Hey, I'm back!
I didn't count the cylinders on the page, as I'm rather counting pages. I drew 26 x 6 = 156 cylinders floating free and 26 x 4 = 104 cylinders in boxes.
Actually, I think I learned more about how to draw square boxes with this exercise than about cylinders, haha. As always, thank you for the review.
Overall your work throughout this challenge is really quite well done. Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, your ellipses are tight and smoothly executed, and you're doing a great job of being fastidious and conscientious in checking the alignment of those ellipses after the fact. That is definitely your biggest weakness here as well - when you execute those ellipses, your alignments do often drift off their intended orientation pretty regularly. Not by huge margins, but it remains fairly consistent over the set, which suggests that the approach you're using when drawing them may need to be adjusted.
If you're not rotating your page before executing the marks, definitely do so. I actually suspect you are rotating the page, though, in which case I'd recommend trying to play with the angle of rotation. If you catch yourself tending too much one way (relative to the minor axis you're aiming for), try rotating the page a little in the opposite direction to compensate for it.
One thing I look out for in these is whether students maintain a consistent relationship between the shift in scale and degree between ellipses on either end of a given cylinder. To put it simply, whether students realize that the rate at which the degree shifts from one end to the other, is tied to the rate at which the overall scale shifts between them due to perspective and foreshortening. Looking at your work, I don't see any major incongruities here - when your scale shifts dramatically, you generally shift the degree in a similar fashion, and when the foreshortening is shallower, you match it with both slight shifts in scale and degree, rather than having one of them being more arbitrarily dramatic. Long story short - everything seems to be in order in that regard.
Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, what you said there is right on the money. This exercise is entirely about teaching students to draw boxes that feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square, as that becomes extremely useful throughout the last two lessons of this course. The cylinder itself just becomes a tool similar to the line extensions from the box challenge. By fitting the ellipses in there, we can test how far off we were from having the ellipse's own line extensions converge towards the box's vanishing points. If they converge consistently to those same points, then we know the ellipse represents a circle that fits into the box's face, which in turn would represent a square in 3D space.
As far as that is concerned, you've done an excellent job of applying those principles, and of using those line extensions to help develop your instincts in estimating those proportions.
So! All in all, your work here is quite well done. Do keep an eye on the alignment of your ellipses, but aside from that, keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 6.
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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