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5:01 PM, Monday June 15th 2020

Overall I can see some progress over the course of the two sections of this challenge, although I do get the feeling that while you're clearly being quite fastidious in applying your corrections/line extensions throughout your work, you have a tendency to make the same mistakes. This suggests to me that you're not necessarily thinking that much about what these line extensions tell you, so you can actively work to reduce them on your next page. Ultimately taking stock of your mistakes - that is, identifying and analyzing them - is all so we can work consciously to take the patterns we unearth and adjust them as we move forwards.

There are a few problems I'm seeing repeated:

  • Some misalignment on your ellipses isn't that abnormal, as it can be quite tricky to really get within a reasonable margin of error - but you do have a number that deviate quite a bit more from the minor axis, especially the farther end of the cylinder rather than the closer end.

  • You appear to apply very limited foreshortening to your cylinders - in most cases, you seem to try and eliminate all foreshortening altogether, which actually results in a lot of cylinders with far ends that are larger than the closer end. Make sure you make a concerted effort to vary the rate of foreshortening on your cylinders - don't just try to draw ones of a single kind.

  • Make sure you're applying the ghosting method consistently to all of your linework. A lot of your linework is pretty decent, but I'm seeing a wavering/wobbling in quite a few of them. Even if it's very, very slight, it does suggest that you're hesitating when executing your mark, which in turn tells me that you're not applying the ghosting method correctly. The ghosting method, as explained here to another student, essentially exists to force students to execute their marks with confidence, and without any hesitation or fear.

  • For your cylinders in boxes, I'm noticing that you neglect to extend the side edges of your cylinder.

  • The biggest thing to focus on with the cylinders in boxes is that a proper cylinder will have ends that are circular in 3D space. This means that the plane that encloses those ends will itself be a square in 3D space. While we don't have easy ways to just eyeball something that represents a square in 3D space, this exercise as a whole trains us to get better at drawing things that are proportionally square by intuition. This is in the same manner as applying line extensions helps us keep the edges of our boxes converging properly towards their vanishing points. When we see that our alignments are off, we adjust what we're trying to draw to bring those alignments together. It appears to me that here while you did apply the line extensions here and all your error checking, you didn't seem to make any conscious effort to try and reduce the mistakes you were bringing to light.

All in all, I feel your work here - while somewhat in the right direction - could have definitely received a more concerted focus on investing as much time as is needed into each individual mark you put down, and on working to improve on the mistakes you were identifying. I can't help but also notice that you're submitting exactly 14 days after your previous submission - another sign that suggests that maybe you were more focused on completing the challenge rather than learning as much as you could have from it.

I'm going to assign some additional cylinders from both sections. I hope you'll take more time in completing these, and focus on doing them to the best of your ability.

Next Steps:

I'd like you to submit the following:

  • 25 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes

  • 25 cylinders in boxes

Make sure you're appyling the ghosting method to every single mark you draw, including both all ellipses and all straight lines.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
2:48 AM, Friday June 19th 2020

I almost throw the last page of section two, even though I’ve only did this page in that day but I did it very badly, my morale was into the ground, so I’m totally ok if you want me to do It again or anything needed obviously.

And yeah I’m very thankful for your critiques and efforts as always, your previous critique was disciplinary and on point :), hope you can see some improvements in my submission.

And sorry for the images quality.

Here is the link:

https://imgur.com/a/QfN7Qmc

7:47 PM, Friday June 19th 2020

These are definitely looking much, much better. You're clearly being a lot more mindful here of what exactly you're trying to do with each mark, and in identifying your mistakes, and the jump in quality of your results is significant over your last set.

There's just one small thing I want to draw your attention to. If you look at cylinder 12, or cylinder 16, you'll see that from the near end to the far end, there's an obvious shift in the scale of the given ellipse. This is a part of foreshortening, basically telling the viewer that the far end is quite far away from the near end - that the cylinder itself is pretty long. So this shift in scale is an element of foreshortening, and helps communicate the length of the object to the viewer.

Another component of foreshortening however is the shift in degree from one end to the other. When the degree of the far end is roughly the same as the close end (maybe a little wider), it tells us that there isn't too much distance between them. When the degree of the far end is considerably wider than the near end, then it tells us that there is a fair bit of distance between them, and that the cylinder is longer.

Looking at these two examples - cylinders 12 and 16 - we see a clear scale shift that says the cylinder is long, but when we look at the shift in degree, it's pretty minimal - telling us that the cylinder is shorter. These two points contradict one another, which makes the cylinder look a little bit off.

Long story short, make sure that you try and keep these two aspects of foreshortening consistent, so they both either say that the cylinder is long, or they both say that the cylinder is short.

So! With that, 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.
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