12:12 AM, Friday July 2nd 2021
Hi Sylx! Im gonna go over your submission.
So, starting out by your normal cylinders, there is a few things I want to touch on for you to take into account moving forward:
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First, remember to always draw big, I dont know if someone mentioned this on a critique at one point, but by drawing so small like you are doing on the first 150 cylinders, you are not giving yourself enough space to use your full arm for confidently executing your lines and ellipsis. Also, remember that it is easier for your brain to engage on spatial reasoning if the drawing is bigger.
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Secondly, I can see that in a lot of your ellipses you are not going through them just twice, its a minor thing really, but remember that we just go two times over our ellipses so it doesnt get messy. Also, although it is a small thing, in something like DaB there is a lot of little things that if you dont try to follow them will add up and diminish your work. Its not really the end of the world, but keep and eye on it!
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On thing that really called my attention is that a considerable amount of your first 150 cylinders are not really converging, maybe you were going for a more subtle foreshortening, but remember that except that the cylinder is running completely parallel to the picture plane, it always has some convergence.
Now, there is something that I want to talk about and is a pretty common mistake at this stage about the convergence of cylinders.
Convergence in our cylinders (and other forms of course) manifest in two ways, or "shifts"- The first one being the shift between the scale from one end of the cylinder to the other, where the further end is going to be smaller overall. The other shift is in the change on the degree of the further ellipse in relation with the closer one, where the further one will be overall wider. Now, this two shifts work together on telling us how a cylinder is converging and both of them should be taken into account, for example in this cylinder, on the scale difference between ellipses you are telling me that this cylinder is very foreshortened, though when I look at the degree of the further ellipse Im seeing a very subtle shift in relation with the degree of the closer one, and this contradicts what you are telling me with the shift on scale.
What we try to do is to make so both shift communicate the same convergence and doing so, selling a more solid and better illusion of depth.
Moving on to your cylinders in boxes, it is explained on the video lesson that the real protagonists of this challenge are the boxes- The idea here was to practice creating boxes that have at least to sides which are proportionally square, by adding the two ellipses on those sides, we are not really constructing a cylinder, we are testing how well constructed that box is built and how "capable" is of creating a cylinder.
This said, I can see that in some of your boxes you are sometimes having trouble with the back corner, definetly give this construction method a go whenever you are doing warm ups if you havent. On the same topic, remember that whenever you are extending a new line on a box you have to take into account how that new line will relate with the other lines of the set of parallels- If you just focus on extending the new line in relationship with just one of the set, it may work good with that one, but it will look off in comparison with the whole set. I know it sounds a little confusing, so here is a diagram that might help you understand it. Although I think you are already doing this, I wanted to put into words in case you are doing it unconsciously and hasnt clicked yet!
So, you did a very solid job on this challenge, I hope all this helps you and Im going to go ahead and mark it as completed! Keep up the good work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move on to lesson 6.