Here's my 250 Cylinder Challenge submission, coming on the heels of my last submission (I had started work on it after my first animals submission while waiting for feedback).
The cylinders in boxes portion was tough, but I didn't really make it any easier on myself. I wanted to step outside of my comfort zone with box construction and try some different approaches than the one I would default to in the past, which was making a Y to start things off. This time around I experimented with constructing different faces first, or just going with things edge by edge in different orders. I did, admittedly, find myself getting backed into a corner with some of my attempts, but in the spirit of being bold, it did help to further my understanding of boxes in 3D space while getting a better grip on the construction of cylinders/circles/squares in perspective.
In any case, thank you in advance for taking the time to look things over, and my apologies for the lack of numbering on the boxed cylinders/clutter of error checking marks. Hope you're well!
Nice work completing the challenge. You were definitely very thorough in working through these, and I can definitely see improvement over the set. The cylinders are notoriously difficult just because there's so many sets of parallel lines to be mindful of, and precision is quite challenging - it's for this reason that lessons 6 and 7 allow for the use of ellipse guides and rulers, but working through this challenge helps a great deal in understand how to apply the use of such tools.
One thing I noticed here and there in your cylinders-in-boxes was that you often extended some of your lines in the wrong direction. For example, on the last page, you've got the cylinder on the bottom right with its green lines being extended towards the viewer, rather than away.
I definitely feel that as you work through them, the cylinders themselves start to feel considerably more solid, and while the square proportions are still elusive at times, you're getting more consistent. So, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 6.
I do want to mention though that you've definitely submitted quite a few times this month. Generally the tier is priced at what would be fair for one submission, though I'm always flexible enough to accept in order to keep from impeding a student. That said, I am going to ask that you hold off on any further submissions until February, and try not to submit quite so many times so close together.
I expect that with the massive increase of submissions I've received this month (the average submission rate is about 2.5 per day, but over the last week I've been looking at more than double that), I'm probably going to make some changes including increasing some of the tiers' pricing (the $10 tier will remain as is), and imposing a 2-week-between-submission rule. I'm considering other things as well, as I'm getting really swamped.
Hey Uncomfortable, it is the least I can do, really. Everything that you mentioned in your other comment is completely fair, and you do deserve to be well-compensated for the service you're providing. I am sincerely grateful and appreciative of it. I also appreciate that you shared your view of submission frequency and how it relates to your workload/return. I hadn't been mindful enough of that.
As for why I've been submitting so much recently, that's simply a matter of this being how I spend my free time. I have goals that I want to achieve and a long plan of future courses and lessons to get through, but I was hoping to be able to finish up with Drawabox (my starting point) before moving into new territory. That said, I want to be sure that I'm not taking advantage of your generosity when it comes to your time, so I will be sure to spread out my submissions and get started on a new course to fill the gaps between these lessons.
Again, thank you for everything, including this latest feedback (there's a key insight in there for me). I've been wanting to get serious about my traditional art skills for a while now, and all of this has proven to be a fantastic starting point, giving a much-needed boost of confidence in what I thought were a lacking set of skills. I'll see you in at least a couple of weeks with my submission of lesson 6. Take care until then.
I still have lot of work to improve here. Making the circle hit where I want to is still a challenge even after these 250. I think that I just started to get the hang of it. And only "get it" at the end of each set. If I continue for a few more then I will start some improve.
I need to review my straight lines. They have a little wiggle that I didn't notice before even if they hit where I want. I am ghosting the lines and pretty sure I am drawing from my shoulder. Maybe it is my hand is too tight, still too heavy handed or not going to fast enough.
Nice work! I can definitely see considerable improvement in your general understanding of 3D space, proportion and construction of these forms throughout the sets, and I'm very pleased with the conscientiousness with which you're applying the correction and analysis techniques. Your convergences steadily improve a fair bit, as does your ability to feel out what would be more square (and the occurrence of slightly squished ellipses decreases as you work through the set).
Now, I do strongly agree that your line quality has definitely taken a hit here. It's not particularly surprising, since this challenge - especially when you hit the cylinders-in-boxes - is difficult and requires a great deal of thought and focus. That said, while you say you are ghosting your lines, I suspect that you may still not be executing your marks with the kind of confident, persistent stroke that the ghosting method demands.
Always remember that - the ghosting method isn't just about the time you invest into the planning and preparation phases, but rather the whole process of taking the time one might invest in drawing, and separating it out into the planning/preparation steps. If you plan/prepare/ghost/whatever properly, but still execute your mark with a slow, laborious stroke, your marks will still wobble.
It's all about drawing with a confident pace (which causes our control to take a hit) and then ghosting in order to get that control back.
Anyway! You are doing a good job, but you definitely need to rein that wobbling in and invest your time in the right places. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, but be sure to incorporate more ghosting/planes and even super imposed lines exercises into your warmup routine to get back in the groove of drawing with confidence.
I completed the challenge. It was pretty hard, requires a lot of focus and improvement was not always linear.
In the second part (from 150 or so) I tried specially to draw from shoulder and to draw through ellipses, because I realized I was not doing so at the beginning
Great stuff! I can see a great deal of improvement overall, and while I can see that it was definitely a pretty big struggle, you never held back from applying the additional correctional techniques and reflecting upon your work to better identify how to move forwards. The first chunk of the work definitely showed a considerable increase in your accuracy when it comes to aligning the ellipses to those minor axes (though you were fairly good at this to begin with, the improvement is visible). The cylinders in boxes was definitely a whole other challenge altogether.
While there's still plenty of room to improve on this front, you're showing considerable growth on multiple fronts. Your estimation of proportions (in keeping faces proportionally square) is much more consistent, the alignment of your ellipses within those enclosing planes, and even the convergences of your boxes have improved a great deal.
One thing that I do want to point out is actually more in relation to the boxes themselves - watch out for situations where you get a little caught up in the lines that share a plane. I can see a number of places where of a given set of 4 parallel lines, they tend to converge in pairs (the members of each pair sharing a plane). Always remember that the relationship between these lines goes beyond the shared corners and planes - it's all about the sets of lines that share a vanishing point, and how all four converge towards that point. So when you're putting that line down, always think about all the lines it is meant to converge with, including those that have not yet been drawn.
Anyway, keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge.
Yes, I've had some trouble with the convergence of the lines in boxes, I will try to think about all four. I like to redo some basic exercises as a sort of warm up
Lesson 3 was getting disheartening so I spent \~a week doing this. I'll admit that I didn't spend as much time as I should have analyzing each set after correcting them, so aside from including cylinders in my warm-ups, how many more of these things do I need to do right now?
Another thing I want to say is that I still don't really get boxes, it feels like I can only make a few different boxes and I have no idea how I am supposed to "think in 3-d" consistently, so that exacerbated my issues with the cylinders.
Honestly, while you definitely had some struggles throughout the second part of this challenge, you did a pretty fantastic job. As you push through, the alignment of your ellipses improves, as do the general proportions of your boxes. There are mistakes here and there, but while you say you're a little sloppy when it comes to the error analysis, you are doing a good job of identifying the alignment of your minor axes and contact points.
Now obviously taking more time to analyze the patterns in your mistakes will certainly improve your overall rate of growth, but as it stands, I can see a definite upward trend. I think the most common mistake I see has to do with the degree of the ellipse being a little too narrow, which throws off the alignment of those contact points. We can see this in 250 and 244 - but it's uncommon enough to tell me that it's something that's gradually diminishing.
I certainly do recommend that you continue doing these as part of your warmup (not too many at a time, as they are time consuming, but a few here and there, and if you're running low on time then even the ellipses-in-planes, modified to try and focus on creating square planes rather than just arbitrary quadrilaterals, can really help.
Also worth mentioning - your linework is quite confident, both on your ellipses and for the straight lines. There's not a lot of stiffening - sometimes your ellipses get a little uneven, but that's pretty normal when it comes to mushing them into some of the more awkward planes.
So! Keep up the good work, and good luck pushing through the rest of lesson 3. Remember that the goal isn't to impress me, it's just to do the work to the best of your ability so I have a body of work that I can assess and use as a basis for my advice and suggestions regarding your next steps.
Honestly your work here is fantastic. You're demonstrating here an enormous degree of patience and care with each and every cylinder - not just in the pretty solid accuracy you've got when it comes to aligning your ellipses to their minor axes, but with the thoroughness of your analyses after the fact. It's very easy, when you've got an ellipse with a minor axis already drawn through it to assume that it's an accurate representation of the true minor axis, but you've very clearly taken your time to found the real one even when it's only off by a degree or two. It's that kind of care that will continue to push you through all of these lessons, and that has contributed to your growth not only in this challenge, but as a whole since you started.
