250 Cylinder Challenge
7:31 PM, Friday October 15th 2021
Hello! This challenge was definitely difficult. Thank you for taking the time to look over my work. I look forward to your critique.
Hello! This challenge was definitely difficult. Thank you for taking the time to look over my work. I look forward to your critique.
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, I can see that you were fairly fastidious and mindful in regards to identifying the minor axes of your ellipses to analyze where they were off in their alignment, although I did see that you were off in some cases, like those marked out on this page.
While it's great to see that you were consistent in drawing through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, I did notice that there was a tendency for your ellipses to come out a little unevenly - that's definitely an area where there's room for improvement. There are a couple things that can definitely help with this - firstly, be sure to employ the ghosting method when executing these (which focuses on separating the markmaking process into different steps, ending with a confident execution regardless of fears of inaccuracy to avoid hesitation). Hesitation is a very common source of unevenness and wobbling in our marks.
Secondly, be sure to engage your whole arm, from the shoulder, when drawing those ellipses as well. When we draw from the elbow, it can also cause the same kind of issue. The unevenness isn't so bad that I think you're drawing from your wrist, but it's likely that you are at least at times slipping back to the elbow.
When it comes to the degree of your ellipses, I definitely picked up on some strangeness. Generally there are two main signs we use to convey the rate of foreshortening to the viewer. Given that we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, the viewer can't actually see directly how much of the form's length exists in the depth of the scene - so trickery like foreshortening is required. We convey it through the shift in scale from one end to the other (so the ellipse closer to the viewer is larger, and the one farther away is smaller), as well as with the shift in degree (farther end is wider, closer end is narrower).
These two kinds of "shifts" also occur in tandem - meaning that if we want to convey more dramatic foreshortening, we have to ensure a more significant jump in scale and in degree simultaneously - can't have the far end get much smaller in overall scale, but remain roughly the same width.
In your cylinders, I'm seeing a lot of cases where the two ends maintain the same degree (for example if we look at the last page, 145, 149 have this issue present). There are also others where the degree/scale shift are not occurring at a similar rate - for example, cylinder 112. There are definitely others where it's all done more correctly, but I felt explaining it here was necessary due to the arbitrariness behind your choices there.
Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, as a whole I do feel you're moving in the right direction here. 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.
While there's still plenty of room for continued growth and improvement, you're doing a good job of analyzing your boxes/cylinders after the fact. By identifying these mistakes and making adjustments to fix them over time, you're steadily improving those instincts and preparing yourself well for the next lesson.
So! All in all, I am going to mark this challenge as complete - just be sure to continue practicing these things as part of your regular warmup routine, and keep an eye on the execution of those ellipses.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 6.
Thank you for looking over my work.
Mind blown, but just about everything that you have mentioned was something I thought at one point or another, this just further confirms were my gaps are and how I fill them.
In the second paragraph where you mention the unevenness of my ellipses, having had draw at least 500 ellipses, that was something I struggled greatly with throughout this challenge. I have been employing the ghosting method, if I had to guess it is more likely your second point. This is probably a question that has no answer; other than after the mark has been made, how can you tell if you are drawing from elbow or shoulder when drawing ellipses? Since those two joint seem to work together drawing this motion, it has been more difficult to "feel it out" as opposed to when drawing a straight line.
Thank you again
I try to push students to worry less about specifically which joint they're using (for the reason you mentioned, it can be rather unclear since the elbow will move at least a little as a sort of response to the elbow moving), and more about whether or not their whole arm is moving. If your upper arm remains static, then you're definitely driving only from the elbow. If the upper arm is moving, then you're definitely on the right side of the fence. From there it's just a matter of experience/practice.
This was very helpful.
Thank you!
Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"
It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.
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