250 Cylinder Challenge

6:23 PM, Tuesday June 9th 2020

250 Cylinder Challenge - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/gallery/d62jzl3

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Hey again,

250 cylinder challenge above.

Let me know if anything needs changed or redone.

best,

haydn

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11:54 PM, Tuesday June 9th 2020

So! Starting with the first section - the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes - you've done a pretty good job. You've been fastidious and patient in checking the alignment of your ellipses and marking out even the smallest of deviations, which definitely goes a long way to helping you improve and generally get more consistent results. One thing I did notice however has to do with the foreshortening on your cylinders.

It's normal to understand that foreshortening relates to the rate at which the scale of either end shifts smaller as we move from the end closer to the viewer to the end that's farther away. If this shift is more dramatic, it tells the viewer that the cylinder is longer. If the shift is more shallow, it tells the viewer that the cylinder is shorter.

This scale shift is not the only aspect of foreshortening, however. The shift in degree (where the far end is proportionally wider than the near end) is also an element of foreshortening. If the degree shift is more dramatic, and that far end gets much wider, this tells us that the object is longer, whereas if it's roughly the same width (just slightly wider), then it's going to be a shorter cylinder.

Because we have two separate properties to our foreshortening, we can end up with contradictions. Basically situations like 150, where the degree is fairly close but the scale shift is more dramatic tell us that the cylinder is both longer and shorter, depending on which aspect you look at.

So! Long story short - keep this in mind, so you can maintain consistency between these properties. It'll help you keep your cylinders, and objects in general, from feeling off.

Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, it's worth mentioning exactly what this exercise is about. While it helps a great deal in improving one's ability to construct specific cylinders that occupy a particular position and orientation in space, it's actually more about the boxes themselves. Just like how when doing the box challenge we draw extension lines so we can identify where our mistakes are, gradually working to reduce those mistakes and get better at intuitively constructing boxes that are more rectilinear, with lines converging more consistently to 3 set vanishing points, what we're doing here helps us to get better at drawing boxes with two opposing faces that are proportionally square.

The cylinder gives us additional lines whose alignments we can check against the vanishing points - if they fall in line, then this tells us that the ellipses on either end represent circles in 3D space - and therefore the planes that contain them represent squares in 3D space as well. Being able to eyeball these proportions naturally and intuitively is a useful part of developing one's general spatial awareness.

Looking over your set, it seems like you've largely only applied the original line extensions of the boxes themselves, and skipped extending your cylinder's minor axis and its contact points, which are explained here in the instructions for this challenge.

You attempted to do this a few times closer to the beginning of the set, but seem to have outright forgotten after the first page or two. This definitely impeded your progress with this challenge - while you definitely got better at constructing the cylinders themselves, this additional aspect of the challenge was neglected.

As such, before I mark this challenge as complete, I'm going to ask for you to draw an additional 30 cylinders in boxes, applying the line extensions as demonstrated in the notes.

Next Steps:

Please do 30 additional cylinders in boxes. Before you do, make sure you read through the instructions and watch the video, as they go over how to apply the line extensions correctly.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
5:39 PM, Thursday July 30th 2020

Hello!

I hope you and your loved ones are safe and well!

Sorry it's been a minute. I'm coming up on my two year learning-how-to-draw-iversary and thought it's about time I try to draw people so i've been back and forth between that and this. Can't tell you how much easier drawing from construction makes anatomical work.

remedial homework below:

https://imgur.com/gallery/UxY9mFy

thanks in advance!

6:34 PM, Thursday July 30th 2020

This is definitely looking a lot better! You're being much more conscientious in your use of the line extensions, and that's a big move in the right direction. I am noticing that you still have a tendency in some areas to allow your lines to diverge - for example, #29's blue lines. I suspect this may be because you're purposely trying to make that set of lines entirely parallel (ie: having no vanishing point at all, as though you were working in 2 point or 1 point perspective).

Remember that even in those situations, where you have 1 and 2 point perspective, as discussed back in lesson 1, vanishing points still exist - they're just so far away that they're at "infinity". We only end up with these situations when the object is oriented in a very specific way, so it's not a matter of choosing to eliminate a vanishing point at a whim.

Long story short, always think about there being a vanishing point for every set of parallel lines, especially in things like the box and cylinder challenges. That vanishing point may be very far away, but it's important that you demonstrate awareness of it through the behaviour of your lines. That way you will avoid situations where your lines diverge, which is itself contradicting the rules of perspective.

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

Next Steps:

Go ahead and move onto lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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