250 Cylinder Challenge

3:41 AM, Wednesday July 8th 2020

250 cylinder challenge - Album on Imgur

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Post with 17 views. 250 cylinder challenge

hello it took a while but finished the 250 cylinder challenge! honestly this was much more difficult than the 250 box challenge i didnt know what i was doing most of the time and it was confusing with so many lines and just how to correct things correctly. thanks so much for the critique.

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9:06 PM, Wednesday July 8th 2020

Let's get started with the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes - that is, the first section of the lesson. Overall I think you did a pretty good job of both constructing these cylinders and striving to align those ellipses to the best of your ability, as well as analyzing them afterwards to identify the correct minor axes. That said, there were some places where you may have gotten tired or distracted, or perhaps just weren't in a great state of mind, where your error checking wasn't quite correct. This was more of an issue towards the end of the set (which lines up with you getting tired and bored of the exercise, so that's understandable). I've marked out on one of your pages here examples were all but two of your "correct" minor axes were pretty far off.

Now, like I said at the beginning, most of your pages were fine, especially those through the first hundred or so. It's really just a matter of being a bit more patient with yourself, and maintaining the same conscientiousness throughout the entirety of the exercise, even if you're being asked to complete a really tedious task.

One thing I am really pleased to see is that for the most part, you've shown a strong intuitive sense for the relationship between the closer and farther end ellipses. While it's normal for students to understand that perspective results in the far end being smaller in scale than the closer end, and while the lesson clearly states that the farther end should have a wider degree than the closer end, it's often that students don't quite catch on to the relationship between these two kinds of shifts.

You've shown here that while you may or may not be consciously aware of it, that you knew to keep the shift in degree relatively minimal when the shift in scale was also minor, or to make it more significant when the shift in scale was greater. To put it simply: you never ended up with the ends being roughly the same size, but one being way wider, or the ends being roughly the same degree, but the far end being way smaller. Very nicely done.

Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, again I think you've largely done a pretty great job. The thing about this exercise is that it's actually a lot more about the boxes themselves rather than the cylinders. In the box challenge, we apply line extensions to help push students towards becoming more intuitively aware of how their lines converge towards their shared vanishing points, and by identifying mistakes and working to bring them more in line, they develop this skill over time.

This exercise takes that concept and adds a few more lines by way of the cylinder. Instead of practicing making lines parallel in 3D space, this additional helps us build up our intuitive grasp of how to draw boxes that have a pair of opposite faces which are proportionally square. To put it simply, in order for those additional lines to line up correctly with the vanishing points (the minor axis, the contact points, etc.), the ellipses on either end of the cylinder must be circles in 3D space. In order for them to be circles, the plane enclosing them has to be a square.

And so, while students aren't generally aware of this, by practicing this exercise they steadily get better at estimating the proportions of their boxes to improve their "test" results at the end.

Overall I think you've largely done well with this, although there are definitely some that stand out as being notably squished (like #99). Also, there is one issue that you do need to focus on more as you continue on.

As your boxes get longer in one dimension, you tend to end up with one of the sets of lines converging in pairs rather than to a single shared point. This is because those end faces get farther away from one another, and so you aren't as keen on thinking about all four parallel lines while constructing the box. We can see this on #99's blue lines for instance, where there are different vanishing points for the blue lines on one end of the box and for the other, which tells us that they are not in fact parallel with one another.

Anyway, all in all your work is looking good. 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.
10:58 PM, Friday July 24th 2020

sorry for the late reply, thank you for the critique!!

ive moved on to start lesson 6, and i have a few small questions.

1) when we are sub-diving a box for example, do we have to subdivied every single plane? (so the ones we cannot see without drawing through) or can we just subdivide the ones that are needed?

2) I was planning to draw this pencil sharpener i have, and theres a lot of stuff going on underneath it,

would i have to draw these forms underneath as well or can i just leave it as a simple elipse opening? if that makes sense.

https://imgur.com/a/dClTNJA

11:38 PM, Friday July 24th 2020
  1. Subdivide what is needed.

  2. Same idea - if you're drawing it from an angle from which you can see those complicated forms along the underside, then obviously you draw them. If you're drawing it from an angle you cannot see them from, then there would be no point in doing so. If however you can see a small portion of such a form, you should draw the whole thing - meaning if you can see that cone-like form through the opening, you should draw the whole cone.

8:05 PM, Saturday July 25th 2020

thanks for the clarification! also on the lesson 6 page we are allowed to use tools to help us out? (rulers/ellipse guides etc etc)

it also says

Whenever drawing freehand, I still want you to apply the methodology I've outlined in the past - the ghosting method, drawing through ellipses, and so on.

in which areas are we allowed to use rulers and such vs freehand drawing?

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