You're definitely developing a good instinct for the alignment of your ellipses, as well as the degrees that would best suit a given plane (considering the contact points and so on). There certainly is room for improvement, but you're getting more consistently in the territory of "good enough" as far as passing at a glance goes, and you'll certainly continue to improve on this front as you plow forward.
Keep working on having your ellipses touch all four corners of their enclosing plane though, and on tightening the ellipses up. You've got many that are within solid margins (as far as the separation between the lines of different passes on the ellipse), and you're definitely maintaining a great deal of accuracy, but every now and then the ellipses either get loose in an attempt to reach out and touch a last edge of the plane, or they fall short. Just something to keep an eye on.
You're doing great here, and are showing a lot of improvement and some excellent habits - keep it up, and consider this challenge complete. Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge next.
With half of the last cylinders I marked where the ellipse should touch the walls, considering the VPs, before drawing it. Hope that's no cheating. I also tried to guess the contact points, but it works much better when I have these guides beforehand.
And I don't know what happened with some of the ellipses, my hand was just dettached from the mind.
Pretty nice work overall! It's important to acknowledge that since cylinders rest so heavily upon ellipses, they are very difficult to wrangle. As such, a considerable degree of struggling is expected. Don't forget - while learning how to control your ellipses and being able to do them freehand is important, it's the sort of thing we develop over a long period of time, to the point that lessons 6 and 7 both allow for the use of ellipse guides.
Now, you've demonstrated a great deal of care and conscientiousness when working through the first section of this challenge. You're very mindful of identifying the accurate minor axis of each ellipse, rather than letting the one drawn initially distract you. Overall you're pretty close in your judgment. There are a few places where the far end of your cylinder is a touch too similar in degree as the near end, but for the most part you have a good shift that is noticeable, but still quite subtle, so as to suggest a normal degree of foreshortening and scale.
When tackling the cylinders in boxes, your strategy of marking out the contact points is by no means cheating, and frankly, is a solid approach similar to how we place the minor axis down in the previous section. Knowing what you're aiming for helps a great deal, but we still have to exhibit a lot of control to actually hit those points as intended, and as you can see it doesn't always happen.
That said, over the course of the set you demonstrate a tightening of the range of your results - even early on you have the odd successful one, but their frequency increases as you push through, demonstrating a greater reliance on skill rather than luck. There are still some serious outliers though where you may be getting a little confused. For example, when we look at 81, your ellipses there are treating the major axis (the line that bisects the ellipse across its wider span) as though it were the minor axis, giving you a very wrong result. You do seem to pick up on that mistake soon after though.
All in all, you've done a good job. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 6.
This challenge is technically situated quite a bit later in the flow of the lessons - you can certainly do it at any point, but it does fall under the $10 patreon tier along with the constructional drawing lessons.
Perfect! There's certainly nothing wrong with jumping into the 250 cylinder challenge immediately after lesson 2 (that's kind of the minimum prerequisite I require) but as you noticed yourself, the second half of the challenge really does get pretty deep in the weeds with topics that only really rear their heads at lesson 6. All in all, the challenge is just something that needs to get done somewhere between lesson 2 and 6. If you'd like to see the recommended "next step" after a lesson, you can follow the little links at the bottom of each page - the one on the last page of a lesson will point you to the next lesson that should be tackled.
So as the two halves of the challenge have different goals, I'll critique the first one, then the second.
All in all, with the first 150, you are being quite mindful of the minor axis for each and every one of these, and are certainly being conscientious when it comes to testing them. Where you did struggle a great deal however was with the ellipses themselves. Across the board, I can see that when you draw your ellipses, you do so with a great deal of hesitation. Each one is quite wobbly and uncertain, like you're focusing overmuch on accuracy, and as a result, aren't trusting in your muscle memory.
Sometimes this merely leads to the line being a little wobbly - many of your ellipses are still fairly well rounded. There are many others however where the shape itself falls out of whack, especially as you get into wider degrees. This is definitely something you're going to need to get control of as you continue to move forwards. I believe it's actually something I called out in lesson 2 as well.
The key here is in the ghosting method - in putting all of your time into the planning and preparation phases, and ultimately executing the mark with a confident, persistent pace. The second your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed - all you can do is commit to it and push through. Right now what I'm seeing is that you're not yet willing to commit to that stroke, and so you hold yourself back.
What you may want to do is take a piece of paper and just draw ellipses without any preplanning, without any consideration for where they need to go or how big they need to be - just to loosen yourself up. Your lines can be smooth and confident, you just need to allow yourself to do it. Reining them in and gaining control over them is a matter of applying those first two steps of the ghosting method - not in drawing more slowly or more carefully as the pen touches the page.
You're certainly just as conscientious and patient when it comes to the second half of the challenge, extending all of your lines, checking your minor axes and convergences. There are a few places I noticed where you extended some lines in the wrong direction (towards the viewer, rather than away). Remember that we're meant to extend them towards their implied vanishing point, so we can see how those lines converge towards it.
The other important point to keep in mind is what this approach actually tests. When applied only to the boxes, it's merely checking if each set of 4 parallel lines converges consistently towards their shared vanishing point. Relatively simple.
Once we throw the ellipses into the mix however, and add the minor axis or contact-point alignment to those sets of lines from the boxes, then we start talking about two different, but related things:
Whether or not the face of the box is reasonably square
If it is, then whether or not the ellipse itself was drawn correctly within it.
In general, you'll find that 80% of the problem if those lines don't align correctly, falls on the face of the box not being a proper "square". That is, square within the terms set out by all the implied vanishing points, and the way that box has defined the space in which it exists.
So once you've gone through a page of these cylinders in boxes, and you apply your checking method, what you want to be paying attention to is what it says about those proportions. In a lot of cases, you can point out, "well this face was probably too long in one dimension", or "this one was pretty squashed". And so you take those points into account when drawing the next set of boxes.
Given that there's a lot here to deal with, it is understandable that it looks like you may not have conveyed that sort of awareness from page to page in terms of which direction you should be going. You did certainly improve, but perhaps not with the kind of efficiency that would be ideal. Still, baby steps.
So all in all, you've got a couple things to keep in mind:
More important than anything else - get those ellipses smooth and confident. Flow above all else. Loosen up.
Consider what your line extensions are telling you about the nature of your mistakes - think about why they're suggesting that the faces you're placing those ellipses into aren't squarish (within a reasonable margin of error), and what you need to adjust in your next box.
Also worth mentioning, your boxes certainly do have issues with their line convergences themselves, so that's something else you're going to want to continue practicing. Look at those line extensions and ask yourself what's going wrong, and work on improving on those specific issues on the next page. You may want to look back at the critique I gave to your box challenge as well, as I did point out specific kinds of things to keep in mind while drawing your boxes.
Anyway - congratulations on toughing through this doozy of a challenge. I'll go ahead and mark it as complete. You should move onto lesson 3 as your next step, but keep on top of practicing your boxes, ellipses and cylinders as you continue to move forwards.
Uncomfortable, thank you for the review. Your correct that I still hesitate and do not commit to my ellipses. I find that I get really frustrated easily here and my instinct is to lock my elbow onto the table I'm drawing on. Stopping myself from doing this seems to help, but it is still a struggle. I did notice some similarities between this review and the last two, in that it seems like I'm just not ghosting enough. I suspect that I will gain an understanding for when to strike and how long to ghost, but is 4-5 ghosts to little?
Understanding the vanishing points is something I just can't wrap my head around and it seems like every time I get a handle on it I lose it. During the last couple of pages, I started drawing my boxes top down, meaning I would do the first square and then do the connecting bottom square. This goes against your advice of focusing only on one VP's lines and allowing the rest of the box to sort of draw itself. (paraphrasing here) I'll go back to lesson 2 and look at that critique to see if I can understand further.
Lastly, I felt like I was repeating the same box just over and over. Did you notice this too during the review? What can I do to break myself out of that box's comfort zone?
You may find that it's less about how many times you ghost (4-5 sounds fine to me) but more about how your arm is moving during the process (locking down to the elbow will make the movement more erratic, while moving from the shoulder will be more even and driven more by the single pivot, making it more predictable and regular). In addition to this, your rhythm is important - make sure you're not missing a beat between ghosting and execution. No pauses in between. Ghost until it feels comfortable and familiar, and continue repeating the motion but press your pen to the page.
