Jumping right in with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, there are a number of things you've done well here, along with one main area that you do need to continue working on. I am pleased to see that:

• You're making good use of the ghosting method to execute smooth, confident lines for the side edges

• You've incorporated a wide variety of rates of foreshortening, as requested in the assignment section - sometimes student miss this for some reason, so I'm pleased to see that you've played with both shallow and dramatic foreshortening, with plenty of instances of the latter.

• I'm also pleased to see that in the more dramatically foreshortened ones, you're showing an either conscious or instinctual understanding that as the shift in scale between the ellipse closer to the viewer and the ellipse farther away (that is, the fact that the far end becomes smaller overall due to the convergence of the side edges) becomes more significant, so too should the shift in degree. Meaning that if the far end becomes a lot smaller than the closer end, it should also match that with a roughly equal increase in its width. You've applied this well and consistently throughout your cylinders, so good work on that.

• You're quite fastidious in identifying the specific, true minor axis for each ellipse, picking up on both more significant and more minimal deviations from your originally intended alignment. This attention to detail - that is, the fact that you're picking up on even small deviations - will continue to help you improve on that front, and I can see that it has here as well.

What will continue to require attention however are the ellipses themselves. While there are some that are definitely more successful (the ellipses in 101 are quite confidently drawn and evenly shaped), in general you do show a tendency to draw your ellipses hesitantly, which in turn results in uneven elliptical shapes, which in turn undermines the solidity of our resulting structure. It continues to be very important that we execute all of our marks - ellipses included - confidently, so as to achieve smooth, even shapes.

Whether or not we execute a mark with confidence is always a factor of choice - we can choose to execute the marks with confidence, or we can choose to hesitate with uncertainty. That's different from what determines whether our mark will be accurate, however. We can choose to make a mark smooth and confident, but accuracy will always be subject to adequate planning, preparation, past experience/mileage, and some luck. That means that every instance where you've hesitated in the execution of an ellipse - where you've held yourself back and second-guessed yourself mid-stroke - has been the result of some manner of conscious choice, or at the very least, a lack of a conscious choice being made. Always choose to execute confidently, regardless of your worry that it'll throw off your accuracy.

Ultimately there are two main things to remember that'll help:

• Make sure that even when executing your ellipses, that you're using the ghosting method. That means focusing your time on the planning and preparation phases.

• Make sure that you're executing them using your whole arm from the shoulder - it can sometimes be easy to slip back into drawing them from the elbow or wrist without realizing it, which can definitely have a significant impact on how those ellipses turn out.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, 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.

As far as these aspects of the exercise are concerned, you're applying those line extensions fairly correctly, except for the fact that you need to be extending both ellipses' minor axis lines all the way, as far as the other lines, so they can all be compared to one another. We are no longer simply identifying the minor axis, but rather judging it against all of the other lines that are meant to converge towards a particular vanishing point.

There is one other concern that I have for your work on these boxes - across the board, you're largely giving the impression that instead of consciously having your boxes' edges converge towards a shared vanishing point, it looks like you are consciously, purposely trying to draw all of your sets of edges (which are parallel to one another in 3D space) as though they are parallel on the page as well, effectively placing those vanishing points at infinity in the manner discussed back in Lesson 1.

Unfortunately, that's not correct. We don't have control over exactly where our vanishing points will go, or whether they go to infinity - that is determined by the orientation of the box, which is something we have control over, but in the context of this exercise, we're effectively rotating our forms randomly. In order for a vanishing point to go to infinity, the set of parallel edges it governs must run perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight, not slanting towards or away from the viewer through the depth in the scene. Since we're rotating those forms randomly, we can pretty much assume that they'll never assign quite so perfectly so as to put any vanishing points properly to infinity - they might end up really far away, resulting in a very gradual convergence, but that still means we need to be consciously thinking about how we're orienting our lines to have them converge at some far off point.

And of course, even if we did end up with lines snapping so perfectly, there's only one orientation that would result in two vanishing points at infinity, and that orientation - with one of the box's faces turning full on towards the viewer - would effectively require that last vanishing point to not only be concrete, but to be so close as to be right on the page, with sharp, dramatic convergences towards it. Perspective projection, which we're using here, does not allow for all three sets of lines to be parallel on the page. At that point you'd be confusing it with orthographic/axonometric/isometric projection, which are different from perspective. Perspective projection is a technique that sets down specific rules (all parallel edges converge towards a vanishing point) with the intent of reproducing human, binocular vision. Orthographic, axnometric, and isometric projections all pursue entirely different goals, depicting 3D space in other ways.

Now, I am going to mark this challenge as complete, but know that when you tackle these kinds of exercises as part of your regular warmup routine, you'll have a list of points to keep an eye on. Also, the point about the evenness of your ellipses is also a concern with the cylinders in boxes,