250 Cylinder Challenge

6:13 PM, Saturday January 16th 2021

Drawabox 250 cylinders redo - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/jZAZdL3.jpg

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered enterta...

Hello Uncomfortable,

Please see the imgur link above. What exact speed do you ghost your lines? Do you go by saying outloud "one mississipi" as you ghost? Or do you use some other method? I feel like I am always fighting myself with going too fast or too slow. I just want to better tackle my wobbly lines.

P.S. I got a laugh out of your wobbly lines comic.

Best,

Lars

0 users agree
1:33 AM, Tuesday January 19th 2021

To answer your question, I don't gauge my speed because speed is not what matters. You'll note that when talking about the ghosting method, at no point do I ever mention "go fast" or "go slow". I talk about confidence and hesitation. This can occur at any speed, though generally students will draw more confidently when they draw faster, and will hesitate more when they draw slower. But at the same time, drawing faster tends to reduce control.

The key is to find what speed you can currently ghost and execute at (these are going to be the same speed) without hesitating, and without trying to steer the line with your eyes. With more and more practice, that speed decreases, as we get more, for lack of a better word, confident at drawing confidently.

Anyway, I feel like all this is moot - because looking at your linework throughout your challenge here, you are drawing your lines confidently. So perhaps you're just overthinking things.

As a whole, I am quite pleased with your work throughout this second attempt at the challenge, and it clearly shows just how much you're capable of, and how little room you've given yourself in the past to really demonstrate it to yourself.

Starting with the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, you've done a great job of aligning your ellipses, have clearly played with rates of foreshortening that were more dramatic (not exactly that much variety still, so in the future mix it up with both shallow and dramatic, both having vanishing points but at different distances from the cylinder), and have done an excellent job of keeping the shifts of degree and scale from end to end consistent with one another.

Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, I did notice that you didn't seem to actually draw the side edges of your cylinders, and merely drew ellipses in opposite planes of your boxes. That is... technically not a huge deal, but is a strange thing to leave out all things considered.

Another thing I did notice was that in quite a few boxes, like 79, 82, 83, 84... a lot, in fact, you have a tendency to draw the far end at an entirely different angle (converging with different vanishing points) from the closer end. This in turn results in ellipses that are narrower on the far end, which as we know about cylinders, is incorrect. Just something to keep in mind.

Anyway, other than that you're moving in the right direction, and I'm still very pleased with your work, especially compared to what you submitted last time. As such, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Just be sure to continue practicing your freely rotated boxes, and watch the tendency to set the far planes at an angle.

Next Steps:

Move onto Lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
11:52 PM, Tuesday January 19th 2021

Thank you for the information and the critique Uncomfortable!

The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
PureRef

PureRef

This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.

When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.

Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.

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