Jumping right in with the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, in regards to the concepts explored in this challenge, your work here is fine - you've varied the rates of foreshortening a great deal, and you're quite fastidious in checking the alignment of your ellipses' minor axes. That said, when it comes to some of the concepts we deal with earlier in the course - particularly the use of the ghosting method, drawing through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, and engaging your whole arm from the shoulder, there are some pretty substantial issues here.

Throughout the course we introduce a lot of techniques and strategies that are expected to be applied consciously as much as the student is able, with an active effort not to let our subconscious autopilot take over. The goal overall is to do this as intentionally as possible so that we can train that autopilot to behave more reliably when drawing outside of this course. That of course takes time - time to ensure that every mark we put down is the result of conscious choices being made to follow the processes to which we've been introduced, and so I have certainly seen plenty of situations where to save time, students may stop being as mindful in applying the individual steps of the ghosting method - planning by plotting the start/end points of their lines where applicable, or otherwise identifying the nature of the mark they wish to make and rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach, then preparing by ghosting through the required motion a few times before finally executing with a confident stroke. Instead, the student might stop putting as much time towards the planning and preparation phases, compensating a bit by putting more time into the execution phase resulting in a mark that is a little more hesitant and careful so as to still maintain that accuracy. The result there is a deviation in small measures, but in all the ways that matter most, from the spirit of the ghosting method, which is all about splitting the process into distinct stages, each with their own priorities, culminating in a confident execution.

As a whole the result here is that your work tends to be a lot less confident, and a lot more focused on maintaining accuracy - which as discussed here in Lesson 1 is always a secondary priority. This shows up most of all in your ellipses, which tend to have far less even shapes due to the greater hesitation, drawing through them two full times less frequently, not using the ghosting method, and so forth. Your side edges are impacted as well, to a less noticeable degree.

Another factor that could be at play here - and you'll know this better than I - is whether or not you're consistently applying the exercises introduced earlier in the course as part of your regular warmup routine. If you've focused too much on certain exercises over others, or forgotten to do the warmups altogether, that could also explain your sharp deviation from those principles from earlier in the course.

I will say that with the scale at which you've drawn your cylinders - which, though not unreasonable is certainly large - you've also been in a position to rely much more on drawing from your shoulder. Without the ghosting method being followed in its entirety, it's admittedly hard to gauge whether that also played a role here. My gut tells me that you were engaging your whole arm from the shoulder, and that it was the absence of a confident execution that held you back more than accidentally relying more on your elbow in its stead - though in general, it wouldn't hurt to give the video from the Lesson 2 Sausages with Contour Lines video a watch, as it does demonstrate my use of my shoulder from several different camera angles when drawing ellipses. That'll give you something to compare against, in case adjustments are necessary in how you're approaching engaging your shoulder.

Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, I unfortunately do not have better news for you here, as there was a pretty substantial issue in how you applied the line extensions that will have impacted how beneficial the exercise ultimately ended up being. 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).

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.

The key issue here is that down the lengthwise direction of your cylinders, you did not apply your line extensions as instructed. Where our instructions state to extend the 4 of the box's edges in this direction, plus each of the ellipses' minor axis lines, you appear to be adding to that the side edges of the cylinder, and instead of extending each ellipse's minor axis line independently, you are merely extending the initial line around which your ellipses were drawn (that is, the line we draw through the center of the two opposite planes). This does not tell us about the actual ellipses that were drawn - merely what your intent was when doing so.

While the ellipses' contact point line extensions carry the most weight of importance in terms of judging how accurate our proportions are, it is the minor axis lines that tell us how accurately the contact point lines actually fit the situation.

• A. In a case where the contact point lines and minor axes align correctly with the box's extensions, then we know the face containing the ellipse in question is proportionally square.

• B. If however the contact point lines are correct, but the minor axes are not, then we know that the proportions are in fact not correct, being off by however much the minor axis is off.

• C. If the contact point lines are off, but the minor axis line is correct, then we know that the proportions are off by however much the contact point lines are off.

• D. And lastly, if the contact point lines are off, and the minor axis line is off, well that instance of the exercise is a wash and won't really give us any useful information.

Without the minor axis being accurately identified and extended, we are left assuming that the case is either A or C, and cannot account for situations B and D, potentially gleaning erroneous information and adjusting our proportions based on that.

As a whole, I think that it may be worth taking a moment to reconsider both how it is you're approaching going through this course - in terms of adhering to concepts introduced earlier in the course on an intentional, conscious level, rather than simply hoping to assimilate them through the more limited mileage by which they were first introduced, and in terms of giving yourself vastly more time to go through the instructions carefully and thoroughly and to revisit them periodically.

In addition to this, making better use of the resources we make available - which includes the discord chat server where we have channels for every lesson and challenge where students can share their work and potentially have glaring issues caught before they continue for too long - may also help in this regard.

Now before I mark this challenge as complete, I will be requiring some revisions. The focus will be on applying the cylinders in boxes correctly, but I'll be including some of the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes to give you an opportunity to demonstrate those concepts from earlier in the course being applied more fully - so do be sure to first review the related material in order to address those issues before tackling these revisions.