250 Cylinder Challenge

4:51 PM, Friday August 20th 2021

250 CYLINDERS (DAB) - Google Photos

250 CYLINDERS (DAB) - Google Photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/kmbfYQF8PYA9WjzBA

I'm looking forward to reading your critique!

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9:33 PM, Friday August 20th 2021

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axis, here you're largely doing a pretty good job. You're executing your ellipses with confidence, achieving even shapes, and I can see that you're doing a good job of checking your alignments fastidiously after the fact, to see where they can be improved upon your next page. I'm also pleased to see that you've played with a variety of orientations and rates of foreshortening throughout this set.

One thing I do want to highlight is that while from what I can see, you are demonstrating a loose, perhaps somewhat instinctual understanding of the relationship between the two manifestations of foreshortening (that is, the shift in the scale from one end to the other, and the shift in the degree from one end to the other), it still seems a little tenuous and could be pushed further - so I figured I would take a moment to explain this mechanic so you definitely understand it on a more conscious level.

Basically, foreshortening is how the viewer is able to better understand how much of the cylinder's length actually exists in the hidden dimension of depth. If the cylinder runs perfectly perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight (not slanting towards or away from them at all, just running across the page), then the cylinder's length is clear to see. As it starts to slant into the dimension of depth however, the viewer relies on foreshortening to be able to tell just how much longer that form might actually be.

This foreshortening manifests in both the fact that the far end is smaller than the end closer to the viewer in its overall scale, as well as in the change in its degree (where the far end is wider than the end closer to the viewer). What's important to keep in mind here is that both of these "shifts" operate in tandem - as the far end gets smaller in overall scale, it should also get wider to match.

There were some examples, like number 115, where the degree seemed to stay pretty similar, but the size changed more dramatically - though examples like this weren't super common in your work, so it's not too much to worry about, just something to keep in mind.

So, all in all, this first section has been done quite well. From what I can see, however, it doesn't appear that you actually went through all of the instructions for the second half of this challenge, and as a result you ended up missing some pretty important aspects of this exercise.

This exercise is all about helping students develop their instinctual understanding of how to draw boxes that feature two opposite ends which are proportionally square, regardless of how they're oriented in space. We do this similarly to how we use the line extensions to develop students' ability to draw sets of lines that converge consistently, by applying them after each page to analyze how far they were off, so they can use that information to try to make the next page more successful.

As explained both in the notes and in the video for this challenge, here we add three additional lines for each ellipse: the minor axis and the two contact point lines. This appears to be what you missed out on. Extending these and checking their convergences against the box's own implied vanishing points allows us to see how far off we are from the ellipses representing circles in 3D space - and therefore how far off the planes that enclose them are from representing squares in 3D space. By repeating this over the full 100 cylinders in boxes, we're able to gradually improve our instinctual grasp of proportion.

Since you didn't do that, I am going to have to ask you to review the video/notes and complete another 50 cylinders in boxes. I won't ask for the full 100 because your work is otherwise well done, but it is important that you apply this exercise correctly here before moving onto lesson 6.

Next Steps:

Please submit an additional 50 cylinders in boxes.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
6:40 AM, Monday August 23rd 2021

Thanks a lot for the critique! I made 50 more cylinders in boxes after re-watching the video. I have no idea why I forgot to check the lines created by both contact point of the cylinder. I hope it's better now!

https://photos.app.goo.gl/zriApkZ8XzLp8CY1A

11:50 PM, Monday August 23rd 2021

These are definitely much more in line with the exercise. One small adjustment - when checking the true minor axes of your ellipses, make sure you're extending them all the way back like the other lines, as we want to test how close they are to converging towards the box's vanishing point for that dimension.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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