250 Cylinder Challenge
12:47 AM, Thursday May 8th 2025
I got a bit carried away the "arbitrary axis" cylinders.
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10:18 AM, Thursday May 29th 2025
Hi hi! I will be giving you my critique about your cylinders! First of all congratulations for finishing it!
150 Cylinders
Some of your ellipses felt wobbly / not confident. To fix this, you should do your ellipses multiple time to make it more firm. I don't expect perfection, but perhaps you should do a bit more ghosting before doing the ellipses more than 2 times. Maybe three or four at first to get yourself acclimated, before you reduce it to two if you want. This guide would explain it better than me: LINK
I also spotted that some of the real minor axis of the cylinders were way off (this is the one where you use rulers to see where you did it wrong). I think you should take some time and maybe shift the angle a bit to see where the real minor axis splits the ellipses into 2 symmetrical halves.
There seems to be a misunderstanding in the way you correct your cylinders minor axis, the correct minor axis (the one you should do with rulers) does not need to start form the first edges of your ghosted minor axis. This doesn't mean that you should make the correction away from the ghosted minor axis, but it should be close enough so that you can build intuition on where you should draw your ellipses. Because you put the corrected on the first edge your ghosted minor axis touch your ellipses, it resulted in the corrected form to NOT split the ellipses symmetrically. Essentially, your corrected minor axis does not split the ellipses into two symmetrical equal halves. I have drawn a corrected minor axis on one of your drawing which you can see here: https://imgur.com/a/w15RSzB
Other than that, I would suggest taking some time during the hatching and not rush through it. Make sure that both ends of the line touch the edge of the ellipses, don't leave it hanging otherwise it might make it harder to communicate :D
100 Cylinders in a box
Some of your early boxes and ellipses are a bit wobbly, but I'm happy to see that the later one was more confident. I do still see that some of the ellipses did not touch all four edges of the boxes, so be try to force yourself to make sure that it touched all sides. It might look crooked, but the whole point of this exercise is not to make pretty drawings anyway so don't think about the result too much.
But I also see the same reoccuring problem where the corrected minor axis did not split the ellipses into 2 symmetrical halves. So please take your time to find the angle where the minor axis could cut the ellipses into two equal halves. I suggest drawing over the ellipses when drawing the corrected minor axis, that way you get a clear sense where it should have been next time.
Conclusion
There is a bit of misconception on the way corrected minor axis needed to be drawn, but overall I see that you have tried and that's what mattered. I just need you to do a little bit of revision before approving you to go on the next lesson / challenge.
Next Steps:
2 full pages of cylinders AND cylinders in boxes.
Make sure that:
-
the corrected minor axis split the ellipses into 2 symmetrical equal halves
-
the corrected minor axis does not have to start from where your ghosted minor axis touch the edge of the ellipses
-
Do a bit more ghosting before making your lines. As for the ellipses, try to do 3-4 rounds of your ellipses until you feel like you are confident (then you can drop it to 2 like how you do it)
2:45 PM, Thursday June 5th 2025
Thank you for taking the time to review my work. I have attached the corrections below:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gmo1NZAfD1yw2hGqUaIWF5ZWpOxSm6tp?usp=sharing
For future reference, it is possible to overdo an ellipse? For example, would 5-6 times be too many times to draw over an ellipse?
2:12 AM, Friday June 6th 2025
Hi hi! I see that you have take in my feedback for the ellipses! I'm glad to see that you have corrected your minor axis! So I'll be giving you an approval for completion!
For your question, I think you can overdo an ellipses. One of my feedback for my own 250 ellipses was that I did it a bit too much (5-6) to the point that it ended up shrinking or growing the ellipses.. I think the main concern for it is that you ended up relying less off the ghosting method before the pen hits the paper, which I think is not what the lesson want. Ideally, it would be great if we could make the perfect ellipses in one go, but 2-3 times is enough for our imperfect hands.
Next Steps:
Go on the next lesson! Good luck!
12:25 AM, Friday June 13th 2025
Thank you!
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Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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