10:46 PM, Friday June 19th 2020
Overall, you've done quite well. There are some small things I want to address, but for the most part your work here shows clear improvement over the set, and a good grasp of the material as a whole. I do want to say however - unless a task specifically says so, it's best to complete the work in the order it is assigned. That is, 150 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, followed by 100 cylinders in boxes. It helps to focus on one entirely, then move onto the next. It also would have made critiquing the set easier, as I'd be able to go through one exercise more easily to identify specific patterns. Your numbering also made this somewhat more difficult than it needed to be. Long story short, please just stick to how the instructions are laid out.
The first thing I want to point out as an issue has to do with your actual ellipses. In general, while they're drawn decently, there definitely is still a clear hesitation to how you execute those marks which really falls in line with the general anxiety and lack of surety with which you seem to approach everything. The ghosting method, which of course we apply to every single mark we draw, is all focused around allowing us to execute a mark without any hesitation or fear of making a mistake. It's not that it makes it impossible to make a mistake - it's that it offloads the responsibility of whether or not we make a mistake onto the previous planning and preparation phases. Once your pen touches the page, there's nothing left to be done - you accept that your only task from that point is to maintain a consistent trajectory, whether that trajectory is correct or not.
I explain this whole mindset behind executing a mark in greater detail in this response to another student.
All that said, throughout the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, you're clearly showing a good sense of how to align your ellipses, identifying the proper minor axes, and so on. There's only one slight thing I want to just make sure you're aware of.
If you look at page 13, there's one cylinder that appears to be labelled 78, or 105... or something. I don't really know. It's towards the right side of the page's vertical center. If we compare the ellipse on the close end and the far end, there are two things we can identify:
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There's very little scale shift between them - meaning the far end isn't noticeably smaller than the near end. This suggests to us that foreshortening is applied quite minimally, that the cylinder itself is probably pretty short in length.
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There's a more significant shift in degree between them - meaning that the far end is noticeably wider than the near end. This suggests to us that foreshortening is applied quite significantly, that the cylinder itself is pretty long.
It's easy to overlook this, but the shift in degree is as much an element of foreshortening as the shift in scale, and it is important that we keep both consistent. If there's a significant shift in scale, then there should also be as significant a shift in degree. If the scale shift is minimal, so too should the degree be almost the same on both ends. Otherwise the cylinder will look slightly off, though it may not be entirely clear as to why.
Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, you hit the nail right on the head in identifying that the proportions of the opposite faces of your box are extremely important. That is, ensuring that they're square. That is ultimately what this exercise is all about. Where the box challenge introduced extending sets of parallel lines to test whether or not they're converging consistently towards the same shared vanishing point - something that we gradually improved upon by actually identifying cases where they were not doing so consistently - this challenge adds a whole cylinder as a further testing tool.
When those opposite planes are not proportionally square, then the contact point and minor axis alignment checks don't end up working correctly - they veer off to the side, instead of aligning to the appropriate vanishing points. By identifying this, and working to bring those alignments in closer, we subconsciously get better and better at estimating the square proportions of our boxes' faces while constructing them.
To this end, you identified this more consciously than most, and the overall improvement on this front was significant.
So! All in all, while you need to work on the execution of some of your ellipses, and where you'd certainly make my life much easier by just following the exercises in the order they're assigned and writing numbers in a normal fashion, you've still done a great job. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 6.