I'm not terribly concerned about repetition in your boxes, and didn't feel that it was noticeable. Boxes by their nature don't have a lot of options - you're either looking at them dead on, from below, from above, or from either side. I can see that you jumped from one to the other, and may have repeated the same configuration quite a bit, but as long as you're not doing the exact same one many times in a row, you're fine. Boxes are just an excuse to practice parallel lines and familiarize ourselves with how those VPs work.
Overall you've done a pretty good job, though I do have a few things I'd like to point out:
To start out with a good point, you demonstrated an incredible degree of patience and care with applying your line extensions to analyze your results and identify patterns of mistakes. You did a great job identifying minor axes, for instance, which isn't easy when there's already a line present that you were trying to match. It requires you to ignore what is right there in order to find the true minor axis. Well done.
I definitely noticed that for the first section of this exercise, you didn't really vary the orientation of your cylinders at all. All those pages basically look like they're close to the same. A lot of the value in these kinds of exercise comes from being sure to change the orientations up, try different angles, shallow/dramatic foreshortening, etc.
All in all, your cylinders-in-boxes are coming along well. It's a difficult thing to tackle, and there's plenty of room for growth and improvement here, but you are trundling down the right path. Often times I see students here with boxes that are sorely out of whack, but yours generally do seem to be coming along fairly well. Your convergences are pretty consistent, so you're giving yourself a pretty solid basis for those cylinders. Similarly to how you're drawing your boxes with an awareness of how those lines need to converge towards their vanishing points, the same is going to be necessary with the ellipses (although this is obviously a lot harder, because it's not as easy to visualize the various elements of the ellipses. Thinking about where you want the ellipse to touch its bounding plane and even marking that out with tiny points may help.
It's also worth mentioning that you have a lot more variety with the cylinders in boxes than your first section, so it's good to see that the problem didn't bleed over into here.
Keep up the good work, and consider this challenge complete. Be sure to keep doing some of these as part of your warmups every now and then however, so you continue to develop these skills and keep them sharp.
Honestly, you may have had trouble with certain parts, but frankly I think your work here is spectacular. And that's saying a lot, especially considering that this isn't really the recommended time to tackle this exercise. You're certainly allowed to - you're allowed to complete the cylinder challenge any time after lesson 2 and before lesson 6 - but it's generally recommended that students do it on the later end of that spectrum. The reason for this is that it is a difficult task.
The first section isn't too difficult, and you did a solid job of it. Your lines were drawn with clear use of the ghosting method, and your ellipses maintained an even, smooth shape. You did a pretty good job of aligning them to the minor axis lines, and did an even better job of going back and identifying where there were slight deviations - this is by nature tricky when you've already got a line there asserting itself as the minor axis, even if it's a bit off. So great work there.
The true challenge in this exercise however is the second part - it leverages what students learn in the 250 box challenge as a foundation (something that while most students have developed well, have plenty of room to keep developing). This means that the underlying foundation isn't as reliable as we'd like - mess up the box, and the resulting cylinder will suffer for it.
All the same, you did a fantastic job. It's true that you did take some time to get used to how those ellipses would fit into the planes, but you picked up on this reasonably quickly, and also were able to get the proportions of your boxes pretty close to having two paired squares on either side (which helps to avoid cylinders that feel more squashed).
Your further error checking was as thorough and conscientious as before. You clearly took your time and thought about the relationships between the various lines, and used this information to help develop your approach further as you pushed through.
To put it simply, I have no issues to raise - you've done a fantastic job, have exhibited the qualities I want to see in my students, and have clearly learned and grown from the challenge. Keep up the great work and consider this challenge complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.
Overall you've done a pretty good job. I do have a few comments to share however. Before we get into that though, I do want to commend you for your patience and conscientiousness. You've taken great care in applying the line extension techniques to each cylinder, and I can certainly see signs that you are thinking about what this analysis is telling you, and attempting to act upon it to develop your spatial skills further. Cylinders in particular, especially when drawn inside of and aligned to existing boxes, are very difficult. With the 250 box challenge, it's normal to see some pretty significant growth over the course of the full set. It is on the flipside entirely normal for the growth seen over the cylinder challenge to be less stark, so don't let that discourage you at all. Your cylinders are already pretty good, what we're working on right now are the subtler characteristics of the form that aren't as easily identified with the naked eye. The growth is definitely there.
So there are a couple things I noticed that you'll want to keep in mind:
I noticed that you mixed up the cylinders-around-minor-axis and the cylinders in boxes, doing a few of each per page as you progressed through the set. It would have been better had you stuck to the order in which they were presented in the instructions - first doing the 150 around the arbitrary minor axis, followed by the 100 in boxes. Reason being, the first set is intended to focus purely on aligning your ellipses to the minor axis, and really hammering that out. Then when you move onto the second set, you wouldn't need to expend as much focus on that particular area, instead targeting the challenges specific to constructing cylinders in boxes.
On occasion, I noticed some of your linework got doubled up, suggesting that you may have attempted to correct mistakes by automatically reinforcing the lines. You don't do it too much, but it is still very much worth pointing out. Correcting mistakes is a bad habit - once the mark is down, whether it's correct or not, it's best to leave it be and work around it. Make one mark for every line you put down.
Anyway, all in all you've done well. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
So! To start with, your first section is looking pretty good. Your ellipses are confidently drawn, and as such are evenly shaped and generally maintaining their integrity rather than getting distortion or overly stiff. I'm also pleased with your attention to the "true" minor axes of each ellipse, which can be especially tricky when faced with an existing minor axis that you tried to hit in the first place. Taking the time to look closely and identify where you're deviating from it is difficult, but you definitely invested the time appropriately.
One minor point I did notice was that while you're doing a great job with the degree shift from one end to the other, the overall size of your ellipses remains pretty much the same. Try and push your far end to be just a little smaller (in terms of overall scale) than the closer end in order to show some very slight foreshortening, rather than staying so close to being isometric.
For the second half of the challenge - the cylinders in boxes - I can see that you're overall doing a good job of working through the steps of construction, of first being fairly mindful of the convergences of your boxes' sets of parallel lines. There is certainly room for improvement in terms of the alignment of your ellipses' contact lines and minor axes but this is definitely a challenging thing to tackle.
It's worth mentioning that this challenge can be done anywhere between the completion of lesson 2 and the start of lesson 6 - so you definitely got it out of the way early on, without the extent of mileage many other students may have already had. So these kinds of issues are entirely normal, and to be expected. Hell, they're expected even for students who are working through this closer to the end of that recommended period.
One point that does stand out to me however is that your linework does trend a little more towards the seemingly rushed. Your lines are still straight, and fluid, and reasonably precise, but overall I get the impression that you were moving through this section with considerable gusto, rather than necessarily analyzing your results as carefully and focusing on each individual line as much as you could have. This comes through more in the tendency for your lines to fade out a great deal past the midpoint of a given stroke. Additionally, closer to the end of the set, your boxes start to suffer somewhat, with their convergences becoming less consistent. We know you're entirely capable of pushing through with the appropriate degree of patience and focus, but it definitely wanes around this point. Again, understandable as you probably want this hell and torment to be over with, but it is one of those things we need to work towards wrangling. If we start to rush, if we lose focus, it's best to take a step back and come back after a bit of a break.
Anyway! Overall you are absolutely on the right track, and are doing a good job of moving forwards on the core aspects of this exercise. Keep at it, and feel free to move onto lesson 3.
Hey, thank you again for the in dept analysis and critique, i felt like my ellipses or anything organic in general i struggled with the most so i went ahead and did the cylinder challenge early to practice what i seem to have trouble with the most.
To start with, it's worth mentioning that while you're cleared to tackle this challenge immediately after finishing lesson 2, it isn't required until before you start lesson 6, and due to the complexity of the challenge (mainly the second half), doing it later is recommended as students end up with a lot more mileage and a stronger overall grasp of 3D space. I'm stating this prior to actually looking at your work, as it's something that always be taken into consideration regardless of how well your challenge actually went.
So! Looking at your first section, you've definitely taken off at a good pace. At the very beginning, I noticed that your ellipses tended to be a little stiff, a little uneven, but as you push through into the second page and onwards, they start to loosen up and grow a little more confident and smooth. This is important, as it helps keep your ellipses evenly shaped, which is critical for construction. On occasion there's still a touch of stiffness, but you're definitely showing improvement on this front.
