250 Cylinder Challenge

4:46 PM, Tuesday January 4th 2022

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Hey there,

Thanks for taking the time to critique my cylinders.

Patmybelly

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8:07 AM, Thursday January 6th 2022

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, there are many things here that I am quite pleased to see:

  • You've included a wide variety of rates of foreshortening - despite asking for this specifically, some students still miss it, so I'm weirdly pleased every time a student follows those instructions correctly.

  • You're very fastidious in checking the alignment of your ellipses, identifying even fairly small deviations when they are present.

  • While you do struggle with drawing confident, smooth ellipses towards the beginning, this does improve over the set. That said, there is still some room for improvement here, so be sure to keep using the ghosting method and engaging your whole arm from the shoulder when executing your ellipses.

One thing that you may not be completely cognizant of at this point, is the importance of keeping the two "shifts" that occur as manifestations of our foreshortening (the shift in scale, where the far end is smaller than the end closer to the viewer, and the shift in degree where the far end is wider than the end closer to the viewer) consistent with one another. That is to say, if we have a more significant scale shift, then we should also have a more significant degree shift to match. Failing to do so would result in a contradiction, where one aspect of our cylinder tells us that what there is a significant portion of the form's length which exists in the "unseen" dimension of depth, whereas the other tells us that what we see is effectively what we get - that the length on the page is all there is.

If we look at some examples - such as 136, we can see very little change in the degree from one end to the other, with a more substantial (although not outright dramatic) shift in scale. 132 is perhaps a clearer example of this issue. This isn't a mistake you make all over, but it's present enough for me to feel that explaining it has been worthwhile.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, I fear this exercise is not wholly complete. 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.

There are two main issues with how you're approaching the line extensions for this part of the challenge - firstly, you only appear to be identifying the minor axis, not any of the contact point lines. Furthermore, the extensions of your minor axes generally appear to be pointing in the opposite direction - what we want is to extend them all the way back, along with the box's own line extensions, so we can identify trends where they're not converging towards the same vanishing points.

I do understand that this particular error checking approach is by no means easy to understand, but it is explained in detail in these notes, as well as in the cylinder challenge video. I recommend you review these, and then give the revisions I've assigned below another shot.

Next Steps:

Please submit an additional 25 cylinders in boxes, applying the line extension error checking method in its entirety.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
4:53 PM, Tuesday January 11th 2022

Oh damn, that was silly of me, woops. Okay, hopefully i did it right this time, though there were defintely some wonky ones this time, though i think im staring to see and predict a lot of my errors.

Thank you so much,

Patrick Culbert

https://imgur.com/a/QjAjPw0

1:55 AM, Thursday January 13th 2022

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you unfortunately seem to have misunderstood what the "contact point" lines are for each ellipse. It appears that you drew lines passing through one contact point for each ellipse, resulting in lines that run along the length of the cylinder. That's not what's depicted here or demonstrated in the video.

Instead, as shown here on one of your box-cylinders, the lines we are to draw here connect the pairs of contact points for a single ellipse at a time. Thus, each ellipse has 3 lines of its own, one converging towards each of the box's vanishing points.

I know you tried hard for this one, but perhaps in your eagerness to complete the revisions correctly, you still may not have checked the instructions closely enough. I'm not going to reassign the same quantity of revisions from before, but we are still going to need to make sure you can apply the approach correctly - so let's do another 10.

Next Steps:

Please submit an additional 10 cylinders in boxes, with the line extensions applied correctly.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
4:00 PM, Thursday January 13th 2022

ahh, that is unfortunate, i admit i didn't rewatch the video for the extra 25 thinking i got it from looking at the diagram. i really did just want to be done with these. Now that i have rewatched the video i feel a lot of things i remember being confused by the first time clicked into place. I hope i have gotten it right this time. Thanks for keeping me honest

https://imgur.com/a/GRe2Ljq

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