250 Cylinder Challenge

2:01 AM, Friday July 5th 2024

Drawabox 250 Cylinder Challenge - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/drawabox-250-cylinder-challenge-zFZLusm

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Another arduous challenge from this great drawing program.

This website indicated that cylinders were difficult and this experience made that clear. I had trouble with keeping the ellipses symmetrical around the minor axis for the first 150 cylinders and keeping the cylinder centered on the edge of the boxes for the last 100. This is not even accounting for the fact that the boxes are not perfect and the face for the ellipse does not perfectly represent a square.

That said, this was still a valuable experience, despite how much toil it is.

Thank you to whoever will review this submission and I look forward to the constructive feedback.

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9:49 PM, Friday July 5th 2024

Jumping right in with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, one thing that immediately does jump out at me is that while this isn't something you're doing consistently, you appear to be drawing the side edges of your cylinders as parallel on the page somewhat often - as we see in cases like 112, 114, 116, 120, 123, 125, and so forth - which is noted in this section of reminders as specifically being incorrect. Seeing this very infrequently could be explained as the result of you trying to achieve very slight convergence, but accidentally ending up with parallel edges, although with this frequency that does not seem to be the case. I also noticed that you'd written "Good?" next to 123, which further confirms that you may have been under the impression that this would be something to aim for.

The rest of your cylinders are generally okay, although your linework also appears to be showing signs of not employing the ghosting method - those signs include an absence of having those start/end points marked out (I can see them on your minor axis lines, although not on the side edges), and those side edges frequently being at least a little hesitant and wobbly (which isn't always immediately noticeable, but is certainly present). Remember that the ghosting method must be used for all of the marks we freehand throughout this course - straight lines, ellipses, curves, etc. - in order to continually reinforce that our first priority is to the confidence of our execution. We achieve this by investing our time into the planning and preparation phases, so that when executing we can simply push through with what we've prepared, but when students start drifting away from this process without realizing it, they tend to do so gradually. First they spend less time in the planning and preparation phases, and in turn they later end up compensating by investing more time into the execution phase, which undermines the methodology as a whole.

So, be sure to reflect upon exactly how you're going about making your marks - we always want to be hyper-intentional with every choice we make when drawing our homework, as this is how we rewire our instincts, so that when we draw outside of the course we're in a better position to apply what we've learned without having to think about it.

Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes, your work here is definitely more consistently better in your execution of the instructions. I'm pleased that you noticed the relevance of the boxes' own proportions, as that is a key aspect of this exercise - though perhaps not in the way you might have thought. 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. That is to say, it's about the box itself, not the cylinder we draw inside of it. We train 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 a whole, I can see that you're applying the line extension methodology as instructed, and that you're steadily applying what those line extensions tell you to adjust your proportions accordingly in later attempts. Additionally, your linework does appear to be more confident and consistent here than it was before.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. As a whole you're on the right track, although do be sure to go through that reminder section I linked earlier, avoid drawing your cylinders' side edges as parallel on the page (or more generally, avoid forcing your vanishing points to infinity if the orientation of those edges in 3D space does not specifically allow for it), and keep an eye on your use of the ghosting method.

Next Steps:

Move onto Lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
2:07 AM, Sunday July 7th 2024

Hi Uncomfortable,

It's nice to receive an official critique from the very creator of this course.

To clarify, I wrote "Good?" for 123 mainly because the true minor axis of the two ellipses aligned closely with the orignial minor axis. Having the ellipses be symmetrical and align with the intended minor axis was something I had trouble with and thus I thought I was making some progress when I saw the results of 123.

The parallel edges originated from my attempts to draw cylinders with subtle foreshortening. Due to inaccuracies with the ellipse, the edges became parallel.

I'll have to keep in mind marking the points for the sides of the cylinder for the ghosting method. I tried to apply the ghosting method for the cylinder sides, but the lack of explicitly defined points led to inaccuracies, hesitations, and wobbly lines as you've pointed out.

As for the boxes, the challenge was certainly making two opposite faces that are proportionally square. The back corner is a good litmus test to how well I did, since any anomaly arising from it is a symptom of incorrectly positioned corners.

I do have a question. One thing that I realized is that I can only draw boxes reliably using the Y-Method, which means I can only draw boxes where the viewer is looking at a corner. If I try to draw a box where I'm looking at an edge like this example, then I start to have trouble. Is this an issue and is there a method to drawing a box in that orientation? Perhaps I'm missing something simple like how I did with drawing explicit points to apply the ghosting method for the cylinder sides/ or something that the course covered already.

Thank you for the review. Hope the 250 cylinders fueled your life force. Every box and cylinder makes you stronger, after all!

5:18 PM, Monday July 8th 2024

One thing to keep in mind is that what we learn throughout this course isn't really about technique. There are certainly techniques in there - or more accurately, things that can be extracted as techniques - but the goal with everything we introduce to students throughout this course are exercises. We're teaching you how, and what, to practice, in order to work towards certain results.

When it comes to the Y method we employ in the box challenge, it shifts the focus to the convergence of our lines, especially when combined with line extensions. That isn't to say that every box we draw in the future will be drawn with this methodology - as you noted, it specifically leans towards 3 point perspective - but boxes are made up of sets of edges that are parallel in 3D space, and there's only two ways in which they're going to be drawn: either they converge towards a concrete vanishing point, or they converge towards an infinite vanishing point (that is to say, they don't converge when drawn on the page and remain parallel).

As each exercise is introduced in a lesson or challenge, and confirmed that we're doing it correctly, it becomes part of our warmups - and so by continuing to practice the use of the Y method by drawing those kinds of freely rotated boxes as prescribed by the box challenge, we continue to practice this limited area of spatial reasoning, in order to improve our ability to leverage the convergence aspect of drawing boxes. The rest - keeping lines parallel on the page - doesn't require as much active practice generally, although if we start thinking of the methodologies we use as general techniques (in the sense that, if you want to draw a box, use the Y method, regardless of its orientation, despite the fact that it as a technique doesn't work as well with 1 and 2 point perspective) we might end up with tunnel vision, and stop leveraging the other things we've learned.

That's something we want to avoid - any situation where we think of what we learn here as step by step recipes. They aren't - at most they're tools for dealing with specific problems, but more than that, as with everything we learn throughout this course, the goal is to rewire your subconscious understanding of 3D space. The end goal that we're working towards is that all of the "how" of drawing sinks into our subconscious, allowing us to focus on the what of what we're drawing instead. Of course, in order to get there, we have to be extremely conscious of every choice we make, and why we make those choices, for the homework we do in this course.

Taking a step back to your question, keep in mind that the box challenge isn't the only place we encounter boxes - the plotted perspective exercise has us working with 2 point perspective (where our verticals are drawn parallel on the page), and the rough perspective exercise has us working with 1 point perspective (where our verticals and horizontals are drawn parallel on the page), and so those are things you may wish to review. At the end of the day, even if a box is rotated entirely independently of the ground plane, horizon, etc. as we see in these challenges, they're still functioning off the same basis of concrete vanishing points and infinite vanishing points.

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