I'm fairly pleased with your error checking against the alignment of each ellipse - you're generally doing a good job of ignoring the big minor axis you drew around, focusing instead on the ellipse itself and pinning down what its true minor axis is. It's quite easy to get distracted by that big line, feeling that everything is in order due to how it asserts itself, but you've done a good job of looking pats that at what is really there.
I'm also seeing a pretty good tendency to shift the degree of your ellipses from one end to the other. The shifts aren't too dramatic, but tend to be in line with the overall foreshortening of the cylinder as a whole - they are usually going to be pretty proportional in tha manner - that is, as regular foreshortening will effect just how much smaller the far end gets, so too will it determine how much wider it gets as well, relative to the closer end. There are a couple where the degree didn't quite shift enough (like 90 for instance) but they did not constitute any sort of trend, and so I'll chalk them up to the odd slip-up.
Now, for the second half, it's fair to say that you definitely struggled a great deal. As mentioned at the beginning of this critique, that's no big surprise - you're fresh off lesson 2, and don't necessarily have the kind of experience that other students might have had when tackling this particularly demanding exercise.
There are a few tendencies I notice, some of which you definitely improve upon, but all of which are worth mentioning.
The first that jumps out at me is a tendency to have your ellipses sometimes sit within the plane, but not actually occupy all of it. Always push yourself to get the ellipse to touch all four edges of its enclosing plane, while remaining evenly shaped and properly elliptical. This is vastly more difficult than it may seem.
The alignment of those contact points are usually a big pain point for you, and that's entirely normal. It really is at the core of this exercise's difficulty, and it has a tendency to really mess with our minds as we draw them. Stepping back and thinking about it objectively, there are three properties of each ellipse - its overall scale, its degree (width) and its orientation. These are the three tools we have to modify that ellipse in order to get it to fit within a given space. Adjusting them will yield different configurations within its containing plane, and changing one will generally require you to compensate with another in order to keep touching all four edges of the plane. The key is to get used to 'pinning' one property (usually the orientation of the ellipse, and therefore the alignment of its minor axis) and then adjusting the other two (degree and scale) to achieve contact points that align correctly towards another vanishing point.
Now on cylinders like 249 are definitely showing considerable improvement 0 it's not perfect, but you're showing that you're able to demonstrate some degree of control over where the minor axis and contact points align to. I am however still seeing many cases (247, 246) where you're not expanding the ellipse to touch all four edges of the plane, so you definitely want to work on that more purposefully.
I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete - you've definitely learned a great deal from this, but be sure to continue practicing and applying it as you go.
It looks like you're submitting a little early - your last submission was on the 14th, so you'll have to hold onto this until the 28th and post it then. I did however notice, with a quick glance, that through your cylinders in boxes you only seemed to be applying your line extensions to the containing boxes, and were not similarly checking the alignment of your minor axes and contact points for the ellipses of each of those cylinders. That definitely would have helped you get even more out of the exercise.
While the requested revisions can be submitted immediately, you can essentially see "the clock" as being based on the last time you submitted something, including those revisions. This is both to ensure that we're not getting bombarded with too many submissions from a single student in a month, and that the student is not encouraged to rush through any a lesson's work.
I don't know what I was thinking, please ignore the early blue lines. I extended the minor axis using a ruler, but only the extensions, the inside line is still ghosted freehand. Sorry about posting too early.
Whew, okay. So over the course of this set, I'm noticing that you're definitely improving in the overall quality of your ellipses. You're getting pretty good at drawing them evenly and confidently, and while they do stiffen up just a little bit when you put them in planes, I'm seeing a lot of improvement there as well, and the stiffness is pretty minor by the end of it. One thing on that point I want to recommend is that you try and stick to drawing through your ellipses 2 full times - no more than that (and obviously no less). Drawing through it several more times generally comes from a lack of confidence, and you're already getting them in place with those first two passes that the next few are only hurting rather than helping.
One point I do want to mention is that your straight lines - mainly the sides of the cylinders - seem to have a little bit of wavering to them that suggests that you might not be using the ghosting method as conscientiously here as you could be. Your boxes are actually generally well drawn (with a few wobbly lines here and there, but most being quite straight), but the cylinders' lines are a lot more hesitant. Definitely keep on top of that, and don't let yourself get sloppy, even if it means slowing down overall and giving yourself more time.
I actually noticed something pretty interesting when giving your ellipses a close look. When drawing them in the first section (where you were constructing cylinders around an arbitrary minor axis), you actually did a really phenomenal job of aligning them to that central line. You were only off by a little bit, barely enough to really catch with the naked eye (although you still picked up on them when going back over to do your corrections, which is great).
Your cylinders in boxes were a different story, however. The margins by which you were off were a lot larger, and the corrections you put in were also off by quite a bit. You can see the differences on this page, where I've drawn the mathematical minor axes for each ellipse. I picked some from the end of both sections just for comparison's sake and used a tool to find the minor axis of each.
So what's happening is that the fact that you're drawing it in a box is throwing you off, not only when it comes to drawing the ellipses themselves (which is totally normal, as balancing the degree and orientation of an ellipse inside of a plane is very tricky), but also when going back to analyze your mistakes. Of course, ironing out the issues in the latter (by taking more time, and reacquainting yourself with what the minor axis actually is) will help you, in time and with practice, nail down the former.
All in all you've demonstrated a great deal of patience working through this exercise, and while there are plenty of areas for improvement, you're headed in the right direction. Since this doesn't come into play as much until lesson 6, you certainly do have time to continue honing your skills with these. But as far as I'm concerned, this challenge is complete. Congrats on the good work.
Hoping this is satisfactory, I feel like my results at the end weren't as impressive as the 250 box challenge. That said I think I improved. Apologies for the odd numbering, I didn't have as much of a system for how I layed my pages out on this one unfortunately, so it sometimes goes top to bottom, bottom to top, or even sideways. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to look this over, have a great day Boxman!
Very well done! You've demonstrated a great deal of improvement over the set, and a keen eye for identifying the various elements of your ellipses (such as the true minor axes and such).
Starting with your ellipses constructed around an arbitrary minor axis, I can see your alignments improving a great deal, and from the beginning, you're definitely able to look past the minor axis you were aiming to align to and actually identifying the correct axis for each individual ellipse. This allows you to get the most out of checking your mistakes, and it definitely pays off overall.
One thing I am noticing however is that the degree of your ellipses doesn't seem to shift much in many cases. On cylinders like 132, you've got a healthy shift, but in many others the degrees seem roughly the same across both ellipses. Remember that the far end needs to be at least a little wider than the near end, for the reasons explained here.
Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, you continue to do a pretty great job. Your ability of dropping those ellipses into their containing planes well improves consistently across the set, and as always your analyses after the fact continue to give you a solid grasp of the kinds of mistakes you're making. I can also see fewer and fewer boxes that are proportionally squished - so you're continually trending more towards cuboid/square boxes, and as a result pushing more towards properly circular cylinders. There are still a few that definitely get visibly squashed, but you're still applying all of the correct principles to drop your cylinders inside of them.
All in all, your cylinders are coming along great, and you're definitely demonstrating an even further increased level of comfort with your boxes, which will serve you well as you continue to move forwards. This is pretty remarkable, as you definitely chose the earliest point you could to do this challenge (I accept it anywhere between lesson 2 and lesson 6, though I generally encourage folks to do it on the later end). So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep up the great work, and head onto lesson 3.
There's definitely a good deal of improvement over the set in terms of how you're constructing your cylinders (both on those constructed around arbitrary minor axes and those constructed within boxes) but there are a few issues I'd like to point out. Some are related to the kinds of errors that come up in your construction, and others have to do with the line quality itself.
Starting with the line quality, there is definitely a certain unevenness to your ellipses and a stiffness to your lines that suggests that you may be falling out of practice with your use of the ghosting method, and that you may not be drawing from the shoulder for many of these strokes. Remember that these are not techniques that are reserved just for those lesson 1 exercises - they should be used with every mark you put down. We take a complex task (putting a smooth, precise mark on the page) and break it into a series of smaller, more easily handled challenges:
First we think about the mark we need to put down and determine its nature. Where does it start, where does it end, what space does it fill, and so on. We also find a comfortable angle from which to approach it. While in this phase, that is all we think about.
Then we make physical preparations to draw it, going through the motion as needed to develop the necessary muscle memory. We're telling our arm how we want it to move, and what we want it to accomplish.
