To start, I can see that you're putting a good bit of effort into drawing your ellipses confidently, to keep them evenly shaped. There is still room for growth here, to help tighten them up, but they're moving in the right direction. I can also see that you're fairly fastidious in checking the alignment of your ellipses by marking out the 'true' minor axes and making adjustments to your approach as you move forwards.

While this is all good, there is one key issue that is of particular concern here. Foreshortening in the forms we draw manifests in two distinct, but related ways. There's the shift in degree/width, where the far end gets wider than the end closer to the viewer. This is present throughout your cylinders, so you've got that one down. The other is the shift in scale, where the far end becomes smaller overall than the end closer to the viewer, generally caused by the convergence of the side edges as they head off towards their shared vanishing point.

Foreshortening itself is basically the way we are able to convey to the viewer just how much of the form's length exists in the depth of the scene, which cannot directly be observed as a distance or length on the flat, two dimensional page. It tells us to what extent our cylinders here actually slant towards or away from the viewer, and the only situation where we would encounter forms with no foreshortening and no shift in scale from one end to the other is when the cylinder itself runs perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight, not slanting towards or away from them. This places that vanishing point "at infinity" as discussed back in Lesson 1.

Unfortunately, you have incorporated no shift in scale whatsoever throughout your cylinders here. This causes two problems:

• Firstly, it creates a contradiction where the degree shift suggests a that there's some foreshortening, and the scale shift suggests that there's none. Both cannot be true.

• And secondly, despite the fact that these cylinders are meant to be rotated randomly (and from the way you've drawn them, you've certainly intended for that to be the case), by keeping those side edges parallel on the page and putting that vanishing point at infinity, you're artificially telling the viewer that each cylinder runs perpendicular to their angle of sight, aligning to a very specific requirement. After all, we cannot simply decide that our vanishing point will be at infinity - where the vanishing point sits is relative to how the form itself (and therefore the set of parallel lines) is oriented in space.

It's also worth mentioning that in the assignment section of the instructions, I asked students to include a variety of rates of foreshortening across the set (in bold).

Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is somewhat better. Those ellipses are still rather loose, so that can be improved with continued practice as well as with purposeful use of the ghosting method and by being sure to engage your whole arm while executing these marks. Still, I can see much clearer convergences in your lines, with concrete vanishing points for each dimension.

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.

Throughout this section of the challenge, you've been quite patient and mindful of applying those line extensions, so your work is coming along well in this regard. I have just one thing I wanted to call out - I may be wrong (it can sometimes be hard to tell with all the lines), but it looks to me like when drawing the line extension for the minor axis, you're simply drawing the line that passes through the center of each plane. For this, make sure that you're drawing two distinct lines - one for the minor axis of each ellipse.

Now, due to the lack of scale shift/foreshortening on the first section, I am going to assign revisions for that exercise to ensure that you're employing it correctly, and that you understood what I explained above. You'll find them listed below.