Well here it is. Once again, work has been draining me of a lot of my spare time/energy just to recover from retail on my days off but I managed to get this finished in a somewhat timely manner. I hope at least some of what I'm trying to learn is sticking!
Alrighty! So your work here is good. But you were so close to it being very bad. Allow me to explain.
Towards the beginning of the set of cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, you had a tendency to make your cylinders' edges very... parallel. In effect, you were putting those lines' vanishing point at 'infinity', in the manner discussed back in Lesson 1. You can think of it as forcing it into isometric projection as well. Either way, it's not something we actually have control over. Rather, we can control the orientation for the cylinder as we draw it, but it is this orientation which determines the vanishing point's location.
To be more specific, in order for those side edges to remain perfectly parallel, they would have to align such that they're running perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight - so not slanting towards or away from them at all. It's a very specific orientation that we are unlikely to hit given that we're rotating these cylinders randomly.
Fortunately, you didn't do this for all of your cylinders - there are plenty of those where you've got some more foreshortening on them - but this does seem to come up every so often. So just keep that in mind - avoid making things too parallel. It's not inherently wrong in every situation (although "isometric" boxes would actually be wrong because they exist outside of the bounds of perspective projection), but it's definitely something you want to be doing intentionally, because you know it's the right choice. Otherwise, always work in a little convergence to your lines, even if only slighty.
Aside from that, your work here is really solid. Your ellipses are confident, you're fastidiously checking your alignments, it's all good stuff. And frankly, your cylinders in boxes are very similar. There are some here and there where you get dangerously close to forcing your boxes' vanishing points to infinity, but there are plenty of others mixed in where you've got a decent amount of convergence. And moreover, your boxes are really very good.
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.
By the end, you're pretty competent at maintaining those squared proportions, regardless of how the cylinders are oriented. This will serve you well into Lesson 6 and beyond. So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep up the great (but dangerous) work!
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 6.
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
