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9:24 PM, Tuesday January 3rd 2023
Jumping right in with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, your work here is by and large coming along well, and I'm pleased to see that you're mindful when checking the correct minor axis alignment of your ellipses, capturing both larger discrepancies as well as some of the smaller ones that can be notoriously easy to ignore (which in turn can result in your improvement plateauing). Good to see that you're keeping on top of it.
My biggest concern with these cylinders fall on the tendency to lose confidence in your execution when executing the wider ellipses (most often those farther from the viewer, due to the degree shift). You do appear to falter, and that hesitation causes the ellipses to come out less evenly shaped than they otherwise could. While the solution to this is simple on paper - it's really a matter of employing the ghosting method in its entirety (especially executing with confidence regardless of your fears of making a mistake), and engaging your whole arm from the shoulder, it is very easy to forget if you don't keep on top of it. When it comes to the use of the ghosting method, many students fall into the trap of thinking that they are, but end up investing less time into the planning and preparation phases, and instead compensating for that by putting more time into the execution, which turns the purpose of the approach on its head. Remember - the ghosting method is all about breaking the process into distinct stages, all with their own specific focuses, as explained here.
And of course, be sure not to neglect your ellipses (especially those with wider degrees) as part of your regular warmups. Some students may also be prone to forgetting that warmups are one of the major responsibilities students need to keep up with, and so they can get rusty on some of the basic principles as they move forwards. As noted here, warmups are indeed required.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is by and large quite well done. 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.
In being as fastidious as you have been in applying the line extensions as instructed, I can see that you've been giving yourself ample opportunity to assess where your approach could be adjusted to bring those convergences together from one page to the next. As a result, your awareness of those proportions have improved, and while there is of course still plenty of room for improvement, you should be well equipped to tackle the related issues that arise as we tackle Lesson 6.
So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto Lesson 6.
The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw
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.