Hello I'll be handling the critique for your 250 cylinder challenge.

-Starting with your mark making and linework, all of your ellipses and lines are drawn with good confidence which means that you are using the ghosting method to good effect and this has really helped your cylinders to look more solid. I also like to see that you have taken your time and been very patient when it comes to checking for the real minor axis, this will help you to avoid plateauing in the "close enough" zone and keep improving as you move on.

As a whole you did a great job on this first part of the challenge, that is because you were able to pick up on the relationship between the rate of foreshortening and the degree shift from the front face of the cylinder to the back face. These two things cannot work independently of each other, which means that if you have a cylinder with a dramatic rate of foreshortening it should be accompanied by a dramatic shift of the ellipses, with the ellipse furthest away having a larger degree.

It is also good to see that you are experimenting a good deal with the sizes, rates of foreshortening and orientation of the cylinders as was suggested on the challenge instructions.

-Moving onto the cylinders in boxes, they are turning nicely, your mark making has kept confident, and as far as I can see you are extending the lines for the edges of the box, the edges of the cylinders and the minor axis of each face of the cylinder.

This exercise is really about helping the students develop an intuitive sense for how to draw a box which features opposite sides which are proportionally a square in 3D space, regardless of its position in 3D space. We don't do this by memorizing every possible configuration, instead we can achieve this by constant repetition and by constant analysis by way of the line extension.

The line extensions in the box challenge helped us to get a better sense for how to draw boxes with more consistent convergences and to correct our approach in order to get better and better results. Here we are adding two more for the contact points of the ellipse and one more for the minor axis of each individual ellipse

. 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.

-There is only one thing I would like to call out and that is that your first priority should be to align your ellipses to the minor axis rather than having them fitting snugly within the plane. This goes back all the way to lesson 1 ellipses in planes exercise, if you remember our main priority was drawing smooth and symmetrical ellipses regardless if they didn't fit snugly within the plane, it's the same for the ellipses on the faces of the box. We can allow ourselves to make these kinds of mistakes as they don't really take away from the things we learn by doing the challenge all the way to the end.

You are already approaching some good square proportions, this knowledge will serve you well during lesson 6, so I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.