Uuuuuuuugh these are so rough! I did these after lesson 2, when it's allowed but not recommended. It's easier to look back and understand why. It's a degree of complexity that we can tackle, but the extra time drawing boxes go a long way to making this easier. That said, my cylinder game is improved, and I can handle revisions well enough. But woof. Wooooooof. We'll, that's all for now...
Thank you for taking the time to look at my stuffs!
Hello Chieftang,
It seems that we meet again. When you left here you were but the learner. Now you are the master. Yes, I know that's not how the quote goes, but let's get started anyway.
Starting off with the first 150 cylinders, you're doing a good job of marking where the actual minor axis of your ellipse, even when it's only slightly off. This shows a good attention to detail, though you'll occasionally second guess yourself and put the minor axis correction off even if, as far as I can see, you actually did a decent job of placing the ellipse along the arbitrary minor axis you've constructed. Cylinders 51 and 79 are examples of this.
The things that stands out to me here most is your use of degree shift. As a reminder, as one end of the cylinder gets farther away from the viewer, the degree or level of openness of the circle - because ellipse are really just circles tilted in 3d space - increases. You're not really employing as much degree shift between your ellipses as one might expect with the degree of foreshortening. I've noted cylinders 17, 38, 44, 46, 54, 94, and 112, among others, as examples where your foreshortening outpaces the rate of degree shift. Of course, you don't always have to dramatically shift the degrees of your ellipses. Cylinders 51 and 74 are good examples of shallow foreshortening combined with shallow degree shifts. You also don't vary the degrees you draw that much. Like the 250 box challenge, having a wide variety of degrees from extremely open to extremely closed will give you more mileage with different types of cylinders.
Moving on to the fun part of the challenge, it looks like you're drawing through your ellipses a lot more times than necessary, 4-5 is my guess. For drawabox, we try to keep it to 2-3 passes, but at least here your ellipses don't fray too much.
That's a minor detail though. Looking at the rest of your boxed cylinders, this is a great demonstration of the foreshortening principle I was referencing earlier. Looking at boxed cylinders 16, 35, 36, 81, and 99, these all show how dramatic foreshortening leads more a more noticeable degree shift. Another things I've noticed was that many of your ellipses end up being just ellipses and not circles. What I mean by that is that when a box encloses a perfect circle tilted in space, that box will represent a perfect square tilted in 3d space (this'll come up again in lesson 7, but it's worth mentioning it briefly here). However, a lot of your boxes - at least the ones containing the ellipses - are rectangles instead of squares. This leads to the ellipse not opening its degree up as expected even when dramatically foreshortened. This is most evident in cylinder 18, 23, 42, 51, 58, 63, 64, 79, 85, and 100. At the end of the day, this isn't a terrible thing considering you completed this challenge around lesson 2. But this is something I'd like you to keep in mind moving forward and maye keep as an explanation for why you might feel "wonky" about these particular cylinders.
One last thing to mention is your correction method. You've done a great job extending the points of the ellipse that touch the sides of the box back to the vanishing point. Just remember to do the same with the actual minor axis of the ellipses you draw. What I mean is that the lines in purple should be extended back to the lines in blue.
And so, the moment you've probably been expecting, I'm going to assign you some revisions. Given that this challenge was completed a while ago and you've most certainly developed your skills a great deal since then, they're not going to be drastic! For your revisions, please do two (2) more pages of cylinder constructed around arbitrary minor axises and one (1) page of cylinders constructed in boxes. For the forst two pages, try to vary the degrees you use and the degree shift you employ relative to the rate of foreshortening. This applies to the page of cylinders in boxes as well, with the added stipulation of extending the minor axises back to the vanishing point like every other extension and attempting to craft your ellipses in squares instead of rectangles. And I mean attempt here because I don't expect/need perfection, just for you to try.
Welp, that's all I have to say for the cylinders right now. I'll see you again for your revisions!
Next Steps:
Two (2) pages of cylinders constructed around arbitrary minor axises - try to vary the degrees you use on this one.
One (1) page of cylinders constructed in boxes
Oh hey Canoe! I'm glad to see you in the critique game; you certainly have an ethic I hope to achieve some day. But first thing's first. I'll admit when I first looked at the material, I didn't quite understand what we were looking for in a cylinder. I knew on some level we were trying to make a perfect circle in perspective, but I didn't quite understand the "how" of it. And then those degree shifts among the arbitrary axes... I didn't even realize that until you mentioned it. I was more focused on rotating the cylinders through space at the time and wasn't paying attention to the full process like I should have, and my own review was so fixated on the last half of the challenge. Ah well.
As you suspected, I have improved on my cylinder constructions, but it was pretty rough for a good long while before they started clicking. Fortunately those embarrassing pages are lost among my pile of warm-ups until the end of time. And the revisions you requested can be found here, here, and here. I still have a tendency to draw through my ellipses 4-5 times, but I'm slowly working on my speed so that I have less time to think about the mark as I draw it.
At any rate, thanks for looking at my stuff yet again and I hope my revisions are satisfactory. Hope you have a good rest of your day!
Hello Chieftang,
I'd say your revisions are more than satisfactory! Your rate of degree shift relative to your foreshortening is much more believable, especially for cylinders 1 and 4 (or I guess 251 and 254). You still haven't gone for any extremely open degrees that almost reach the point of looking like circle, but this shouldn't be a challenge for you if it pops up in the next lesson.
Your boxed cylinders are, quite frankly, impressive. It's astounding how well you've managed to fit the ellipses inside their respective faces in perspective. There's really not much to comment on to be honest.
It's clear that you've progressed quite far since doing this challenge after lesson 2 and your revisions handily demonstrate this. The next step from here on out forgoes that squishy, fuzzy, lively realm of the organics and dives into the hard, rigid, angular world of the gizmos and do-dads that populate our desks, rooms, and homes.
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 6.
Hey Canoe, thanks again for looking at my cylinders! As strange as it sounds, this challenge has been profoundly cathartic for me. It was a true test to resist the urge to repeat the challenge in order to find my errors. Thankfully I have finally come to develop a decent understanding of how to construct cylinders, and now I have to see if I can leverage this knowledge into helping other folks in the community to do the same.
I hope you have a great rest of your day!
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
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