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11:04 PM, Saturday January 21st 2023
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, one thing that stood out quite a bit is the fact that you appear to have forgotten the point about drawing through all of your freehanded ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, as stated back in Lesson 1. This is of course something that also should have been drilled as part of your warmups, specifically when tackling the Lesson 1 ellipses exercises. This is very important, as it helps us achieve smoother, more evenly shaped ellipses, which does appear to be something you are struggling with here.
While this did impact the resulting cylinders across the board, if we look past that, for the most part you've handled this part of the challenge correctly. I have only two other points to draw to your attention:
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For cases like 133 and 134, you appear to have your side edges running basically parallel to one another on the page. This challenge has us rotating cylinders freely and randomly in space (as we did for the box challenge), and unfortunately a vanishing point would only go to infinity (resulting in lines parallel on the page) if the set of edges they represent are running perfectly perpendicular to the angle at which the viewer is looking out into the world. In other words, we only draw them with parallel lines on the page if the edges themselves aren't slanting towards or away from the viewer through the depth of the scene, but rather running straight across their field of view. Given the random rotations we use in this challenge, this perfect of an alignment is not something that would happen often, if at all, and so forcing those vanishing points to infinity would be incorrect. You do fortunately have many cylinders that don't have parallel side edges like that, although I would have liked to see you follow the point here in the assignment section which, in bold, stated to vary the rate of foreshortening across the set.
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The other point I wanted to draw to your attention is something you were not told in advance, so it's not a problem that you didn't notice it. Rather, it's something I wanted to leave students the room to pick up on themselves, and in the case that they didn't, I would be able to explain it in my critique. Basically, it's that foreshortening - that is, the visual cue that tells the viewer how much or how little of the form's length exists in the "unseen" dimension of depth (allowing us to judge whether what we see on the page is all there is, or if there's more that can't be conveyed in the two dimensions of the page) - manifests in two ways. One is the shift in scale from one end to the other, which we inevitably get by having the side edges of our cylinders converge, and the other is the shift in degree where the farther end gets wider. The thing is, because they both represent the same thing - how much foreshortening is being applied - they also must operate in tandem. The more that far end gets smaller, the wider it should also become as a result.
Now, I definitely feel you could have done a good deal better with this had you been mindful of drawing through your ellipses, of the importance of varying your rates of foreshortening in this challenge, and so on. These are things that, if full care had been taken in adhering to the warmups, and in being sure of the assignment, could have been avoided. That said, I will not be holding you back over them, but will instead leave you to address them on your own going forward.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is considerably better. 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 applying the line extension methods correctly and consistently throughout the set, you were able to identify where each page's approach could be adjusted to yield better results, and then work on applying those changes into the next page. Over time, this helped improve your judgment and instincts in regards to what proportions to use in order to maintain ends that are, in three dimensions, fairly close to square. While there is certainly more room to grow and improve on this front, I think your ability to estimate those proportions as it stands now should help you as you move into the next lesson.
So, I will go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Just be sure to review Lesson 0 so as to refresh your memory on what a student must do as they go through this course (warmups included), and alter your approach to the course accordingly.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 6.
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