Finally we execute the mark with a single confident motion. At this point we have committed ourselves - our only responsibility at this point is maintaining a consistent trajectory. The second our pen touches the page, there is nothing we can do to improve our accuracy - all we can do is push through and ensure our line remains smooth.
Based on these steps, when correctly following the ghosting method it's impossible to end up with a wobbly line - just one that misses its mark. And that's a much more manageable problem in the long run, so always remember to apply the ghosting method across the board.
For the individual boxes you were using as containers for your cylinders-in-boxes, there were a couple other issues I noticed:
Give this simplification of 1/2/3 point perspective and when to use which from lesson 1 a read, and keep it in mind. In a lot of cases you are following those principles, but I think you do have a tendency to let your lines just run parallel (towards an infinitely far vanishing point) when it isn't necessarily the best choice for a certain set of lines. If, for example, we've got a corner of a box pointing straight at the viewer, then you will want to have some visible convergence for all three sets of lines.
I noticed that when your cylinders got longer (resulting in longer boxes) you had a tendency to focus on the convergence of a given set of parallel lines in pairs, rather than how all four converged together. This resulted in different vanishing points for each plane, rather than one shared one for all four parallel lines.
Overall you definitely still do have a lot of room for improving upon your boxes' convergences. Make sure that when you're drawing a line as part of a box, that you think about how it is actually going to converge with all the other lines it is meant to run parallel to, including those that haven't yet been drawn. Think about how all of their orientation needs to be set in order to meet at that single vanishing point. Don't jump in thinking about how the lines meet at corners, or how they define a plane. And of course, don't forget about these notes.
Generally setting aside the box containers themselves and the quality of the lines, the actual construction of the cylinders is generally coming along well. The only recommendation I have there is that you should avoid a lot of the extremely exaggeratedly long cylinders you threw in there. They have a tendency of incorporating a lot of foreshortening, which becomes very distracting when trying to focus on learning how to construct a cylinder and mind the minor axes and degrees of its ellipses. It also makes it more likely that you're going to draw a lot of those tiny arms from your wrist or elbow rather than from your shoulder.
I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, but you definitely should continue to practice your freely rotated boxes as part of your regular warmup routines, along with the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 (as I hope you have been doing up til now). Feel free to move onto lesson 6.
Uncomfortable
2019-01-20 21:25
Old thread got locked, those eligible for private critiques can post their work here.
dvdjrnx
2019-01-21 03:45
Hey Uncomfortable,
Here's my 250 Cylinder Challenge submission, coming on the heels of my last submission (I had started work on it after my first animals submission while waiting for feedback).
The cylinders in boxes portion was tough, but I didn't really make it any easier on myself. I wanted to step outside of my comfort zone with box construction and try some different approaches than the one I would default to in the past, which was making a Y to start things off. This time around I experimented with constructing different faces first, or just going with things edge by edge in different orders. I did, admittedly, find myself getting backed into a corner with some of my attempts, but in the spirit of being bold, it did help to further my understanding of boxes in 3D space while getting a better grip on the construction of cylinders/circles/squares in perspective.
In any case, thank you in advance for taking the time to look things over, and my apologies for the lack of numbering on the boxed cylinders/clutter of error checking marks. Hope you're well!
Uncomfortable
2019-01-21 22:12
Nice work completing the challenge. You were definitely very thorough in working through these, and I can definitely see improvement over the set. The cylinders are notoriously difficult just because there's so many sets of parallel lines to be mindful of, and precision is quite challenging - it's for this reason that lessons 6 and 7 allow for the use of ellipse guides and rulers, but working through this challenge helps a great deal in understand how to apply the use of such tools.
One thing I noticed here and there in your cylinders-in-boxes was that you often extended some of your lines in the wrong direction. For example, on the last page, you've got the cylinder on the bottom right with its green lines being extended towards the viewer, rather than away.
I definitely feel that as you work through them, the cylinders themselves start to feel considerably more solid, and while the square proportions are still elusive at times, you're getting more consistent. So, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 6.
I do want to mention though that you've definitely submitted quite a few times this month. Generally the tier is priced at what would be fair for one submission, though I'm always flexible enough to accept in order to keep from impeding a student. That said, I am going to ask that you hold off on any further submissions until February, and try not to submit quite so many times so close together.
I expect that with the massive increase of submissions I've received this month (the average submission rate is about 2.5 per day, but over the last week I've been looking at more than double that), I'm probably going to make some changes including increasing some of the tiers' pricing (the $10 tier will remain as is), and imposing a 2-week-between-submission rule. I'm considering other things as well, as I'm getting really swamped.
Uncomfortable
2019-01-22 00:10
Thanks for increasing your pledge! It's much appreciated, and I'm glad you felt the critiques I gave warranted it.
dvdjrnx
2019-01-22 03:10
Hey Uncomfortable, it is the least I can do, really. Everything that you mentioned in your other comment is completely fair, and you do deserve to be well-compensated for the service you're providing. I am sincerely grateful and appreciative of it. I also appreciate that you shared your view of submission frequency and how it relates to your workload/return. I hadn't been mindful enough of that.
As for why I've been submitting so much recently, that's simply a matter of this being how I spend my free time. I have goals that I want to achieve and a long plan of future courses and lessons to get through, but I was hoping to be able to finish up with Drawabox (my starting point) before moving into new territory. That said, I want to be sure that I'm not taking advantage of your generosity when it comes to your time, so I will be sure to spread out my submissions and get started on a new course to fill the gaps between these lessons.
Again, thank you for everything, including this latest feedback (there's a key insight in there for me). I've been wanting to get serious about my traditional art skills for a while now, and all of this has proven to be a fantastic starting point, giving a much-needed boost of confidence in what I thought were a lacking set of skills. I'll see you in at least a couple of weeks with my submission of lesson 6. Take care until then.
EntropyArchiver
2019-02-08 11:59
Challenge: https://imgur.com/gallery/axzP5XL
I still have lot of work to improve here. Making the circle hit where I want to is still a challenge even after these 250. I think that I just started to get the hang of it. And only "get it" at the end of each set. If I continue for a few more then I will start some improve.
I need to review my straight lines. They have a little wiggle that I didn't notice before even if they hit where I want. I am ghosting the lines and pretty sure I am drawing from my shoulder. Maybe it is my hand is too tight, still too heavy handed or not going to fast enough.
Thank you for your feedback in advance.
Uncomfortable
2019-02-08 21:37
Nice work! I can definitely see considerable improvement in your general understanding of 3D space, proportion and construction of these forms throughout the sets, and I'm very pleased with the conscientiousness with which you're applying the correction and analysis techniques. Your convergences steadily improve a fair bit, as does your ability to feel out what would be more square (and the occurrence of slightly squished ellipses decreases as you work through the set).
Now, I do strongly agree that your line quality has definitely taken a hit here. It's not particularly surprising, since this challenge - especially when you hit the cylinders-in-boxes - is difficult and requires a great deal of thought and focus. That said, while you say you are ghosting your lines, I suspect that you may still not be executing your marks with the kind of confident, persistent stroke that the ghosting method demands.
Always remember that - the ghosting method isn't just about the time you invest into the planning and preparation phases, but rather the whole process of taking the time one might invest in drawing, and separating it out into the planning/preparation steps. If you plan/prepare/ghost/whatever properly, but still execute your mark with a slow, laborious stroke, your marks will still wobble.
It's all about drawing with a confident pace (which causes our control to take a hit) and then ghosting in order to get that control back.
Anyway! You are doing a good job, but you definitely need to rein that wobbling in and invest your time in the right places. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, but be sure to incorporate more ghosting/planes and even super imposed lines exercises into your warmup routine to get back in the groove of drawing with confidence.
Pinocho8
2019-02-20 23:24
Hi Unconfortable,
I completed the challenge. It was pretty hard, requires a lot of focus and improvement was not always linear.
In the second part (from 150 or so) I tried specially to draw from shoulder and to draw through ellipses, because I realized I was not doing so at the beginning
gallery: https://imgur.com/a/9RizT0A
thank you.
Uncomfortable
2019-02-21 19:43
Great stuff! I can see a great deal of improvement overall, and while I can see that it was definitely a pretty big struggle, you never held back from applying the additional correctional techniques and reflecting upon your work to better identify how to move forwards. The first chunk of the work definitely showed a considerable increase in your accuracy when it comes to aligning the ellipses to those minor axes (though you were fairly good at this to begin with, the improvement is visible). The cylinders in boxes was definitely a whole other challenge altogether.
