250 Cylinder Challenge
7:54 AM, Tuesday September 14th 2021
the hardest part was definitely the scanning one tho.
(any feedback appreciated)
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5:36 PM, Wednesday September 15th 2021
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, overall you've done a pretty good job here, including a decent variety of orientations and rates of foreshortening, and demonstrating quite a bit of patience and care in identifying the true alignment of your ellipses' minor axes. One minor point that I did notice was that it seems you've been trying to hit each ellipse in one go - remember that throughout the entirety of this course, every ellipse we freehand should be drawn through two full times before lifting the pen from the page, both to continue encouraging a confident execution with a smooth, even shape (which you're doing just fine), but also to provide more practice for one's muscle memory.
Another point I usually look for in this section of the challenge are signs showing whether or not a student understands the relationship between the two 'shifts' that occur to the ellipses as we transition from the end closer to the viewer to the end farther away. These include the shift in scale (which, due to the convergence of the side edges, causes the far end to get smaller overall than the closer end), and the shift in degree (which causes the far end to get proportionally wider than the end closer to the viewer). What students sometimes forget or miss out on noticing, however, is the fact that these two shifts occur in tandem, at roughly the same rate, because they both manifest the foreshortening being applied to the given form, and serve to communicate the same thing to the viewer. That is, just how much of the cylinder's length exists in the unseen dimension of depth, which cannot be directly conveyed on the page.
Fortunately I've not seen significant contradiction of this in your work, but I offered the explanation above just in case. Normally I look at any examples of really dramatic foreshortening to see how the two shifts behave, but there don't appear to be any of that sort in this set.
Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, overall you've done a pretty good job, but I did see a few places where you weren't as consistent in checking your line extensions as you ought to have been. For example, on number 200 you skipped the ellipses' lines and only extended the box's edges. I also noticed that some others earlier on, like 185 and 183, you only extended two of the box's three sets of parallel edges. This is also visible on other pages before that point.
Overall however, and more so as you push through the set, you have shown a fair bit of care in applying these line extensions. Ultimately the line extensions themselves are quite important. The exercise itself is all about helping develop students' intuition in regards to constructing boxes which feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square. We do that by testing how far off our ellipses are from representing circles in 3D space by checking whether their lines (their minor axes and contact point lines) converge towards the box's own vanishing points. This also allows us to test how far off we are from having the planes that enclose those ellipses represent squares in 3D space.
There are however two things I want to point out which are somewhat reducing the effectiveness of this analysis approach. The first of these is that you appear to be focused primarily on extending the ellipses' contact point lines, but not their minor axes. Make sure that you extend those minor axes for both ellipses all the way back as well, so you can see whether or not they're converging towards the box's own vanishing points.
Secondly, make sure that your ellipses touch all four edges of the plane - you have a tendency to have some touch just two edges. Having it touch all 4 edges will ensure that when we test the line extensions, we are analyzing the enclosing plane as well, rather than just the ellipse it contains.
Anyway, all in all you are doing quite well, but have a few things to keep in mind. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 6.
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