Part 2 (last 8 pages) here.
Excuse me for this mess—Imgur made it very difficult to upload images, this time (it took me over 4 hours).
Starting with your cylinders around minor axes, I'm noticing an unfortunate trend in your work that runs us into a few pretty significant issues. The trend is that a lot of these (not all, but definitely the majority) appear to have their vanishing points forced to infinity, resulting in completely parallel side edges that do not converge at all. In effect, you've tried to eliminate the foreshortening altogether, perhaps in an attempt to simplify the exercise. Unfortunately:
This goes against what was assigned - you'll note in this screenshot of the assignment section and the "Be sure to vary the rate of foreshortening across your cylinders" in bold.
It's also incorrect in terms of perspective. I'll explain why below.
We do not directly control our vanishing points and where they go. What we do control is how we wish a given form to be oriented in space. It's this which dictates indirectly where the vanishing points will be, and there's a limited set of orientations that will actually force a vanishing point to infinity. This can occur only when a set of edges in 3D space is running perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight - basically, when those lines go straight across their field of view, not slanting towards or away from the viewer through the scene.
Given that this challenge has us rotating our forms freely and randomly throughout the exercise, the chances of us aligning so perfectly is pretty slim - to the point that we should probably accept that our side edges should always be converging, even if only very slowly and gradually, just as with the 250 box challenge.
Unfortunately this does mean that this part of the challenge was done incorrectly, and will have to be done once again. Along with this point, I am noticing some cases where your ellipses are more unevenly shaped than others - for example, this page. This suggests that you're hesitating more as you draw them - remember to always use the ghosting method to separate the markmaking process into bite-sized steps, and be sure to engage your whole arm from the shoulder.
Fortunately, the second part of the challenge is in fact very well done. This exercise is really all about helping develop students' understanding of how to construct boxes which feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square, regardless of how the form is oriented in space. We do this not by memorizing every possible configuration, but rather by continuing to develop your subconscious understanding of space through repetition, and through analysis (by way of the line extensions).
Where the box challenge's line extensions helped to develop a stronger sense of how to achieve more consistent convergences in our lines, here we add three more lines for each ellipse: the minor axis, and the two contact point lines. In checking how far off these are from converging towards the box's own vanishing points, we can see how far off we were from having the ellipse represent a circle in 3D space, and in turn how far off we were from having the plane that encloses it from representing a square.
In being as fastidious as you were with the line extensions, you've honestly done a great job of developing your underlying instinctual grasp of how to draw each box to maintain those general proportions, regardless of how they're oriented in space. Your line quality here is also considerably more confident, which shows more consistent use of the ghosting method, and more overall application of the concepts discussed earlier in the course.
As stated above, you will need to redo the 150 cylinders around arbitrary axes. Fortunately while 150 is a lot, it's definitely the lesser of the parts of the challenge, as far as time consumption goes. Of course, I can fully understand that this would be rather disheartening to hear though, so you might want to give yourself a bit of a break before you get started on it. While you missed an important instruction and it led you down the wrong path, it is still important to recognize that you've put a ton of work into what you did here.
Although I have one request - when you do that section again, it'd help if you numbered each individual cylinder, rather than the pages. Helps in situations where I need to refer to specific instances.
Next Steps:
Please submit an additional 150 cylinders.
Hello again! I am finally back with the 150 cylinders as you instructed. Hopefully it hasn't been too long.
This is a big improvement over the last set. One thing that did stand out to me was the tendency for your minor axis lines (the ones added after the cylinder is drawn, in red) tended to very frequently match the desired alignment, which would either suggest that you're extremely good at nailing your minor axis alignment, or that you were perhaps overlooking small discrepancies.
It seems that it was a bit of both. I found that many of your minor axis alignments were quite close to correct, but there were some cases where the actual minor axis of the ellipse was a little off as shown here. Identifying the true minor axis is admittedly pretty hard when just working by eye, but I find that it really comes down to giving yourself more time to observe the results of your work, and to start out from the assumption that the minor axis is probably a little bit off, and to either show yourself that this is incorrect, or identify in what way it's off. This will help you avoid plateauing in terms of how much this exercise helps you grow.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 6.
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.
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