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2:39 AM, Wednesday August 25th 2021

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, I can see that you're doing a good job of checking the true alignment of your various ellipses, doing so consistently and fastidiously throughout the set. Your linework is coming along fairly well too - there were a few places where you went back over your lines unnecessarily, but this was pretty rare. Aside from that your lines were quite confident, and you clearly went through proper preparation prior to executing your ellipses.

One thing that did stand out was that across a fair number of these, you were pretty light on the shift in degree from one ellipse to the other. Right up to maybe around the 75 mark, you didn't really seem to increase the width of the ellipse on the far end of the form at all. Gradually after this point, you started to push this a little farther, and after about 100 you were doing it more consistently. I'm glad that you improved on this front on your own.

It is a little unfortunate though that you didn't really include that many cylinders with especially dramatic foreshortening to them, with most of these instead being quite shallow. I actually did request in the assignment that you include a lot of variety in the rates of foreshortening.

The reason I wanted to see this is that it helps emphasize cases where students don't necessarily understand the relationship between the two main manifestations of foreshortening in their cylinders. These manifestations include the shift in scale from one end to the other (closer end is bigger, farther end is smaller), and the shift in degree from one end to the other (closer end is narrower, farther end is wider). Both of these work together to help communicate just how much the form is tilted towards or away from the viewer through the depth of the scene.

The issue comes about when students apply these two shifts independently of one another - for example, cases like 147 where you featured a more dramatic shift in degree, but little to no shift in scale. Or, alternatively, if one had a more dramatic shift in scale with strong convergence for those side edges, but little to no shift in degree. These two 'shifts' have to work in tandem, in order to maintain a consistent message to the viewer.

Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, you may have found this to be quite challenging, but I feel you did a pretty good job with it. I'm sorry to hear about the coffee spill though - while the pages no doubt survived, I hope your laptop did too.

The key point about this exercise is that it's all about developing students' instinctual understanding of how to construct boxes that specifically feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square. We do this in the same way the box challenge trains students' instincts in regards to having sets of lines converge consistently - using the line extensions. By add the three lines from each ellipse (minor axis + two contact point lines) to the mix, we can identify how close or how far we are from having those ellipses represent circles in 3D space (based on whether the lines converge towards the box's vanishing points), and therefore how far we are from having the plane that encloses them represent a square in 3D space.

There's only one shortcoming in your approach here - right now you aren't extending the minor axis lines enough, instead limiting them to just identifying that true alignment like you did in the first section of the challenge, but not actually testing them against the box's vanishing points.

All the same, I can see that you've made good progress here, so just keep that in mind and extend the minor axis lines further for this exercise in the future.

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

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:57 AM, Wednesday August 25th 2021

Thanks a lot!

I was aware of the foreshorting and shift correlation the whole time, but I think I tried to be more subtle about it in the beginning. I'm still not sure how much of degree shift should I apply, though. I'll try focus on it when doing exercise. Thanks for pointing that out.

Can't wait to start Lesson 6. Looks way more fun than this one.

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Ellipse Master Template

Ellipse Master Template

This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.

I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.

No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.

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