6:08 PM, Tuesday May 26th 2020
I'm glad my feedback has been helpful!
So, looking at the first section - the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes - the first thing that jumps out at me is that you're pretty consistently drawing cylinders that appear to have extremely shallow foreshortening to them. As a result, the scale of the near and far end ellipses appears to be roughly the same. It really is important that when you do these challenges - just like the 250 boxes - that you introduce lots of variety instead of drawing the same thing over and over. So by variety, I mean proportion/length and rate of foreshortening. And of course, it is very uncommon to have your cylinder oriented in space in such a way that there is no scale shift - so in the future make a point of making that far end at least a little bit smaller, so the edges along the sides of the cylinders converge at least a little bit as they move away from the viewer.
Since you didn't vary the aspects of the cylinders I listed above, but did draw them at various angles and orientations, that leads me to ask - when drawing these cylinders, did you rotate your page frequently to line up a comfortable angle of approach for each individual stroke? If you did, then great - but if you didn't, then make sure you do moving forward whenever freehanding lines for these lessons. Throughout this course we're still not really concerned with being able to draw lines at every possible orientation.
Now you have been pretty good at identifying the "true" minor axes of your cylinders, though you are definitely still struggling to align them to that central minor axis throughout a fair bit of this section. Once you hit around 100 though, you do show greater consistency and lower margins of error, so that's definitely a big sign of improvement.
The last thing I wanted to mention actually is a little difficult to touch upon due to the lack of foreshortening - it's something I give students the opportunity to identify for themselves throughout the challenge, as truths determined while practicing often stick better than those explained.
Basically, it has to do with the relationships between the scale shift from the far end to the near end (far end smaller, near end bigger) and the degree shift between them (far end wider, near end narrower). Both of these are aspects of foreshortening, and they help communicate at least in part whether the cylinder is short (shallow foreshortening) or long (dramatic foreshortening). What this means, however, which students often miss initially is that you're not going to end up in a situation where the scale shift is very dramatic and rapid, but the degree shift is not - or vice versa. That is to say, you won't end up with a far end that is much smaller but roughly the same degree/width as the near end, and you won't end up with a far end that is the same size but much wider than the near end either.
I think with your cylinders in boxes, you've largely done a pretty good job overall. The thing about this exercise is that rather than being about cylinders, it's actually more about learning how to draw boxes that have opposing faces which are proportionally square. Similarly to how we apply the line extensions to the box challenge to test whether the parallel lines converge consistently (information we can then analyze and use to change our approach on the next page), the cylinder portion of this exercise basically adds to that and allows us to test just how close those opposite planes are from being actually proportionally square. After all, if an ellipse in 3D space represents a circle (relative to the box's own vanishing points), then the plane that encloses it will be a square. Checking the minor axis and contact point alignment allows us to see how far off we are from that, and to make changes to help improve upon it.
For the most part you've shown definite growth as far as this is concerned, and I think your general ability to freehand ellipses within set spaces has definitely improved since the first chunk of this challenge.
All in all, this second section is somewhat redeeming - but make sure that when practicing cylinders as part of your warmups, you add more variety to the ones constructed around arbitrary minor axes.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 6.