9:37 PM, Monday November 16th 2020
Alrighty! So, starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, I did notice that your line quality was admittedly a bit wobbly, both in drawing your longer straight lines along the edges of your cylinders, as well as with the ellipses themselves. Now, the lengthy break since your last submission can certainly explain why you might have gotten rusty in this regard, but remember the key principles behind executing your marks. Each and every one should employ the ghosting method, and both your straight lines and your ellipses should be drawn from the shoulder.
Drawing larger is obviously hard regardless, but at this point you should have enough mileage with those exercises to maintain more consistent strokes (assuming you've been doing the exercises from the lessons you've completed previously as warmups). The point I'm mostly making here is that I suspect you haven't.
When it comes to the ghosting method, it exists entirely to help us separate the planning and preparation of our marks into separate stages, so that when we actually execute the stroke, we can do so with full confidence to avoid any hesitation. Hesitation is what causes the wobbling. I explain this in further detail in this response to another student.
Another thing I wanted to point out was that in some of your cylinders, there's a bit of an inconsistency in the relationship between the ellipses on either end of the form. There are two ways in which the ellipses differ - their overall scale, getting smaller as we move to the farther end, and their degree, which gets wider as we more to the farther end. These "shifts" should occur at the same rate - meaning that if we've got a lot of foreshortening on our cylinder, then the farther end is going to be both much smaller and much wider than the closer end. We won't ned up in a situation, like the cylinder in the middle of this page, where the far end is considerably smaller but still roughly the same degree.
Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, while your linework is still quite hesitant and wobbly here, you've applied the exercise itself fairly well. You've done a good job of working towards improving your ability to estimate boxes that are roughly square on two opposite ends, which is precisely what leads to an improvement in the convergences of your line extensions. After all, the additional lines from the ellipses (the minor axis and contact-point-lines) only align to the box's own vanishing points when the ellipse itself represents a circle resting within a face of the box. Improving the convergence of those line extensions inherently improves your judgment when constructing the box.
The line quality did somewhat impede your progress here, but all in all the exercise was applied correctly.
So, while you need a lot of work on your use of the ghosting method, you did complete this challenge reasonably well. As such, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Please be sure to work on your linework in the warmups. From this point on, you will be allowed to use a ruler and an ellipse guide, so I strongly suggest that you do so in order to avoid distracting yourself from the core purpose of those lessons, while you get your line quality back up to speed. Working on both at the same time will not be worth it.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 6.