250 Cylinder Challenge
1:18 PM, Monday November 2nd 2020
Dear Uncomfortable/teaching assistent,
I hate to say it, but this was my least favourite submission so far - mostly because I don't feel like I improved that much.
Anyways, the first 150 cylinders were preety straightforward. I noticed in the beginning that I would miss the minor axis with the first elipse and as I drew the 2nd one, I would try to allign it to the previous elipse's true minor axis (not the one I put down initially), and it worked preety well for me. But I kinda thought of this as cheating, so I forced myself to try to hit both elipses on the primary minor axis, regardless of how badly I missed with the 1st elipse. This actually resulted in some improvement, so I'm glad I did that.
Cylinders 151-250 are an entirely different kind of beast. I quickly realised that I should warm up with the elipse in planes exercises but it still made very little difference. The fact that you only have 1 shot to hit the elipse (and it is going to be painfully obvious if you miss) made my hand shake. It didn't help that it takes a nice chunk of time to get a solid box on the paper. What I'm trying to get at is that I started caring too much. I know we're not supossed to ''treasure'' these exercises like finished artwork, but I really wanted to do them to the best of my ability. I know I would be way more loose if I didn't care about the results, but I just couldn't help it.
I do think my boxes are ok, but the elipses are so bad that I started questioning the point of trying to find a minor axis, because bad elipses don't have a minor axis. And in general, so many things can go wrong with this method of cylinder construction that I don't know if this error checking serves a purpose. I guess it is good in the sense that you are aware of all the conditions that must be met to create an actual cylinder, but I do not see much of a point beyond that.
So my main problem was my elipses - I tried varying speed, varying the pressure I apply to paper, varying the pressure of my pen holding, varying the angle at which I drew, ... I found out that I can get good elipses with all those methods (it's just a matter of what I'm used to at that time) but the main problem is performance anxiety. If you give me a random page of planes and I just have to draw the elipses in them, I'll do okay. But if I spend a decent amount of time trying to get the box right, then my brain will be like ''don't fuck this up man, you spent a while making the box look good, this elipse better be tight''.
Sorry for being long, I just had to get my thoughts out. Anyways, I'm really looking forward to the critique.
Best regards,
MisterSpades