250 Cylinder Challenge

7:19 PM, Saturday May 17th 2025

CILINDROS - Google Drive

Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LEcIHMOE-txZE-o33FWE3WqoIjWiSz3_

https://imgur.com/a/1j0efFh

I put two links to make it easier to evaluate and organize, and if possible you can write them down. Which were the three best?

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9:12 PM, Monday May 19th 2025

Before I start with the critique, I wanted to note that the way these exercises work (and the course as a whole), asking for which ones were done best isn't actually useful or productive information. Having individual cylinders come out well, or having them come out badly, isn't directly relevant to us. As these are all exercises, what matters is that we're striving to follow the provided steps and instructions as closely as possible, so that our brains are forced to think about certain things, and through repetition, those intentional considerations are pushed down into our subconscious so that we consider them automatically when drawing our own things.

All of which is to say, I won't be pointing out the three best, because it isn't really relevant to what we're doing here and I wouldn't want to give you the impression that it is.

So! Jumping right in with the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, there's an important set of reminders stressed here in the lesson material which I get the impression you may have missed. They stress the following:

  • We want to include a wide range of foreshortening, from shallow/gradual convergence where the side edges of the cylinders converge, but very gradually over the length of the cylinder, all the way to much more dramatic foreshortening where the side edges converge very quickly.

  • We want to avoid any cases where our side edges run parallel to one another on the page, as this can only be achieved when the cylinder itself is oriented prependicularly to the viewer's angle of sight, which since we're rotating our cylinders randomly here, that would not really occur.

On the first page, number 3 was definitely a case where the side edges were drawn incorrectly (they were actually drawn in such a way that they diverged, which is a common issue that arises when students are trying to keep them parallel on the page), but overall it was coming along well. Number 1 seemed to be a case where there was some slight convergence, but it wasn't clear if this was accidental, or if the intent was to keep them parallel. Either way, not a terrible start, with 4 others that were clearly converging.

Progressively from there however, you shifted more and more to prioritizing arbitrarily forcing that lengthwise vanishing point to infinity so the side edges could be drawn parallel on the page, with more and more instances of this with each passing page. You never at any point defaulted to only doing this - so for example, if we look at the page containing 46-53, 6/8 were drawn in this manner, while 47 and 49 had some convergence (in 47 it looks like it could have been accidental). Going further, the entire page consisting of 132-138 seemed to feature convergence, but just a couple pages later (the last of this section), we can see that 145 and 149 still feature this issue.

Furthermore, while as I noted there are quite a few instances where there are cylinders with convergence amidst the set, the vast majority of these feature fairly shallow foreshortening, which means that ultimately the first point from the reminders, stressing the importance of varying across the full range of foreshortening, was neglected.

This inevitably means that revisions will be required - but while in most cases I do ask the student to redo the full 150, in your case I'm seeing enough that suggests that significantly less will be sufficient, so we won't push it that far.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, overall these are coming along quite well. 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.

By and large you're adhering to this use of the line extensions well, although I did notice at least a few cases where your estimation of the minor axes may have benefitted from closer assessment, and perhaps a bit more time. It's very easy to assume that the minor axis is roughly aligned as we intend for it to be, and this can cause us to pay less attention and miss cases where it's dramatically off, as we see in this example. Be sure to pay more attention on that front, as when the minor axis line is way off, the contact point lines aren't as useful in serving their purpose.

Anyway, as noted, I will require some revisions on the first section of the challenge. You will find them assigned below, but be sure to review the instructions before getting started on them to ensure that you are following the exercise as prescribed, rather than as you remember it.

Next Steps:

Please submit 50 additional cylinders around arbtirary minor axes.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
8:03 PM, Tuesday May 20th 2025

https://imgur.com/a/WerJdLH

So I wanted to know which ones had turned out better to use more or less as a reference but through your explanation I can already do that thank you.

I hope it's okay but I did all 50 today but at different times

8:18 PM, Thursday May 22nd 2025

Doing them all in one day isn't generally something I'd advise - not that it can't be done well (yours largely appear fine), but more because if there are significant issues there's a pretty high likelihood I'd ask you to do it again, more slowly, if there aren't any obvious misunderstandings revealing themselves already. There's just so much that can go wrong when you pack that volume of work into one day, even if we have the best intentions.

Fortunately, your work is largely looking fine here. Number 5 is an example of the foreshortening being reversed (at least in regards to the shift in the overall scale, as you've got the far end being larger overall than the end closer to the viewer), but this appears to have been a one-off issue.

The only other thing I do want to bring to your attention is that when your foreshortening becomes more dramatic, resulting in a far end that is much smaller overall than the end closer to the viewer, make sure that you're also having the same thing happen to the degree of the far end. Both of these shifts (that is, the shift in the overall scale, and the shift in the degree, as we slide along the length of the form moving further away from the viewer) are visual cues that tell the viewer just how much of the cylinder's length can be measured directly on the page, versus how much exists in the "unseen" dimension of depth. Since they represent the same thing, they should occur at similar rates - all of which is to ultimately say that if your far end gets a lot smaller, it should also get a lot wider to match.

Aside from that, your work is coming along well. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto Lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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