Hi Beckerito, hope you’re well. Congratulations on making it through the cylinder challenge, I’ll be checking them for you today.

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, you’ve done an excellent job. Your mark making looks confident, and you remembered to draw through your ellipses twice too. You’ve been quite fastidious in checking your minor axis, noting even small miss-alignments and this will help you to avoid plateauing in a “good enough” zone, great work. I’m pleased to see that you took the opportunity to experiment with lots of different viewing angles and rates of foreshortening in the challenge, exploring plenty of variety to learn as much as possible from the exercise, well done. Throughout this portion of the challenge you’ve shown a solid understanding of how foreshortening operates on cylinders. Applying both a shift in in scale, where due to the convergence of the side edges the far end becomes smaller overall, and the shift in degree where the far end gets wider than the end closer to the viewer. You’re also showing an awareness that we need to make sure that both of these "shifts" occur in tandem. Should one shift be dramatic and the other shallow, it creates a contradiction that the viewer will pick up on, noticing that something's "off" even if they don't specifically know why.The reason for this is that both of these shifts are manifestations of foreshortening, and they convey to the viewer just how much of that cylinder's length is visible on the page, and how much exists in the unseen dimension of depth, which cannot be conveyed as distances on the flat piece of paper. So, you’re doing great! A couple of suggestions for spicing this exercise up a bit when you practice it in the future: You can play around with the proportions of your cylinders a bit more, for example, what if you need to draw a cylinder that is very short and flat, like a coin? Or really long, like a tube of wrapping paper? You can also change up the scale, drawing these smaller or larger, as they mostly seem to be a similar size here. Just suggestions and options though, your work is already strong.

Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes, you've done a great job. Your lines continue to look smooth and confident, and your ellipses improve a lot across the set. 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 memorising 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.

By consistent in the application of your line extensions, and keeping an eye on where they drift apart, you've made visible improvements in your estimation of those proportions, and you've hit a point where, though there is certainly still plenty of room for growth, you should be able to estimate the proportions well enough regardless of how your boxes are oriented - something that will help you a fair bit into the next lesson.

One thing I do want to make note of though, if you check the example cylinder here https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/88b497e2.jpg you can see that Comfy also extends the sides of the cylinder, to check if they converge to the same VP as the box and the minor axis. It isn’t mentioned in the text as far as I know, so I can’t really fault you for it, but I did notice in this page https://i.imgur.com/D8oDrMj.jpg 158, 159 160 that the sides of your cylinders appear to be diverging instead of converging. You seem to have spotted this and rectified it even without the help of extending them, but I think it’s a good idea to extend the sides of your cylinders when you practice this exercise in warm ups in the future.

You’re doing great! Feel free to move on to lesson 6.