While there's still plenty of room to improve on this front, you're showing considerable growth on multiple fronts. Your estimation of proportions (in keeping faces proportionally square) is much more consistent, the alignment of your ellipses within those enclosing planes, and even the convergences of your boxes have improved a great deal.
One thing that I do want to point out is actually more in relation to the boxes themselves - watch out for situations where you get a little caught up in the lines that share a plane. I can see a number of places where of a given set of 4 parallel lines, they tend to converge in pairs (the members of each pair sharing a plane). Always remember that the relationship between these lines goes beyond the shared corners and planes - it's all about the sets of lines that share a vanishing point, and how all four converge towards that point. So when you're putting that line down, always think about all the lines it is meant to converge with, including those that have not yet been drawn.
Anyway, keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge.
Pinocho8
2019-02-22 15:26
Yes, I've had some trouble with the convergence of the lines in boxes, I will try to think about all four. I like to redo some basic exercises as a sort of warm up
Wheels there I go!
Thank you
LearningForLucy
2019-02-28 01:25
Here's my stuff I guess
Lesson 3 was getting disheartening so I spent \~a week doing this. I'll admit that I didn't spend as much time as I should have analyzing each set after correcting them, so aside from including cylinders in my warm-ups, how many more of these things do I need to do right now?
Another thing I want to say is that I still don't really get boxes, it feels like I can only make a few different boxes and I have no idea how I am supposed to "think in 3-d" consistently, so that exacerbated my issues with the cylinders.
Thanks in advance.
Uncomfortable
2019-02-28 02:19
Honestly, while you definitely had some struggles throughout the second part of this challenge, you did a pretty fantastic job. As you push through, the alignment of your ellipses improves, as do the general proportions of your boxes. There are mistakes here and there, but while you say you're a little sloppy when it comes to the error analysis, you are doing a good job of identifying the alignment of your minor axes and contact points.
Now obviously taking more time to analyze the patterns in your mistakes will certainly improve your overall rate of growth, but as it stands, I can see a definite upward trend. I think the most common mistake I see has to do with the degree of the ellipse being a little too narrow, which throws off the alignment of those contact points. We can see this in 250 and 244 - but it's uncommon enough to tell me that it's something that's gradually diminishing.
I certainly do recommend that you continue doing these as part of your warmup (not too many at a time, as they are time consuming, but a few here and there, and if you're running low on time then even the ellipses-in-planes, modified to try and focus on creating square planes rather than just arbitrary quadrilaterals, can really help.
Also worth mentioning - your linework is quite confident, both on your ellipses and for the straight lines. There's not a lot of stiffening - sometimes your ellipses get a little uneven, but that's pretty normal when it comes to mushing them into some of the more awkward planes.
So! Keep up the good work, and good luck pushing through the rest of lesson 3. Remember that the goal isn't to impress me, it's just to do the work to the best of your ability so I have a body of work that I can assess and use as a basis for my advice and suggestions regarding your next steps.
OrdinaryMushroom
2019-03-09 02:42
Hello Uncomfortable :)
This is my assignment : https://imgur.com/a/GyUMjMI
I think I kind of deteriorated towards the end there /:
Thank you for your time in advance <3
Uncomfortable
2019-03-09 18:47
Honestly your work here is fantastic. You're demonstrating here an enormous degree of patience and care with each and every cylinder - not just in the pretty solid accuracy you've got when it comes to aligning your ellipses to their minor axes, but with the thoroughness of your analyses after the fact. It's very easy, when you've got an ellipse with a minor axis already drawn through it to assume that it's an accurate representation of the true minor axis, but you've very clearly taken your time to found the real one even when it's only off by a degree or two. It's that kind of care that will continue to push you through all of these lessons, and that has contributed to your growth not only in this challenge, but as a whole since you started.
You're definitely developing a good instinct for the alignment of your ellipses, as well as the degrees that would best suit a given plane (considering the contact points and so on). There certainly is room for improvement, but you're getting more consistently in the territory of "good enough" as far as passing at a glance goes, and you'll certainly continue to improve on this front as you plow forward.
Keep working on having your ellipses touch all four corners of their enclosing plane though, and on tightening the ellipses up. You've got many that are within solid margins (as far as the separation between the lines of different passes on the ellipse), and you're definitely maintaining a great deal of accuracy, but every now and then the ellipses either get loose in an attempt to reach out and touch a last edge of the plane, or they fall short. Just something to keep an eye on.
You're doing great here, and are showing a lot of improvement and some excellent habits - keep it up, and consider this challenge complete. Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge next.
OrdinaryMushroom
2019-03-09 23:40
Oh, thank you Uncomfortable. I feel very encouraged by this, and I look forward to the next challenge. And I'll keep at my ellipse exercises (:
steadyh32
2019-03-14 18:21
Hey Uncomfortable,
Here are the 250 cylinders.
With half of the last cylinders I marked where the ellipse should touch the walls, considering the VPs, before drawing it. Hope that's no cheating. I also tried to guess the contact points, but it works much better when I have these guides beforehand.
And I don't know what happened with some of the ellipses, my hand was just dettached from the mind.
Thanks,
Uncomfortable
2019-03-14 20:46
Pretty nice work overall! It's important to acknowledge that since cylinders rest so heavily upon ellipses, they are very difficult to wrangle. As such, a considerable degree of struggling is expected. Don't forget - while learning how to control your ellipses and being able to do them freehand is important, it's the sort of thing we develop over a long period of time, to the point that lessons 6 and 7 both allow for the use of ellipse guides.
Now, you've demonstrated a great deal of care and conscientiousness when working through the first section of this challenge. You're very mindful of identifying the accurate minor axis of each ellipse, rather than letting the one drawn initially distract you. Overall you're pretty close in your judgment. There are a few places where the far end of your cylinder is a touch too similar in degree as the near end, but for the most part you have a good shift that is noticeable, but still quite subtle, so as to suggest a normal degree of foreshortening and scale.
When tackling the cylinders in boxes, your strategy of marking out the contact points is by no means cheating, and frankly, is a solid approach similar to how we place the minor axis down in the previous section. Knowing what you're aiming for helps a great deal, but we still have to exhibit a lot of control to actually hit those points as intended, and as you can see it doesn't always happen.
That said, over the course of the set you demonstrate a tightening of the range of your results - even early on you have the odd successful one, but their frequency increases as you push through, demonstrating a greater reliance on skill rather than luck. There are still some serious outliers though where you may be getting a little confused. For example, when we look at 81, your ellipses there are treating the major axis (the line that bisects the ellipse across its wider span) as though it were the minor axis, giving you a very wrong result. You do seem to pick up on that mistake soon after though.
All in all, you've done a good job. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 6.
lokivii
2019-04-10 20:45
Here are my 250 cylinders! That was way harder than the boxes and I really struggled with the self-checking.
https://imgur.com/a/1qR3gse
Uncomfortable
2019-04-10 22:20
This challenge is technically situated quite a bit later in the flow of the lessons - you can certainly do it at any point, but it does fall under the $10 patreon tier along with the constructional drawing lessons.
lokivii
2019-04-10 22:56
My tier has now been updated.
Uncomfortable
2019-04-10 23:32
Perfect! There's certainly nothing wrong with jumping into the 250 cylinder challenge immediately after lesson 2 (that's kind of the minimum prerequisite I require) but as you noticed yourself, the second half of the challenge really does get pretty deep in the weeds with topics that only really rear their heads at lesson 6. All in all, the challenge is just something that needs to get done somewhere between lesson 2 and 6. If you'd like to see the recommended "next step" after a lesson, you can follow the little links at the bottom of each page - the one on the last page of a lesson will point you to the next lesson that should be tackled.
So as the two halves of the challenge have different goals, I'll critique the first one, then the second.
All in all, with the first 150, you are being quite mindful of the minor axis for each and every one of these, and are certainly being conscientious when it comes to testing them. Where you did struggle a great deal however was with the ellipses themselves. Across the board, I can see that when you draw your ellipses, you do so with a great deal of hesitation. Each one is quite wobbly and uncertain, like you're focusing overmuch on accuracy, and as a result, aren't trusting in your muscle memory.
Sometimes this merely leads to the line being a little wobbly - many of your ellipses are still fairly well rounded. There are many others however where the shape itself falls out of whack, especially as you get into wider degrees. This is definitely something you're going to need to get control of as you continue to move forwards. I believe it's actually something I called out in lesson 2 as well.
