250 Cylinder Challenge
7:49 PM, Saturday July 9th 2022
250 Pfiou...
Starting with the cylinders around an arbitrary minor axis, you've generally done a good job here. There are a few minor issues here and there but I'll get to it later. But first let's talk about the positives:
You've experimented with the rate of foreshortening (something that a lot of people seem to neglect, despite it being in bold in the instructions)
You're doing a great job of checking for minor axis discrepancies which is important to ensure you do not plateau in that area.
One thing I want to talk about has to do with the two ways in which the ellipses on our cylinders change over the course of its length. The first has to do with the "scale" shift, in which the farther end of the cylinder appears smaller than the closer end, even when both ends are actually the same size. The other thing has to do with the "degree" shift in which the farther end appears to be proportionally wider. The thing is, both of these shifts are manifestations of foreshortening. These are the signs our brain uses to understand how much of this form exists on the unseen dimension of depth. As a result, both of these shifts must operate in tandem. As the scale shift becomes more significant, it has to be matched with a similar shift in degree. If we look at cases like these, we get a noticeable shift in scale while the degree remains the same, which results in these looking like foam cups rather than perfect cylinders. The viewer will be able to tell something is off even if they don't know the exact reason for it, so keep this in mind moving forward.
Another thing I want to call out that comes up in your work although they do get better over time. It has to do with how your ellipses appear to be a touch bit hesitant which suggests to me that you're not applying the ghosting method before executing every mark (this includes your side edges). In addition to this, the unevenness also tells me that you're not executing them from your whole arm or shoulder and instead, you're slipping back to using your elbow or wrist.
As i said, this is something that gets better over time so just keep pushing yourself on executing those marks with a confident stroke.
Moving onto the cylinders in boxes, I noticed that you did not number your cylinders. I'll have to take your word for it that they're all here but as you can imagine, numbering them would have been quite helpful. What we're trying to do here is develop our understanding on how we construct our boxes to have proportionately square faces regardless of the box orientation. To do this, we don't actively memorize every single configuration but instead we subconsciously develop that understanding through repetition and analysis.
The box challenge was all about developing a stronger sense of how to achieve more consistent convergences by analyzing the line extensions. Here, we're just adding three more sets of line extensions: the minor axis lines (which also happen to be one of the vanishing points), and the two contact points. We can check how far off these are from the box's vanishing points and this helps us determine whether the ellipse represents a circle in 3d space, and in turn how far off the plane was from representing a square.
In applying those line extensions quite fastidiously across the whole set you've been able to gradually train the way in which your brain understands those proportions, helping you get a better instinctual grasp on the given orientation of the form. I'll be marking this as complete. Feel free to continue onto the next lesson.
Next Steps:
Lesson 6
Thank you for this detailed correction !
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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