9:34 AM, Tuesday March 2nd 2021
Starting with the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, I can see that you've put a good deal of effort into checking the alignment of your ellipses from one cylinder to the next, and that as a whole you do appear to be tightening up your range as you push through this part of the challenge. That is to say, from the beginning you vary between getting very close to the correct alignment, to some that come out more skewed, but towards the end, that variation diminishes. That said, I am noticing a tendency to be a touch hesitant with your ellipses, which suggests that you're not executing them with as much confidence as you ought to. Don't forget that you should be applying the ghosting method and executing these marks from your shoulder in order to achieve the most confident, controlled linework you can. These are topics that have both been more recently revised and updated in Lesson 1 - so in case you need a quick refresher, I recommend you give them a read/watch.
A bigger overall concern I have with this first section of the challenge is that you appear to have missed a clear instruction I left in the homework section, in bold:
Be sure to vary the rate of foreshortening across your cylinders across the set.
You appear to have stuck to what is effectively no foreshortening at all, focusing on keeping the side edges effectively parallel to one another on the page. One of the basic principles of perspective is that when a 3D object is drawn in 2D, we perceive lines that are parallel in 3D space to converge (whether gradually or rapidly) towards a shared vanishing point. We use this rate of convergence to help us estimate roughly how long the cylinder is, in regards to its overall scale. If however there is no convergence at all - something that really only happens when we get a form in a very specific orientation (running perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight, something that we can assume doesn't happen much when rotating our cylinders freely) - that tells the viewer that the cylinder has a length of 0. This is also something we can visibly see to be false, leading to a contradiction.
Taking that a step further, we also want to make sure that the two signs we have of foreshortening - that is, the shift in the scale of the ellipse (which is tied to the convergence of those side edges) and the shift in the degree of the ellipse (just how much wider it gets on the far end), should be consistent. If we get a more significant shift in degree, it should be matched with a more significant shift in scale/convergence as well.
Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, it seems that there are some other instructions you neglected as well. This is explained both in the video, and in these notes - your line extensions should include those of the box, as well as the ellipse's minor axes and the lines going through the contact points of the ellipses. It is this which allows us to check if the ellipses represent circles in 3D space, which in turn help us to improve our ability to estimate the construction of boxes which feature a pair of faces that are proportionally square in 3D space.
I mean, the boxes themselves are coming along nicely, but you've definitely missed a pretty solid chunk of the assignment. So, I'll assign some revisions below. Please read the instructions more carefully in the future - and be sure to go back over them now as well. Do not rely so much on memory.
Next Steps:
Please submit an additional:
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20 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, being sure to vary your rates of convergence
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30 cylinders in boxes