1:53 AM, Tuesday March 22nd 2022
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, while you've largely done fairly well here, there are a few things that I would like to call out.
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Firstly and most notably, I can see that you're not necessarily as consistent as you should be in drawing through your ellipses. Keep in mind that as discussed back in Lesson 1, we are to draw through each of the ellipses we're freehanding two full times before lifting our pen from the page. This helps keep our ellipses evenly shaped while also helping to eliminate stiffness and wobbling from the marks, as it helps us lean into a confident execution (assuming we allow it to). That is definitely something that some of your ellipses would benefit from. I can see that you're drawing through some of them, often partially rather than two full times, but it does seem that you're allowing yourself to hesitate as you execute, which is something you're going to want to be mindful of.
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This is really more of an extension of the previous point, but I suspect that while I'm seeing signs that you're using the ghosting method at the very least for your straight edges, you do still have a tendency to hesitate as you execute them, which can lead to some wobbling - in your case, fairly slight wobbling, but given that it's my job to pick that kind of thing out, I am seeing such things. When I see this from students, it often suggests that while they're very fastidious in applying the various stages of the ghosting method, their lack of confidence still hinders them from applying the last step completely - that is, the confident execution. It is difficult to just let go and accept that the second the pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has already passed, though the line hasn't been drawn. It is however within our control - it is our choice - to allow ourselves to execute that mark with full confidence, pushing through rather than hesitating and second-guessing. You're close, but you definitely need to push yourself a little farther.
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And of course, the ghosting method applies to the ellipses as well.
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Another point I noticed was that you didn't really vary your foreshortening all that much here - and in fact, a lot of these appear to minimize foreshortening enough that it seems more that you simply drew the side edges as being parallel on the page, converging towards a vanishing point at infinity (in the manner described back in Lesson 1). While this isn't the case for all of your cylinders, it is for many of them - despite the fact that the instructions in the assignment section did specifically ask for lots of variation on foreshortening.
To expand on that last point, in this challenge, having those side edges run completely parallel, if that's something you were doing intentionally, is incorrect. Reason being, we do not choose the position of our vanishing point. We choose how we mean for the form to be oriented, but it is that orientation which determines where the vanishing point would go. Specifically, the only circumstance in which a vanishing point would go to infinity is if the set of lines it governs is actually running perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight, rather than slanting towards or away from them through the depth of the scene. Given that we're rotating these cylinders freely and randomly in 3D space, the chances of any of our cylinders aligning so perfectly would be close to nil, so we may as well leave it out altogether.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, these are by and large quite well done. The ellipses are at times still suffering from a more hesitant execution, but as far as the exercise itself goes, you're showing good progress, and you've followed the instructions 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 extending the lines and analyzing their behaviour, you have been able to gradually develop that instinctual grasp of proportion. There is certainly more room for growth and improvement with this with further practice, but I feel what you've already developed will be of considerable use as you move into Lesson 6.
One last thing I wanted to call out is the fact that when you work with longer boxes/cylinders, you still seem to have a keen sense of how they need to be angled in order to converge consistently with the other half of their set on the opposite side of the box. Most students have this as a point of weakness, making the pairs converge more quickly, but you handle this somewhat better.
Anyway! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. While there's always room for improvement here, your big takeaway should be the importance of executing your marks confidently. Be sure to apply that especially when continuing to do your Lesson 1 linework and ellipses exercises in your regular warmup routine.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 6.