This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.

8:13 PM, Thursday August 29th 2024
Jumping in with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, the start was admittedly a bit rough (you ended up immediately running afoul of some of the reminders/instructions we highlight as being especially important in the lesson material), but throughout the set you continually move further and further away from the issue, so I don't believe this will require revisions to address.
Basically the issue is that for your first page, you started off with cylinders whose lengthwise vanishing point appears to be forced to infinity - meaning the lines governed by it are drawn as being parallel on the page. As discussed in this reminders section, this is incorrect - the vanishing point and whether or not it is at infinity is determined by the orientation of the edges it controls in 3D space, and that vanishing point only goes to infinity when those edges run perfectly perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight. Since we're rotating our cylinders randomly here, we can pretty much guarantee that the alignment will never be so perfect as to warrant forcing the VP to infinity.
Taking a closer look at your work, I suspect that the way you opted to approach the necessity of varying the rates of foreshortening across the set was to basically start with 0 foreshortening (which again in this context is incorrect), and then steadily adding a little more foreshortening with each cylinder - which would explain why you may have started doing it incorrectly, but moving in the direction you did would render that somewhat moot (although the misunderstanding/misjudgment of drawing them without convergence at all at first would still be present, making me pointing it out here at length still necessary).
Honestly I wouldn't recommend approaching it in this way in the future, simply because of how gradually increasing the foreshortening over the whole set gives our brain a pattern to fall into, which tends to reduce the likelihood that we're really actively thinking about every choice we're making as intentionally as we need to in order to fully fulfill the purpose of the exercise, and of the course as a whole. After all, with things like the ghosting method and all of the very specific methodologies we use to construct our forms and objects, it's all about being hyper-intentional so that our brain is continually faced with these problems to solve. It's in continually facing those problems that we rewire the way in which our brain addresses them. If those problems are too different, then the brain doesn't have enough shared elements with which to develop its understanding, because the problems being faced are too separated. But, similarly, if those problems are too similar, the brain doesn't have enough difference with which to create a complete picture of the overarching problem itself, and is more likely to fall into auto-pilot where it stops being as attentive to the problem as a whole.
All of that is to say, when doing these kinds of drills and exercises in the future, mixing up the variety instead of creating a single continuous trend will serve you better.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is largely coming along well - and much of that simply comes down to the fact that you took a lot of care in applying the instructions to the letter, and you avoided straying from them. 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.
So, in applying the line extensions as consistently and correctly as you did, you ensured you were armed with ample information about how to keep tweaking your approach to deal with the different problems that arose. This provided you with an active, living, and changing problem to solve with each attempt, and I can see from your work that it yielded meaningful results in your estimation of those proportions. Certainly not perfect (that is not remotely what we're expecting), but you've built it up more than well enough to have that skill serve you as you move into the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 6.

Rapid Viz
Rapid Viz is a book after mine own heart, and exists very much in the same spirit of the concepts that inspired Drawabox. It's all about getting your ideas down on the page, doing so quickly and clearly, so as to communicate them to others. These skills are not only critical in design, but also in the myriad of technical and STEM fields that can really benefit from having someone who can facilitate getting one person's idea across to another.
Where Drawabox focuses on developing underlying spatial thinking skills to help facilitate that kind of communication, Rapid Viz's quick and dirty approach can help students loosen up and really move past the irrelevant matters of being "perfect" or "correct", and focus instead on getting your ideas from your brain, onto the page, and into someone else's brain as efficiently as possible.