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3:28 AM, Tuesday August 9th 2022

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, you've done a fantastic job. Not only did you follow the instructions - varying the rates of foreshortening, checking the alignment of your ellipses after the fact, drawing your lines with confidence, and all of that - you've also given probably the best evidence I've seen of a student picking up on a certain unspoken rule and doing so consciously rather than just subconsciously. Basically this is something that students sometimes pick up on their own, but that I can never quite tell if they're doing it intentionally, or just instinctually. Both are great, but the uncertainty of which it is gives me the freedom to pad my critiques with an explanation of what it exactly is.

It comes down to how the student approaches the two shifts - the shift from large to small, and narrow to wide - from one end of the ellipse to the other. Or more specifically, the rate at which those shifts occur. They're both manifestations of foreshortening, and function as signs our brain can use to understand just how much of the length of the form exists right there on the page, versus how much exists in the "unseen" dimension of depth. Because they represent the same thing, they have to occur in tandem - as the far end gets smaller, it should also get wider to match.

You established your clear understanding of this concept because you specifically laid your cylinders out in continuous progressions, rotating by set amounts from one to the next, at least on some pages. This showed a really solidly developed grasp of how these forms operate in 3D space - not only in terms of the degree and scale shifts, but also in the physical overlapping of those ellipses as the form turned. Great work.

Your work on the cylinders in boxes are, despite your own misgivings, similarly well done. What you regard as struggles (and of course, they are that) are entirely the point of the challenge. - and based on your comments, you seem to have understood that implicitly as well.

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). So to put it simply, of course you had a tough time with it - if you weren't expected to find that challenging, it wouldn't be in the challenge! You can think of it as a sort of boot camp, because Lesson 6 is more dependent on one's ability to estimate squared proportions.

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.

In applying those line extensions consistently throughout, you've definitely improved and solidified your estimations, and I expect this will serve you quite well as you move forwards. So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:07 AM, Tuesday August 9th 2022

Wow, I didn't expect that haha, I actually thought that I will fail the challenge and will have to do some revisions, thank you so much!

I will move on to the lesson 6!

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