250 Cylinder Challenge

1:51 PM, Saturday March 6th 2021

Draw a box -  250 Cylinder Challenge - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/gallery/loJc9W6

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Hello

i have uploaded the challenge in two separate links, please see them below:

https://imgur.com/gallery/loJc9W6

https://imgur.com/gallery/SL3C2Zi

I had some doubts on how to correct the axis orientation , even re-reading the orientations multiples times ,i hope they are ok .

I would like to know if i could resend the lessons 3 to 5 , once i have finish all lessons , just to keep practicing and have your feedbacks .

Many thanks

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1:03 AM, Tuesday March 9th 2021

To answer your question at the end there - you are indeed allowed to go back and redo past lessons, once you've completed the course.

Now, starting with the first section - the cylinders around arbitrary minor axes - there are some pretty big issues that stand out to me.

The first of these is the fact that you appear to have made a purposeful, concerted effort to draw all the cylinders such that their side edges remain completely parallel on the page. That is fundamentally incorrect, and it's something we covered way back in Lesson 1 - the core principle of perspective that lines that are parallel in 3D space converge towards a shared vanishing point when drawn in 2D (like on a piece of paper, or a canvas). The only situation where this vanishing point goes "to infinity" (resulting in those lines becoming parallel on the page) is when the form is aligned in a very specific way relative to the viewer - specifically running perpendicular to the direction the viewer is looking. That is something that occurs when we mean for it to intentionally, but something that simply doesn't happen when drawing a bunch of random, freely rotated forms.

In the homework section for this challenge, where the work was actually assigned, I have there written in bold:

Be sure to vary the rate of foreshortening across your cylinders across the set

So at the very least there should have been a much wider range of cylinders with different rates of foreshortening - some more dramatic, with more rapid convergence, and some shallower with more gradual convergence. That said, even then having no convergence at all would be incorrect.

The foreshortening on a form basically gives the viewer a way to determine in rough terms how long the cylinder is. If the foreshortening is more dramatic, there's going to be more distance between the two ends. If the foreshortening is shallower, then there's less distance between the ends. When there's no foreshortening, as in your cylinders, there is no distance between those ends - but this is something we can obviously see to be false, leading to a visual contradiction in your drawing.

Taking it all a step farther, foreshortening doesn't just manifest in the shift from one end being larger in scale, to the farther end being smaller. We also see it in the width of these ends, with the closer end being narrower, and the farther end being wider, as explained here. If there's no foreshortening at all, then there should be no shift of either sort (no shift in scale, no shift in width/degree). They need to be consistent.

Now, fortunately your cylinders in boxes are much better. You're doing a good job of checking the convergences of those line extensions, which is helping you to improve your ability to estimate the proportions of those boxes. After all, if the boxes don't feature a pair of planes that are proportionally square, then the line extensions of the ellipses won't line up with those of the box itself. That is the key to the exercise - by adjusting the way we draw the boxes, the ellipses inside them line up better with the characteristics of circles in 3D space. The whole thing is just designed to make you better at drawing square faces, which is very valuable in the next lesson. You've done a pretty solid job at that, and your estimation of your convergences are coming along well.

So, you basically bungled the first part, and nailed the second one. So I'm going to have you do an additional 50 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, this time incorporating lots of variation in foreshortening.

Next Steps:

Please submit another 50 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
3:24 PM, Friday March 12th 2021

Thank you very much for the feedback ,please see in the link below the 50 requested addtional cyllinders

https://imgur.com/gallery/pNmtG2G

Many thanks

7:52 PM, Sunday March 14th 2021

So you definitely did a better job here of adding a little bit of foreshortening to each cylinder. It's pretty subtle (and there are some cases where I'd say that there isn't any), but there's enough foreshortening in most of them to avoid the mistake I called out previously.

Keep in mind though, in my critique this is specifically what I asked for:

So, you basically bungled the first part, and nailed the second one. So I'm going to have you do an additional 50 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, this time incorporating lots of variation in foreshortening.

You didn't include any variation in your foreshortening - you stuck to roughly the same shallow foreshortening the whole way through, rather than playing with cylinders with more dramatic, rapid foreshortening among them (where the side edges of the cylinders converge more quickly).

This kind of circles back to the same problem - you're struggling to follow the instructions you're given.

Now, I am going to mark this challenge as complete, but this is something you should reflect upon for yourself. Why is it that you're missing key instructions, and what is it you can do to ensure that you adhere to them more closely in the future?

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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