis checking lines as long as the rest of your extensions. I think that’s your missing puzzle piece.

I’ll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, keep up the good work.