250 Cylinder Challenge

6:54 PM, Sunday July 28th 2024

250 cylinder challenge Draw-a-Box - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/iJEKz97

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Have done the 250 cylinder challenge... not sure that I got it completely but still saw some improvement.

My main problem was, and might be still the mental barrier of dropping THE ellipse into the plane, and touch it at 4 points of tangency which are in the middle of the plane's sides in perspective, and the thing clicked to me almost on the last page that they were not perfect squares and that's why I had such a block and collision of those two aspects (Minor axis alignment and tangency points)

Also the issue about the invalid url when trying to post returned and I changed the browser and it solved the problem...

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3:47 PM, Tuesday July 30th 2024

Jumping right in with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, your work here is honestly very well done - although I will say that I was at first very concerned that you were running into a critical issue. Fortunately upon closer inspection I can say with some confidence that this is not the case.

The issue is basically the fact that very many of your cylinders with very shallow foreshortening were very close to having side edges running parallel on the page (in other words, converging to an infinite vanishing point despite the orientation of the cylinder not being perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight). At a glance, it looked like you may have been intentionally forcing them to infinity, but it didn't take too much to realize that you were actually consistently in each case avoiding keeping them perfectly parallel. Frankly, I don't think I've seen anyone thread the needle that closely and consistently before, and it definitely speaks to an impressive level of control. While I was already fairly confident that you were actually doing a very good job at playing a dangerous game, the comment next to 115 (one of the few cases where you lost the dangerous game and ended up with side edges that were parallel on the page) where you wrote "lines parallel" made it clear that this was not your intent.

As to the rest, very solid work. Your linework is confident and controlled, your ellipses are smooth and evenly shaped, and you're demonstrating a wide variety of rates of foreshortening across the set. And of course, you're also quite fastidious in checking the alignment of your ellipses, and are taking care to catch even the less obvious mistakes, where you are closest to being correct. This will help you avoid plateauing in your development of this area of skill.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, you hit the nail on the head with your comment about the faces of your boxes not being perfect squares. 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.

Just as with the first section, you've similarly done a fantastic job with this one. I can see that you appear to be following the steps of the instructions well (although I would encourage you to more consistently extend the ellipses' lines as far back as the boxes' so as to be able to compare them and their convergences as easily as possible at a glance). I can also see that your estimation of those square proportions is coming along quite well, so you should be well equipped to jump right into the next lesson

So, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep up the great work.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto Lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:03 PM, Tuesday July 30th 2024

Thank you very much for your feedback on the cylinders, I would continue to work on them during the warm-ups and will try to be better! Thank you for the encouraging words!

And if you don't mind I have a quick question about the ellipses following up in Lesson 6,7 and the wheels/chests challenges... I don't have access to any elliptical template of decent size, I have a few, but they are more the size of manga speech bubbles if you understand...

So I'm stuck with free-handing those in my future drawings for Draw-a-Box, the question is, am I allowed to use special tricks (like a lot of subdivision...like in 16 squares) to identify more points the ellipse will pass through and won't additional subdivision or necessary for constructing an accurate ellipse line extension hinder the process with clutter for the one giving the critique... or is it better to maybe use pencil (only for that) and mark points with ink, or is it still better to do all in ink and give the person looking at the critique more info to base the critique itself?

Sorry for that cluttered essay :( and once again thank you very much for all your hard-work, positivity and encouragement, your help to artistic community is immense and invaluable!

6:09 PM, Tuesday July 30th 2024

Most students don't end up getting more than a basic master ellipse template (which while much cheaper basically gives you a range of degrees with a more limited range of sizes - I talk about this in the video for Lesson 0 Page 4), so the majority of students are in the same boat. There are two main areas where ellipse guides come in very handy, and the master ellipse template is sufficient for those - drawing the ellipses for the 25 wheel challenge (which results in small wheels but it's still much better than freehanding them in that exercise), and performing the "constructing to scale" technique in Lesson 7 which allows us to create 3D grids to specific proportions.

Outside of that, yeah you'll end up freehanding your ellipses but they're not cases where that level of precision is as necessary, so you'll likely be fine. If you want to go crazy on subdivision, you can, as long as it doesn't ultimately result in anything less than a confidently executed ellipse in the end (in the sense that laying out all those points can cause you to hyperfixate on accuracy and end up with a stiff, wobbly ellipse, which per our markmaking principles is not preferred over a confident, smooth, but inaccurate one.

And no, you certainly should not be using a pencil to increase your accuracy. At the end of the day, remember that the end result is not what matters here. Each drawing is an exercise that puts you through a process, and it's the process that actually rewires your brain and develops your spatial reasoning skills. The end results are just a biproduct of that, but focusing too much on taking steps with improving the end result as the goal will cause you to stray from the process itself.

10:15 AM, Sunday August 4th 2024

Thank you so much for your reply on my questions!

I will try to think something about getting at least master ellipse template, cause mine is really not only small, but really doesn't have good degree shifts between ellipses, and has 2-3 ellipses with different degrees and just changes sizes...

So, thank you very much once again!

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