250 Cylinder Challenge

8:59 AM, Thursday April 13th 2023

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My green marker is not showing up that well on the scans.

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9:34 PM, Thursday April 13th 2023

Glad to see you were able to get the patreon issue sorted out. Let's jump straight to the critique.

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, by and large your work here is quite well done. You're making your marks with a great deal of confidence, which helps to keep your lines straight and accurate, and your ellipses smooth and evenly shaped. I can see clear signs that you're still consistently applying the ghosting method, which is great to see (many students get a little sloppy with it this far into the course, and need reminders to go through all the steps consistently.

One point I do want to draw to your attention, which is by no means a mistake, as it was not explicitly mentioned in the lesson notes (it's something I want to leave students the opportunity to potentially pick up on themselves, as that kind of thing sticks more strongly in one's memory), is that the two shifts between the ellipses on either end of the cylinder operate in tandem. That is, the shift in overall scale where the farther one becomes smaller than the end closer to the viewer, and the shift in degree where the farther one becomes proportionally wider.

Both of these shifts help to convey foreshortening, or how much of the cylinder's physical length in three dimensions is visible right there on the page, and how much of it exists in the "unseen" dimension of depth. The more dramatic the scale/degree shifts, the greater the foreshortening, the more of the form's length exists beyond what we can directly measure on the page.

This does however mean that both those shifts need to operate together - so when you push the scale shift harder, increasing the convergence of your side edges and making that far end much smaller, be sure to match it by making the degree considerably larger too. This will help the viewer understand that both visual cues are telling them that this cylinder is much longer than we can measure on the page.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, by and large you've done a great job with this exercise. Also, thank you for noting the issue with your green pen - at a glance, it's definitely not super visible, but I can definitely see them if I look harder. Would have been pretty embarrassing if I thought you hadn't extended one out of three sets of lines!

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 checking your line extensions as fastidiously as you have, you've armed yourself with plenty of information on which to base any adjustments to your approach for the next page. Over the course of the set, I can see your instincts regarding these proportions developing, and I feel that you should now be well equipped to move forwards. There is of course always continued room for improvement, so be sure to incorporate these exercises into your warmups, but as it stands you're doing great.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto Lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:13 PM, Wednesday May 3rd 2023

Thank you! On to lesson 6!

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