Alrighty, so starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, there are a handful of things that detract from your work here, but if you set them aside, you have indeed put in a good deal of effort and have been mindful of analyzing the alignment of your ellipses, to continue improving on them page after page.

So, let's first look at what made this exercise harder than it needed to be:

• Firstly, you're drawing way too small. We may have discussed this in previous critiques, but drawing small on the page and limiting how much room you have to work will impede your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder for you to draw using your whole arm. Give yourself lots of room for each cylinder - sticking to 5 or 6 per page is probably best, just like the box challenge.

• Secondly - and this is a more minor issue, but I think it still impacts the overall approach as a whole - you're not drawing through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen. When I do see this, it does make me question how much a student has stuck to performing the exercises they've encountered thus far through the course as part of a regular warmup routine. I can see you drawing maybe one and a half times around the ellipses on occasion, but often times you seem to try to hit it in one go. It's not that your ellipses are coming out poorly, but that you're limiting the practice and muscle memory training you get, and more importantly - it's a matter of forgetting the instructions of the course. With Drawabox, following the instructions to the letter is always critical, and not doing so in one area raises questions about what other small things you might be forgetting here and there, and where they might be diminishing what you get out of each exercise.

Now, there is one other thing to address for the challenge, that is a fairly normal issue that comes up as a matter of course. That is to say, I expect it, and the opportunity to point it out usually lets the idea sink in a bit deeper.

Foreshortening manifests in our forms in two ways. One is the shift in scale from one end of the cylinder to the other, where the far end is going to be smaller overall. The other is the shift in degree, where the far end is going to be wider than the closer ellipse. The thing to remember is that these two shifts both represent the foreshortening - that is, they tell the viewer how much of the cylinder's physical, 3D length, exists in the "unseen" dimension of depth. When there's a lot of foreshortening, the viewer's brain multiplies the length visible on the page by some factor, and if there's basically no foreshortening (like if the cylinder is running parallel to the picture plane).

But, what happens if you've got a significant shift in scale (far end much smaller than the closer end), but a negligible shift in degree (far end same degree as the closer end)? This is a scenario that comes up often throughout your cylinders - it leads to a visual contradiction, telling the viewer that the cylinder is both just as long as they see on the page, and that it is simultaneously much longer. This is the sort of thing the viewer will feel as being "off" even though they can't put their finger on why.

So, long story short - make sure that you're considering both the scale and degree shift as working in tandem with one another, rather than being arbitrary and unrelated.

Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes, what you mention on the notes on this page is entirely correct - by drawing the box, you are indeed trapping yourself into a given outcome. As mentioned in the video, this exercise is actually about the boxes themselves, rather than the cylinders. It's designed to train students' instincts to construct boxes that specifically feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square.

The cylinder itself - or more appropriately, the ellipses on either end - are not the goal, but rather they're part of the analysis performed to identify mistakes, just like the 250 box challenge's line extensions. Each ellipse itself adds three more lines - a minor axis, and two contact point lines, one for each of the box's own vanishing points. The closer those lines are to converging towards the box's VPs, the closer the ellipse is to representing a circle in 3D space, and therefore the closer the plane enclosing them is to representing a square in 3D space.

Based on those notes you wrote there, it suggests to me that you're still very much focusing on this exercise as a sort of performance - that is, focusing on achieving something on the spot, rather than viewing it more as you marching in a particular direction, continually reevaluating that direction through analysis. This does mean that your ellipses need to be drawn such that they touch all four edges of each plane, doing your best to align to that minor axis, and align the contact points correctly, but if the box just isn't perfect, your ellipse won't be either. You might get the minor axis alignment right, but the contact points might be off - or vice versa.

From there, it's integral to extend those lines to see just how far off they are, and where, and how things can be adjusted to bring them closer. This is where I think your results were kind of inconsistent. Sometimes you'd extend all the lines really well, sometimes you'd only extend some of them (the minor axes were forgotten in a number of places), and often the ellipses themselves wouldn't touch all four edges.

Overall, you are moving in the right direction here, you just got a little mixed up in terms of how to apply all the steps to get the most out of the exercise. Make sure you extend all the lines as you move forwards, and that the ellipses are at the very least drawn so they touch all four edges, understanding that yes - the box will determine whether or not you can get those alignments perfect, but the point is more to analyze where the box is off, and how to improve upon it next time.

I've shared a number of points for you to keep in mind here, but all in all you're still good to consider this lesson complete. Just keep them in mind when doing these exercises as part of your regular warmup routine.