250 Cylinder Challenge
8:36 PM, Monday June 8th 2020
Hopefully the cylinders in the boxes aren't too messy and you can see them.
Starting with the first section, I think you've been very conscientious and mindful when it comes to identifying the true minor axes of each ellipse afterwards. It's often easy to ignore slight deviations, but you've clearly paid careful attention to each ellipse, and have noted even small mistakes. This ultimately has helped you improve your alignments overall, and reduce the magnitude of those errors.
One issue I did notice however was that you seem to have largely stuck with a pretty consistent level of foreshortening, keeping it all quite shallow with minimal shift in the scale of your ellipses from the front end to the back end. There's definitely a lot of value in pushing the foreshortening of our cylinders throughout this exercise in order to explore a greater variety of configurations, but there's also a particular issue that I want to point out that relates to this.
If you look at some cylinders, like 102 and 104, we can see that there is again virtually no scale-shift between the ends of the cylinder, but there is a fairly dramatic shift in the degree from one to the other. The end closest to the viewer is quite narrow, and the end farther away gets very wide. This does indeed adhere to the notes covered in the lesson, but one thing I wanted to allow students to determine for themselves is the fact that this kind of shift in degree is actually as much an element of foreshortening as the shift in scale is.
Both of these shifts, when exaggerated, convey the impression that the object is large, that the physical distance in 3D space between the ends is longer. To have one such property shift (the degree) but not the other (the scale) results in a visual contradiction. One aspect says the cylinder is long, but the other suggests the cylinder is short. Definitely something to keep in mind when moving forwards.
Moving through your cylinders, I'm very pleased with how you've extended all of your lines and studied how they converge (or diverge). I can definitely see improvements in a number of places, and the most specific area is actually with your boxes. This exercise is actually more about the boxes themselves, than the cylinders.
Just like how in the box challenge we extend our lines to identify issues where sets of lines that ought to be parallel in 3D space are not, we add the cylinder to it to help identify where certain pairs of faces should be proportionally square, but aren't. This is because the characteristics we test with the ellipses (the alignment of the minor axis to one of the box's vanishing point, and the alignment of the two sets of contact points to the other two vanishing points) can only be correct when the faces containing the ellipses are proportionally square. If they get stretched into being more rectangular, this throws things off.
In essence, this exercise has helped you improve your estimation of proportions in 3D space. There is indeed room for growth with this, as there always is, but I can definitely see a good deal of improvement over the set (and now that you're more aware of this "secret" nature of the exercise, it should help you as you continue onwards).
So! All in all, very nice work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Just make sure that when practicing your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, that you practice both shallow and dramatic foreshortening.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 6.
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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