Thanks in advance. This took longer than expected, both due to the exercise being harder than I thought and my real life. Any tips to improve would be greatly appreciated.
Side note but I've also started the online figure drawing course at proko.com since it seems like a natural point to start after Lesson 5 and the fundamentals I learned at drawabox was immensely helpful. Once again thanks for the lessons so far.
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, your work here is quite well done. While your ellipses are a touch wobbly, it's only very slight - something that likely comes from drawing more from your elbow than your shoulder, or perhaps just slight hesitation. Be sure to engage your whole arm, and be sure to apply the ghosting method when drawing your ellipses, focusing on as confident an execution as you can manage. It's the fear of making mistakes that causes us to hesitate, and so we have to train our brains to accept the inevitability of a mistake from the moment the pen touches the page, so we can push through.
Generally you do a great job of executing your individual lines with confidence, yielding smooth, consistent strokes, and I can clearly see your use of the ghosting method there. Lastly, you've done well to catch even fairly minor discrepancies in the alignment of your ellipses. This is important, as when we get into the territory of "close enough", it's easy to plateau and slow our improvement, if we're not careful to catch even minor hiccups.
There's just one thing I want to call out. On occasion - not often, though not infrequently - we see cylinders like this where your side edges are effectively parallel on the page. Since it doesn't come up super often, I'm not too worried about it, but I figured I would explain why this is actually incorrect.
We get side edges that are parallel on the page like this when the vanishing point that governs them is at "infinity" (in the manner discussed in Lesson 1) - but as the person drawing the form, we cannot actually control where the vanishing points go. We control the orientation of our intended form, which determines where the vanishing points are, but we do not control them directly.
The only situation in which a set of lines would converge to an infinite vanishing point is if they run perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight - basically not slanting towards or away from the viewer through the depth of the scene. Given the cylinders in question, it's clear that this specific orientation was not your intent, but we can take that one step further and say that since, like the box challenge, we're drawing cylinders here that are randomly rotated in space, the likelihood of achieving such a perfect alignment would be slim to none. So, we can pretty much assume that none of our cylinders in the limited sample size of 150 would reasonably behave in this manner, and so it's best to always include some convergence to those side edges, even if only very slight.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, you've done quite well here. 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.
In applying those line extensions consistently and correctly, you've given yourself the analysis and information required to identify where your approach can be adjusted from page to page, steadily developing your sense of those proportions as you progressed, and ultimately settling with a pretty good grasp of how to draw those end planes, regardless of how the given box itself is oriented in space. This should help you considerably as you move into the next lesson.
I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 6.
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.
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