250 Cylinder Challenge
1:26 PM, Sunday April 30th 2023
This took some time!
Thank you for taking a look.
There is admittedly a fairly significant issue present in your work here - but fortunately, it's something that you did address yourself, albeit fairly late into your work. This kind of issue is something that will generally require a full redo, or even a partial redo, if the student has not sufficiently corrected it themselves within the submission (in the sense of doing it wrong for a while, then realizing the mistake and correcting it before finishing), so in your case you are quite lucky that you corrected it yourself.
The issue is that throughout much of your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, you specifically drew the cylinders with side edges that instead of converging (whether gradually or very rapidly) towards a vanishing point, remained fully parallel on the page - regardless of how the cylinder itself was meant to be oriented in space. This is incorrect in relation to the rules of perspective, and I explain the reasoning for this in more depth here in the lesson notes. The main point is that we only get lines running parallel on the page like that when the edges they represent run fully perpendicularly (in 3D space) to the angle at which the viewer is looking. So in other words, when the cylinders you're drawing are meant to run straight across our field of view, not slanting towards or away from us through the depth of the scene.
This issue persisted through about two thirds of this section, and you didn't start incorporating any actual foreshortening until after 106. Prior to this point, this also means that you were not adhering to what is required in the assignment section in bold - that you vary your rates of foreshortening between shallow (gradual convergence) to dramatic (rapid convergence).
This issue was present in your cylinders in boxes as well, although to a much lesser degree. So for example, we can see it in 156 and 157 on this page, where you're going beyond just shallow foreshortening and instead forcing it to a non-existant "0-point-perspective" where all the vanishing points are at infinity. Fortunately, you had many other cases for this section where there were convergences, be they gradual or rapid.
Aside from this, you've handled this section of the challenge 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.
So, in checking your line extensions correctly and fastidiously, you have armed yourself with the information required to adjust your approach from one page to the next, to bring those convergences in more consistently, and ultimately train your internal sense of what proportions should be used given any arbitrary rotation of the form. This is something you will certainly be able to keep improving, and so like all the exercises we encounter through this course, it should become part of your pool of warmup exercises - but you're headed very much in the right direction here.
I will be marking this challenge as complete, but going forward please take more care to read and follow the instructions exactly as they're written. Catching such issues two thirds of the way through an exercise is better than not at all, but it does reduce how much you're getting out of the time you've invested.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 6.
Thank you for the critique Uncomfortable! I will make sure to read the instructions with more attention from now on.
Stan Prokopenko's had been teaching figure drawing as far back as I can remember, even when I was just a regular student myself. It's safe to say that when it comes to figure drawing, his tutelage is among the best.
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