250 Cylinder Challenge

1:00 AM, Wednesday August 24th 2022

250 Cylinder Challenge - Google Drive

250 Cylinder Challenge - Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1qma9lwSUZCxTI1v1a8CSQe9MzQZfmViq?usp=sharing

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Any feedback is appreciated.

I uploaded it to google drive instead of imgur, because imgur wasn't working, so I hope it works.

I'm not entirely sure if I checked for errors correctly.

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11:28 PM, Wednesday August 24th 2022

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, one thing that stood out to me quite quickly was just how many of these cylinders appear to be drawn without any convergence - as though their vanishing points were being forced to infinity. It's very fortunate that this was not the case for all of your cylinders for this section, but it's the case for enough that it is definitely something we're going to have to address.

The reason this is a problem is because it is incorrect. We do not actually control where our vanishing points go - not directly, anyway. What we control is the orientation we intend for each form we draw, and it is that orientation in relation to the direction the viewer is looking out onto the scene that determines where the vanishing point will fall. When the vanishing point governing a set of edges goes to infinity, it's specifically because those edges it governs are running perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight - in other words, those edges are not slanting towards or away from the viewer through the depth of the scene.

Given that we're dealing with a bunch of randomly rotated forms here, like in the 250 box challenge, we can say that the chances of achieving such a perfect alignment once in 150 is unlikely, and we may as well just ensure that we're always having our edges here converging towards a concrete vanishing point.

Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes, I can happily confirm that you do appear to have applied the mine extensions here correctly. And that's good, because they're extremely important as far as the exercise goes. 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.

The only thing I would recommend here is that you appear to be extending your minor axis in a fairly limited fashion, similarly to the previous section. This one however would benefit more from having those minor axes - both of them - extended all the way back with the other lines that are meant to converge towards the same vanishing point. The process after all relies on judging how all of these lines within the same set are converging, so if some are left further behind, we are diminished in our ability to judge those convergences.

Now, I am going to ask for some revisions, but as you did not force all the vanishing points to infinity for that first section, the revisions will be significantly less of what they would otherwise have been.

Next Steps:

Please submit an additional 50 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes. Be sure to dramatically vary your foreshortening here, but do not draw anything with a vanishing point forced to infinity.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
1:38 AM, Wednesday August 31st 2022

Hello, thank you for the feedback, it was very helpful. Here are the 50 additional cylinders, I hope they are correct. I uploaded to imgur this time.

https://imgur.com/gallery/FM26NpN

7:08 PM, Wednesday August 31st 2022

Much better. There's two main things I want to call out, but I'll be marking this challenge as complete.

Firstly, be sure to draw through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen. It's easy to end up going around only one and a half times if you stop paying attention to what you're doing with each individual action.

Secondly, one point you'll want to keep in mind is that the two shifts we see in our cylinders, comparing one end to the other - the shift in scale where the far end is smaller overall, and the shift in degree where the far end is wider than the end closer to the viewer - both serve as visual cues to tell the viewer how much of the form's length is visible on the page, and how much of that length exists in the "unseen" dimension of depth.

As they represent the same thing, they have to operate in tandem. As the scale gets smaller, the degree needs to get comparatively wider. Not perfectly in sync, but roughly similar. So for example, in situations like this, the viewer will pick up on the fact that it looks off, even though they won't specifically know why. Be sure to keep that in mind when applying foreshortening in the future.

So! As promised, I'll go ahead and mark this as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
7:28 PM, Wednesday August 31st 2022

Thank you for the feedback, I will be sure to watch out for those points and improve them.

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