The key here is in the ghosting method - in putting all of your time into the planning and preparation phases, and ultimately executing the mark with a confident, persistent pace. The second your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed - all you can do is commit to it and push through. Right now what I'm seeing is that you're not yet willing to commit to that stroke, and so you hold yourself back.
What you may want to do is take a piece of paper and just draw ellipses without any preplanning, without any consideration for where they need to go or how big they need to be - just to loosen yourself up. Your lines can be smooth and confident, you just need to allow yourself to do it. Reining them in and gaining control over them is a matter of applying those first two steps of the ghosting method - not in drawing more slowly or more carefully as the pen touches the page.
You're certainly just as conscientious and patient when it comes to the second half of the challenge, extending all of your lines, checking your minor axes and convergences. There are a few places I noticed where you extended some lines in the wrong direction (towards the viewer, rather than away). Remember that we're meant to extend them towards their implied vanishing point, so we can see how those lines converge towards it.
The other important point to keep in mind is what this approach actually tests. When applied only to the boxes, it's merely checking if each set of 4 parallel lines converges consistently towards their shared vanishing point. Relatively simple.
Once we throw the ellipses into the mix however, and add the minor axis or contact-point alignment to those sets of lines from the boxes, then we start talking about two different, but related things:
Whether or not the face of the box is reasonably square
If it is, then whether or not the ellipse itself was drawn correctly within it.
In general, you'll find that 80% of the problem if those lines don't align correctly, falls on the face of the box not being a proper "square". That is, square within the terms set out by all the implied vanishing points, and the way that box has defined the space in which it exists.
So once you've gone through a page of these cylinders in boxes, and you apply your checking method, what you want to be paying attention to is what it says about those proportions. In a lot of cases, you can point out, "well this face was probably too long in one dimension", or "this one was pretty squashed". And so you take those points into account when drawing the next set of boxes.
Given that there's a lot here to deal with, it is understandable that it looks like you may not have conveyed that sort of awareness from page to page in terms of which direction you should be going. You did certainly improve, but perhaps not with the kind of efficiency that would be ideal. Still, baby steps.
So all in all, you've got a couple things to keep in mind:
More important than anything else - get those ellipses smooth and confident. Flow above all else. Loosen up.
Consider what your line extensions are telling you about the nature of your mistakes - think about why they're suggesting that the faces you're placing those ellipses into aren't squarish (within a reasonable margin of error), and what you need to adjust in your next box.
Also worth mentioning, your boxes certainly do have issues with their line convergences themselves, so that's something else you're going to want to continue practicing. Look at those line extensions and ask yourself what's going wrong, and work on improving on those specific issues on the next page. You may want to look back at the critique I gave to your box challenge as well, as I did point out specific kinds of things to keep in mind while drawing your boxes.
Anyway - congratulations on toughing through this doozy of a challenge. I'll go ahead and mark it as complete. You should move onto lesson 3 as your next step, but keep on top of practicing your boxes, ellipses and cylinders as you continue to move forwards.
lokivii
2019-04-10 23:43
Uncomfortable, thank you for the review. Your correct that I still hesitate and do not commit to my ellipses. I find that I get really frustrated easily here and my instinct is to lock my elbow onto the table I'm drawing on. Stopping myself from doing this seems to help, but it is still a struggle. I did notice some similarities between this review and the last two, in that it seems like I'm just not ghosting enough. I suspect that I will gain an understanding for when to strike and how long to ghost, but is 4-5 ghosts to little?
Understanding the vanishing points is something I just can't wrap my head around and it seems like every time I get a handle on it I lose it. During the last couple of pages, I started drawing my boxes top down, meaning I would do the first square and then do the connecting bottom square. This goes against your advice of focusing only on one VP's lines and allowing the rest of the box to sort of draw itself. (paraphrasing here) I'll go back to lesson 2 and look at that critique to see if I can understand further.
Lastly, I felt like I was repeating the same box just over and over. Did you notice this too during the review? What can I do to break myself out of that box's comfort zone?
Uncomfortable
2019-04-11 00:43
You may find that it's less about how many times you ghost (4-5 sounds fine to me) but more about how your arm is moving during the process (locking down to the elbow will make the movement more erratic, while moving from the shoulder will be more even and driven more by the single pivot, making it more predictable and regular). In addition to this, your rhythm is important - make sure you're not missing a beat between ghosting and execution. No pauses in between. Ghost until it feels comfortable and familiar, and continue repeating the motion but press your pen to the page.
I'm not terribly concerned about repetition in your boxes, and didn't feel that it was noticeable. Boxes by their nature don't have a lot of options - you're either looking at them dead on, from below, from above, or from either side. I can see that you jumped from one to the other, and may have repeated the same configuration quite a bit, but as long as you're not doing the exact same one many times in a row, you're fine. Boxes are just an excuse to practice parallel lines and familiarize ourselves with how those VPs work.
lokivii
2019-04-11 00:45
Thank you for answering my questions.
paperrush
2019-04-30 23:43
Hi Uncomfortable. Here are my cylinders: https://photos.app.goo.gl/AoCnSG7cmgHRvxfR6
Let me know what you think. I appreciate your time.
Uncomfortable
2019-05-01 20:17
Overall you've done a pretty good job, though I do have a few things I'd like to point out:
To start out with a good point, you demonstrated an incredible degree of patience and care with applying your line extensions to analyze your results and identify patterns of mistakes. You did a great job identifying minor axes, for instance, which isn't easy when there's already a line present that you were trying to match. It requires you to ignore what is right there in order to find the true minor axis. Well done.
I definitely noticed that for the first section of this exercise, you didn't really vary the orientation of your cylinders at all. All those pages basically look like they're close to the same. A lot of the value in these kinds of exercise comes from being sure to change the orientations up, try different angles, shallow/dramatic foreshortening, etc.
All in all, your cylinders-in-boxes are coming along well. It's a difficult thing to tackle, and there's plenty of room for growth and improvement here, but you are trundling down the right path. Often times I see students here with boxes that are sorely out of whack, but yours generally do seem to be coming along fairly well. Your convergences are pretty consistent, so you're giving yourself a pretty solid basis for those cylinders. Similarly to how you're drawing your boxes with an awareness of how those lines need to converge towards their vanishing points, the same is going to be necessary with the ellipses (although this is obviously a lot harder, because it's not as easy to visualize the various elements of the ellipses. Thinking about where you want the ellipse to touch its bounding plane and even marking that out with tiny points may help.
It's also worth mentioning that you have a lot more variety with the cylinders in boxes than your first section, so it's good to see that the problem didn't bleed over into here.
Keep up the good work, and consider this challenge complete. Be sure to keep doing some of these as part of your warmups every now and then however, so you continue to develop these skills and keep them sharp.
paperrush
2019-05-01 21:40
Thank you for the tips and the in-depth review. Much appreciated.
NavrcL
2019-05-03 11:04
Hi, here are my cylinders: https://imgur.com/a/VX5QJr5
I had some troubles figuring out the second part, but it started getting a bit better towards the end.
Anyway, thank you for your thoughts.
Uncomfortable
2019-05-03 18:46
Honestly, you may have had trouble with certain parts, but frankly I think your work here is spectacular. And that's saying a lot, especially considering that this isn't really the recommended time to tackle this exercise. You're certainly allowed to - you're allowed to complete the cylinder challenge any time after lesson 2 and before lesson 6 - but it's generally recommended that students do it on the later end of that spectrum. The reason for this is that it is a difficult task.
The first section isn't too difficult, and you did a solid job of it. Your lines were drawn with clear use of the ghosting method, and your ellipses maintained an even, smooth shape. You did a pretty good job of aligning them to the minor axis lines, and did an even better job of going back and identifying where there were slight deviations - this is by nature tricky when you've already got a line there asserting itself as the minor axis, even if it's a bit off. So great work there.
The true challenge in this exercise however is the second part - it leverages what students learn in the 250 box challenge as a foundation (something that while most students have developed well, have plenty of room to keep developing). This means that the underlying foundation isn't as reliable as we'd like - mess up the box, and the resulting cylinder will suffer for it.
All the same, you did a fantastic job. It's true that you did take some time to get used to how those ellipses would fit into the planes, but you picked up on this reasonably quickly, and also were able to get the proportions of your boxes pretty close to having two paired squares on either side (which helps to avoid cylinders that feel more squashed).
Your further error checking was as thorough and conscientious as before. You clearly took your time and thought about the relationships between the various lines, and used this information to help develop your approach further as you pushed through.
To put it simply, I have no issues to raise - you've done a fantastic job, have exhibited the qualities I want to see in my students, and have clearly learned and grown from the challenge. Keep up the great work and consider this challenge complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.
