Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, for the most part you've done a good job. You've been fairly fastidious in checking the alignment of your ellipses after the fact, and you've covered a good variety of different rates of foreshortening across your different cylinders.

I did notice a few little cases that stood out to me, so I'll address them each in turn.

  • This one was pretty early on, but 12 was definitely pretty backwards. You had one end that was larger in scale, but wider in degree, and the other end was smaller in scale, but thinner in degree. It's clear that you understood that this was a mistake, as you did it correctly through most of your others, so I'll just leave it at that observation.

  • Cases like number 30 - where both ends were roughly the same overall scale (but the far end gets wider in degree) are actually a common mistake students make, though in your case I think it was just another one-off slip-up. Still, I will take this opportunity to remind you that there are very few cases where you'll have your side edges run parallel on the page like this, with no visible convergence at all. This'll happen only when the cylinder itself is running perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight. As discussed back in Lesson 1, this orientation would put the vanishing point at "infinity". Since we're rotating these forms completely randomly though, we can pretty much assume that none of our cylinders will hit that "perfect" angle, so always work in even a little bit of convergence to your side edges.

Aside from that, I'm quite happy with your results. I didn't see very much inconsistency in terms of the foreshortening either, which is another common mistake students make, where they have the scale shift more dramatically from one end to the other, while having the degree remain consistent, or the opposite. Actually, I can see maybe one example of this in number 93 (where the scale shift is basically nil, and there's a much more dramatic degree shift), but it definitely wasn't a pattern I saw throughout your work.

So, all in all, well done.

Moving onto the next section, let me set your fears at ease. The Y method is both a perfectly effective technique for drawing boxes, and it is also an exercise (in terms of how we use it in the box challenge) specifically because of how each arm of the Y points towards a separate vanishing point.

You are absolutely welcome to use that technique for drawing your boxes here. I didn't simply because drawing the boxes in a particular way wasn't part of the exercise for this challenge. As long as you're thinking about all three sets of 4 parallel lines (which is what the Y method helps train), you can draw a box in whatever order you like.

In that regard, you've done a solid job with your cylinders in boxes here as well. As discussed in the cylinders video, this exercise is basically to help develop students' instincts for how to draw their boxes such that they'd feature two opposite faces that are proportionally square. As you progressed through the set, and tested the line extensions - specifically those coming off the ellipses, and whether they were close or far off from converging towards the box's own vanishing points - you were able to gradually adjust your instincts to be more in line with these square proportions.

Reason being, if an ellipse's line extensions (the minor axis and contact point lines) align towards the box's vanishing points, then that ellipse must represent a circle resting on the face of the box. In turn, if the ellipse represents a circle, then the plane enclosing it must also represent a square in 3D space. The more we repeat this exercise, the more we hone our intuition to this end, and ultimately we end up better equipped to tackle the things we draw in lesson 6. And for what it's worth, while you started off a little weak in this section, you definitely showed a great deal of improvement.

So! All in all, good work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.