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5:06 PM, Thursday July 30th 2020

Really good work making the axes of those cylinders close enough. I really liked how confident your line work is in the majority of the pages. Seems like you got burnt out ¾ ths into the exercise, if that’s the case try to shorten the working time and take some brakes. Warm up a little with whatever pen you decide to use to feel the smoothest angle and speed to work with. At the end of the work I can see some real confidence in those cubes.

All in all remember to take your time. Over time I feel how I get stiffer and stiffer. Taking some brakes whenever I feel the stress coming helps me to relax my arm a bit. Short breaks also give me the time to take a look at my work to notice when I have moved the axes and my vanishing points, it also helps all the information to sink in.

I really envy those final cubes of yours!!

By the way… I wonder if you used a fountain pen at some point, some of those balck lines seemed to me like fountain pen lines. When I use fountain pens I watch out not to let too much ink into the line and also need more time for the ink to be absorbed into the paper, especially when using a ruler.

Next Steps:

Not an expert here, I can just advise to always remember to commit to the line. You seemed to have the fundamentals right and pretty much know how to construct. When starting your drawings doodle a little bit with the pen you are using, relax and be confident in your strokes.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
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1:10 AM, Saturday August 8th 2020

I'm going to add to what seik said, as he didn't mention much about the cylinder themselves:

Starting with your normal cylinders, you're doing a good job understanding the basic concepts, as the cylinder gets away from the viewer, it will get smaller, but the ellipses will also get wider as they turn more towards the viewer. Now, these two things aren't unrelated to each other; you won't see a cylinder that gets only ever so slightly smaller to have a degree shift between the two ends very big. If the reduction on the scale of the cylinder is big, then the change of degrees between ellipses will follow along and get bigger as well.

As for the accuracy of the ellipses, don't forget that anything you can do to improve your accuracy in the page works; you can add little dots to mark the scale of the ellipses you want to draw, which will make it easier to ghost and not lose track of what you're trying to achieve.

Now into the cylinders in boxes. I think you've done a good job here as well, but I'm going to cover what I think that can help you improve:

When drawing the axis of the cylinder, don't forget that that axis is another line that will be parallel to the lines of the box, I tried explaining it here. Basically, as the axis line will be parallel to another 4 lines on the box, you can use them as a guide to draw your axis guide; you have another thing more to think about, if you do that instead of just trying to join the 2 dots, you'll get better results.

Another similar thing here as well which might help get better results. You can use all of these things to plan every mark you do, ellipses, lines of the box etc, to get them more accurate.

And I don't have much more to say; your boxes end up pretty good, by the end of the challenge you're making consistently equilateral boxes, your marks are confident, and your ellipses end up pretty good too, focusing on confidence as you should be doing. Great job overall!

Good luck with lesson 6!

Next Steps:

Lesson 6

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12:08 AM, Monday August 10th 2020

Thanks so much for the extra advice

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