250 Cylinder Challenge

3:51 AM, Monday October 26th 2020

DaB - 250 Cylinder Challenge - Official - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/Nk6CKIU.jpg

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered enterta...

Homework listed in link above. WOW! This one took a little while but worth it. Thank you for your feedback and help!

Alan

0 users agree
1:15 AM, Tuesday October 27th 2020

Alrighty! Starting out with the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, overall you've done a pretty good job. You've drawn your ellipses with a lot of confidence, keeping them smooth and even in most cases. Your side edges did leave a bit to be desired in terms of accuracy though, suggesting that you may not have been relying as much on the ghosting method (or at least not as completely and consistently) as you should have, which in some cases led to the lines not quite touching the circumference of the ellipse on one end. For this I'm not referring to cases where the ellipses were a bit looser, but for those I would suggest always aiming for the outermost ellipse being the one you attempt to draw your lines to. This avoids the issue of having lines existing outside of the silhouette of the form.

Overall you were pretty conscientious with your minor axis corrections, which clearly helped you develop your ability to align the ellipses well, though I did notice on one specific page that the alignments you were marking with your red pen were actually incorrect (as shown here). This appeared to be isolated however, perhaps it was just an off day.

One thing I am very glad to see is that you appear to be maintaining a pretty consistent relationship between the shift in scale from one end to the other and the shift in degree from one end to the other. That is to say, when the shift in scale is pretty minimal, so to do you keep the shift in degree pretty slight (shallow foreshortening). In the admittedly rarer cases where you made the shift in scale more significant, you matched it with a more significant shift in degree (dramatic foreshortening). Keeping these consistent is important, as the viewer will be able to tell something's off if they introduce contradictions.

Moving onto the cylinders in boxes, unfortunately it appears you neglected to read and follow the instructions correctly, in terms of the line extensions. This exercise is primarily focused on pushing students to develop their instincts for drawing boxes that include a pair of opposite faces which are proportionally square. We do this by taking the principles of the line extensions from the box challenge, and adding the cylinder to it.

The cylinder adds two ellipses, and with each of those ellipses we get three additional lines to extend - the minor axis line, and the lines established by the points at which the given ellipse touches its enclosing plane (we call these contact points). These lines only align to the box's own vanishing points when the ellipse itself represents a circle in 3D space that is resting on the surface of the box. Therefore if those lines are a little off from aligning to those vanishing points, then as we make adjustments to bring them more in line, the better we get at ending up with ellipses that represents circles, and therefore the planes that enclose them get closer to being square.

Because you didn't actually extend any of the additional lines relating to the ellipses, you entirely skipped this part of the exercise. While you no doubt got more practice at drawing the cylinders inside the boxes, and placing ellipses inside those planes, you unfortunately sidestepped the core focus of this exercise altogether. As such, I'm going to have to assign additional cylinders so you can demonstrate proper use of this technique. Fortunately, I will not be reassigning the whole 100.

Next Steps:

Please submit 50 additional cylinders in boxes, after you have a chance to revisit the instructions to ensure that you complete them as instructed.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
1:40 AM, Tuesday October 27th 2020

Lol how embarrassing. I got cocky... Didn't even bother to check my previous work either. 50 more well deserved.

6:05 PM, Saturday October 31st 2020

Revisions located here https://imgur.com/a/5k4c8ch

Moved away from using markers and tried pens for the line segment checks. Felt like you would be able to see my lines better. Markers felt pretty heavy.

Sorry again for wasting your time with the first submission. A lot going on and didn't give this the focus it deserved. However, this was a good wake up call.

6:28 PM, Monday November 2nd 2020

This is looking much better, and you're clearly more mindful of the behaviour of those lines as they extend into the distance. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
7:08 PM, Monday November 2nd 2020

Oh man you just made my day!!! Boom. You probably have alot of students but I remember us having a conversation awhile back when I had to start over when moving to official. FINALLY caught back up and it feels amazing.

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.
Sakura Pigma Microns

Sakura Pigma Microns

A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.

In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.