This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
1 users agree
9:23 PM, Thursday January 19th 2023
Hello congrats on finishing the cylinder challenge! I'll do my best to give you advice so that you can improve.
Starting with your cylinders around an arbitrary axis, there is major error here in that you haven't really varied the foreshortening of your cylinders https://drawabox.com/lesson/250cylinders/1/assignment which is to vary the rates of foreshortening from shallow (where there's very little noticeable convergence but not quite parallel on the page) to dramatic (where there's a lot of convergence over a short distance). Because you were staying in the shallow end of the pool with these, you did end up with situations where some of your cylinders did not actually have any visible convergence, suggesting that the vanishing point may have been intentionally forced to infinity to simplify the problem. I do not actually believe this to be the case - rather, I think it was just that your intent was to add a little convergence but you flew a little too close to the sun, and it didn't end up coming through in the result. Still, I do think that I should explain why having those lines be parallel is incorrect.
We do not actually control where the vanishing points should be. Rather, we control how our edges in 3D space are oriented, and it is that which controls the location of the vanishing points. Specifically, a vanishing point would only go to infinity if the edges it governs run perpendicular to the angle at which the viewer looks out into the world - basically, where those edges do not slant towards or away from them through the depth of the scene. Since we're rotating our cylinders randomly throughout this challenge, the chances that they'd align so perfectly is small enough to be avoided altogether - so in the future, if you aren't fully intentionally aligning a set of edges that specifically, be sure to include some visible convergence, even if it's only very slight.
Aside from that your marks appear confident and you have checked well for the majority of them. You've also made the side that goes away from the viewer smaller and wider which is also very good. You would just need to vary the rate of foreshortening.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes there is also another fatal error here in that you haven't applied the error checking method correctly in the sense that you extended every line in the wrong direction https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes/1/wrongdirection. I've highlighted in pink and cyan how you should have actually checked it. Additionally the sides of the cylinders were not checked either https://drawabox.com/lesson/250cylinders/1/stage2check and the ellipses inside the box plane were also not checked properly. In the example I drew over you want your error checking lines to follow the minor axis of the ellipse which should lead to the vanishing point. If you want an easy way to check if your boxes are extended correctly you should do this https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes/1/easyextension which is to extend the lines from the initial "Y" of the box you put down. You've extended correctly for only 1 side for every box, in the example I highlighted that would be your blue lines.
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.
If some of the line extensions are neglected, it undermines the purpose of the entire error analysis, and thus the exercise as a whole. 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 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).
Therefore I'll unfortunately have to ask you to re-do the whole exercise. When you re-do I strongly recommend reading through the instructions again and making sure you vary the rate of foreshortening of your cylinders. For your boxes I would review the notes from the box challenge as well as the error checking method for the cylinders. If you have any questions or if anything was unclear please let me know. Good luck.
Next Steps:
Re-do the 250 cylinder challenge making sure you target the points highlighted in the critique.
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)
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.