250 Cylinder Challenge
12:20 AM, Sunday May 1st 2022
Finally done with this challenge. It's marked 1 to 150 for the cylinders, 1 to 100 for the boxes with cylinders. All critiques will be appreciated! Thanks
Hello I'll be handling the critique for your 250 Cylinder Challenge.
-Starting by the cylinders around an arbitrary minor axis I like to see that your ellipses are drawn with confidence, are symmetrical and evenly shaped, the same can be said about the edges of the cylinder. All of this has definitely helped your cylinders look more solid.
-I can see that you have made great efforts to check the minor axis of your ellipses, catching even the slightest misalignments, this will help you to keep progressing and avoid plateauing in the "close enough" zone.
-You have also avoided drawing cylinders with parallel edges, which would be incorrect given that we are working with cylinders that are randomly oriented in space and the possibility of having a cylinder with the vanishing point at infinity is pretty small and it is better to ignore it completely.
You have experimented a good deal with the rates of foreshortening which is a good thing but there is one thing that you may have missed. What I'm referring to is the relationship between the rate of foreshortening and the degree shift of the ellipses, these two things can't behave independently of each other, which means that if we have a cylinder the with a dramatic rate of foreshortening it should be accompanied by a dramatic change in the degree of the ellipses, with the ellipse furthest away being wider than the ellipse at the front.
This is due to the fact that both things give us information about the orientation of our cylinder in 3D space, and they cannot contradict each other. Some examples where you made this mistake should be cylinders (75,95, and 101). It seems that as you progressed you became more aware of this, but you need to keep working a little bit more on this
Moving on to the cylinders inside boxes, you are doing a great job. This diagram exercise is all about helping the student to develop a sense for how to build a box which features two opposite sides that are proportionally a square in 3D space, regardless of how it is oriented in 3D space, we don't do this by memorizing every possible rotation, instead we do this by way if the line extension. During the box challenge we uses the line extensions to get a better feel for how to have more consistent and accurate convergences, here we are adding 3 more lines, 2 for the contacts points and one for the minor axis of each ellipse. This will give us information as to how close we were to having our ellipse representing a circle and in turn how far off we were from having our plane representing a square. I did notice that you got better and better at doing this, but there is one important thing I have to call out.
That is that some of your boxes had a parallel sets of lines, we know from the box challenge that this is a mistake, this can be seen in cylinders in boxes (35, 38 and 41). It is better that all of your sets of lines converge instead of having them being completely parallel.
-Another important thing to add is that your first priority should be to align the ellipse to the minor axis, instead of worrying too much about having the ellipse touch the contact points.
Lastly, make sure to extend your lines ( especially the minor axis) a good deal, in order to have a clearer view of your mistakes. This will make easier to adjust your strategy and keep improving.
Okayy, there are a few things you have to keep working on,so I'll leave you some additional homework, good luck!!
Next Steps:
-20 cylinders around an arbitrary minor axis
-10 cylinders inside a box
Hi, thanks for your critique! Sorry for the delay. I did get the relationship between foreshortening and degree change mixed up, for some reason I thought that we should experiment trying every combination between the two, but I think it may've been length and foreshortening what I was supposed to combine.
As for the boxes, I made them in 1, 2 and 3 point perspective, that's why some lines didn't converge. In the redo, I made them with all lines converging. It's weird, because the 2 point perspective makes it really easy to fit the ellipses in, and in some examples Uncomfortable used them, that's why I relied in them as well.
Anyway, here's the extra work: https://imgur.com/a/f0X0tHJ I'll be waiting for your response!
Okayyy, starting with the cylinders around arbitrary minor axis I can see that you have tried to address the issues that I raised in the critique, and generally you are moving in the right direction, however I can still see a few instances where the bottom and top ellipses barely change degrees, although it seems that you corrected this as you went along, whether consciously or unconsciously, and I assume that this cylinders just misshapen.
I do have one suggestion that may help you to get more out of this exercise, I can see that most of your cylinders are more or less in a sideway view, you can try to draw cylinders that are close to a front view, in these cases the top and bottom ellipses would approach a full circle as shown here
This will give your cylinders a sense of depth which is very useful, and keep in mind that you get the most out of these exercises by experimenting a good deal with all sorts of orientations.
-Moving on to the cylinders in boxes, these are turning out well, and I like to see that you are not too overly concerned with having the ellipse touching the four sides of the plane, this mistakes do not take away from the things we learn by completing the challenge all the way to the ends. I do see some boxes where you are approaching to some good square proportions, this will serve you well for lesson 6, so I’ll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Lesson 6
I struggle a bit balancing the change of degree and length, but I'm conscious of it. I'll keep the suggestions in mind for my warmups and the next lessons. Thanks!
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
On the flipside, they tend to be on the cheaper side of things, so if you're just getting started (beginners tend to have poor pressure control), you're probably going to destroy a few pens - going cheaper in that case is not a bad idea.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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