I finally made it through this challenge and are back for Draw a Box again after a hard year.
Honestly the cylinders in boxes was very exhausting and challenging and I don't know but I felt like it was even getting worst in the end of my pages not improving. But consistency and discipline kept me through it :)
Here is the second link:
Starting with the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, there are a number of aspects of this exercise that you're doing well. Your ellipses are drawn confidently, and your side edges are straight and well executed. When it comes to the process of checking your ellipses' alignments however, it appears as though you're only checking one ellipse for every cylinder (or at least the majority of them, there are a few where I can see you checking both), instead of applying the same process to both as shown in the instructions.
For the ellipses you did check, you've been fairly fastidious in picking up on small deviations, so that's good to see.
Actually- on closer inspection, I can see that for some of the ellipses you did not check, you placed a little checkmark next to them. This leads me to believe that perhaps you just skipped over the ones you felt were already correct - I would not recommend this. Be sure to actually draw in the perceived minor axis line for each ellipse, regardless of whether you think it's correct or not. Ignore the line that was present from the construction of the cylinder, and just focus on the ellipse to the best of your ability. You can judge how close you were afterwards.
Continuing on, my biggest concern when it comes to this section of the challenge is, however, a notable one. In the assignment section of the challenge, I mention in bold that I'd like to see a fair bit of variety when it comes to the rate of foreshortening across the cylinders for this section, and that is something you appear to have neglected to do. More importantly however, the way in which you actually drew those cylinders - specifically eliminating the foreshortening altogether and drawing those side edges parallel on the page itself (rather than converging towards a concrete vanishing point) - is actually incorrect.
In lesson 1, we talk about how 1 point and 2 point perspective still include 3 vanishing points each, but that one or two of those vanishing points end up "at infinity", resulting in lines that run parallel on the page, converging towards a point that is infinitely far away. This - that is, the relegation of a vanishing point to infinity - happens in very specific circumstances. Specifically, a vanishing point for a set of edges that are parallel in 3D space will only go to infinity when that set of edges runs perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight. Basically, it's necessary for those lines not to slant towards or away from the viewer through the depth of the scene, but rather to always run across their field of view.
This challenge, like the 250 box challenge, involves drawing forms at entirely arbitrary, random orientations in 3D space. The intended randomness of this can just about guarantee that none of them will be so perfectly aligned to the viewer, and thus there should always be concrete rather than infinite vanishing point.
Unfortunately, it does appear that this same issue is largely present for your cylinders in boxes, at least to a point. I am seeing some convergences, but as a whole your intent still seems to be to keep things as parallel as possible, perhaps to eliminate certain difficulties from the exercise.
When it comes to the rest of this exercise, you are largely handling it well. 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.
While this is something that the general parallelity of your lines would undermine, you are still applying the principles well, and I feel that whether the slight convergence was intentional or not, I do feel that it allowed you to get the intended benefit from a fair bit of these attempts, working to improve your instincts in terms of estimating those proportions.
I have just one other correction to offer - right now you do seem to be checking the alignment of both ellipses more consistently than in the first section, although for this exercise, it is important that you extend the minor axis line for both ellipses all the way back so they can be properly compared to the other converging lines.
Now, when it comes to this challenge, I've had a small handful of students attempt to keep things too parallel as you have, neglecting the request for lots of variation in foreshortening, and in some of those cases I have assigned a full redo because I felt that was what was in the student's best interests. I do not feel that is in your best interests however, so instead I am going to assign some more limited revisions to address the issues, before sending you on. You'll find them listed below.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
50 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes - make sure you vary the rates of foreshortening on these, do not attempt to put your vanishing points at infinity, and be sure to check all of your minor axes regardless of how close you feel they are.
10 cylinders in boxes - try to incorporate more foreshortening for these, so you can see how the exercise works with sharper convergences.
Here is the addon to the homework.
It was way harder for me to implement the foreshortening and also trying different types of boxes.
Alrighty, so you've done the first section very well this time. You've got a variety of rates of foreshortening, and that foreshortening is consistent in its different manifestations. That is to say, foreshortening is apparent in the forms through two distinct "shifts" between the ellipses on either end. One is the "scale" shift - where the far end is smaller overall due to the convergence of the side edges. The other is the "degree" shift, where the far end is proportionally wider than the end closer to the viewer.
The important thing is that these two operate in tandem (if one's shifting dramatically, so too should the other), and you're doing a great job of that.
Looking at your cylinders in boxes however, you did do a great job with the foreshortening. I did however notice that you applied the line extensions incorrectly. Looking back at your original submission, I realized that you weren't doing it correctly there either (although the issue was different - you were trying to do the extensions in all three dimensions, whereas here you were only extending in one dimension). It must have slipped my notice, so for that I apologize.
As it stands, you're handling the minor axis line and the line extensions in that direction correctly, but you do need to apply the box's edges for the other two dimensions as well. Furthermore, when extending the ellipses' "contact point lines", it works like this. In your previous set you were drawing a line through the contact points for both ellipses, which is incorrect. Instead, each line corresponds to just one ellipse at a time, passing through two contact points on the same ellipse.
I'm not going to ask for further revisions - I imagine that you should be able to understand how to do this based on this explanation, and it was my mistake that I didn't catch the issue previously. If you are still uncertain however, feel free to ask.
I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 6.
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.
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