NavrcL
2019-05-06 05:53
Thank you for you great feedback!
I have to admit that I've learnt a lot in just one month following your lessons.
Thanks
ThunderEasy
2019-05-04 20:56
Hi, here's my 250 cylinders.
https://imgur.com/gallery/F2eySkH
As always, thank you for your time!
Uncomfortable
2019-05-05 16:24
Overall you've done a pretty good job. I do have a few comments to share however. Before we get into that though, I do want to commend you for your patience and conscientiousness. You've taken great care in applying the line extension techniques to each cylinder, and I can certainly see signs that you are thinking about what this analysis is telling you, and attempting to act upon it to develop your spatial skills further. Cylinders in particular, especially when drawn inside of and aligned to existing boxes, are very difficult. With the 250 box challenge, it's normal to see some pretty significant growth over the course of the full set. It is on the flipside entirely normal for the growth seen over the cylinder challenge to be less stark, so don't let that discourage you at all. Your cylinders are already pretty good, what we're working on right now are the subtler characteristics of the form that aren't as easily identified with the naked eye. The growth is definitely there.
So there are a couple things I noticed that you'll want to keep in mind:
I noticed that you mixed up the cylinders-around-minor-axis and the cylinders in boxes, doing a few of each per page as you progressed through the set. It would have been better had you stuck to the order in which they were presented in the instructions - first doing the 150 around the arbitrary minor axis, followed by the 100 in boxes. Reason being, the first set is intended to focus purely on aligning your ellipses to the minor axis, and really hammering that out. Then when you move onto the second set, you wouldn't need to expend as much focus on that particular area, instead targeting the challenges specific to constructing cylinders in boxes.
On occasion, I noticed some of your linework got doubled up, suggesting that you may have attempted to correct mistakes by automatically reinforcing the lines. You don't do it too much, but it is still very much worth pointing out. Correcting mistakes is a bad habit - once the mark is down, whether it's correct or not, it's best to leave it be and work around it. Make one mark for every line you put down.
Anyway, all in all you've done well. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
ThunderEasy
2019-05-05 16:54
Yeah its frustrating seeing my mistakes sometimes and I give in to the temptation of redoing the mark. Thanks for the reminder uncomfortable
Arnie_Xeroz
2019-06-10 21:01
Hi, here is my 250 cylinders.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/xN4RSrjvMiSjWQ4k7
Thank you for your time and critique!
Uncomfortable
2019-06-11 17:49
So! To start with, your first section is looking pretty good. Your ellipses are confidently drawn, and as such are evenly shaped and generally maintaining their integrity rather than getting distortion or overly stiff. I'm also pleased with your attention to the "true" minor axes of each ellipse, which can be especially tricky when faced with an existing minor axis that you tried to hit in the first place. Taking the time to look closely and identify where you're deviating from it is difficult, but you definitely invested the time appropriately.
One minor point I did notice was that while you're doing a great job with the degree shift from one end to the other, the overall size of your ellipses remains pretty much the same. Try and push your far end to be just a little smaller (in terms of overall scale) than the closer end in order to show some very slight foreshortening, rather than staying so close to being isometric.
For the second half of the challenge - the cylinders in boxes - I can see that you're overall doing a good job of working through the steps of construction, of first being fairly mindful of the convergences of your boxes' sets of parallel lines. There is certainly room for improvement in terms of the alignment of your ellipses' contact lines and minor axes but this is definitely a challenging thing to tackle.
It's worth mentioning that this challenge can be done anywhere between the completion of lesson 2 and the start of lesson 6 - so you definitely got it out of the way early on, without the extent of mileage many other students may have already had. So these kinds of issues are entirely normal, and to be expected. Hell, they're expected even for students who are working through this closer to the end of that recommended period.
One point that does stand out to me however is that your linework does trend a little more towards the seemingly rushed. Your lines are still straight, and fluid, and reasonably precise, but overall I get the impression that you were moving through this section with considerable gusto, rather than necessarily analyzing your results as carefully and focusing on each individual line as much as you could have. This comes through more in the tendency for your lines to fade out a great deal past the midpoint of a given stroke. Additionally, closer to the end of the set, your boxes start to suffer somewhat, with their convergences becoming less consistent. We know you're entirely capable of pushing through with the appropriate degree of patience and focus, but it definitely wanes around this point. Again, understandable as you probably want this hell and torment to be over with, but it is one of those things we need to work towards wrangling. If we start to rush, if we lose focus, it's best to take a step back and come back after a bit of a break.
Anyway! Overall you are absolutely on the right track, and are doing a good job of moving forwards on the core aspects of this exercise. Keep at it, and feel free to move onto lesson 3.
Arnie_Xeroz
2019-06-11 19:13
Hey, thank you again for the in dept analysis and critique, i felt like my ellipses or anything organic in general i struggled with the most so i went ahead and did the cylinder challenge early to practice what i seem to have trouble with the most.
once again thanks for the time!
[deleted]
2019-06-15 09:19
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2019-06-15 17:37
To start with, it's worth mentioning that while you're cleared to tackle this challenge immediately after finishing lesson 2, it isn't required until before you start lesson 6, and due to the complexity of the challenge (mainly the second half), doing it later is recommended as students end up with a lot more mileage and a stronger overall grasp of 3D space. I'm stating this prior to actually looking at your work, as it's something that always be taken into consideration regardless of how well your challenge actually went.
So! Looking at your first section, you've definitely taken off at a good pace. At the very beginning, I noticed that your ellipses tended to be a little stiff, a little uneven, but as you push through into the second page and onwards, they start to loosen up and grow a little more confident and smooth. This is important, as it helps keep your ellipses evenly shaped, which is critical for construction. On occasion there's still a touch of stiffness, but you're definitely showing improvement on this front.
I'm fairly pleased with your error checking against the alignment of each ellipse - you're generally doing a good job of ignoring the big minor axis you drew around, focusing instead on the ellipse itself and pinning down what its true minor axis is. It's quite easy to get distracted by that big line, feeling that everything is in order due to how it asserts itself, but you've done a good job of looking pats that at what is really there.
I'm also seeing a pretty good tendency to shift the degree of your ellipses from one end to the other. The shifts aren't too dramatic, but tend to be in line with the overall foreshortening of the cylinder as a whole - they are usually going to be pretty proportional in tha manner - that is, as regular foreshortening will effect just how much smaller the far end gets, so too will it determine how much wider it gets as well, relative to the closer end. There are a couple where the degree didn't quite shift enough (like 90 for instance) but they did not constitute any sort of trend, and so I'll chalk them up to the odd slip-up.
Now, for the second half, it's fair to say that you definitely struggled a great deal. As mentioned at the beginning of this critique, that's no big surprise - you're fresh off lesson 2, and don't necessarily have the kind of experience that other students might have had when tackling this particularly demanding exercise.
There are a few tendencies I notice, some of which you definitely improve upon, but all of which are worth mentioning.
The first that jumps out at me is a tendency to have your ellipses sometimes sit within the plane, but not actually occupy all of it. Always push yourself to get the ellipse to touch all four edges of its enclosing plane, while remaining evenly shaped and properly elliptical. This is vastly more difficult than it may seem.
The alignment of those contact points are usually a big pain point for you, and that's entirely normal. It really is at the core of this exercise's difficulty, and it has a tendency to really mess with our minds as we draw them. Stepping back and thinking about it objectively, there are three properties of each ellipse - its overall scale, its degree (width) and its orientation. These are the three tools we have to modify that ellipse in order to get it to fit within a given space. Adjusting them will yield different configurations within its containing plane, and changing one will generally require you to compensate with another in order to keep touching all four edges of the plane. The key is to get used to 'pinning' one property (usually the orientation of the ellipse, and therefore the alignment of its minor axis) and then adjusting the other two (degree and scale) to achieve contact points that align correctly towards another vanishing point.
Now on cylinders like 249 are definitely showing considerable improvement 0 it's not perfect, but you're showing that you're able to demonstrate some degree of control over where the minor axis and contact points align to. I am however still seeing many cases (247, 246) where you're not expanding the ellipse to touch all four edges of the plane, so you definitely want to work on that more purposefully.
I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete - you've definitely learned a great deal from this, but be sure to continue practicing and applying it as you go.
hanareader
2019-06-25 17:51
https://imgur.com/a/cLhNW4t
Uncomfortable
2019-06-25 17:57
It looks like you're submitting a little early - your last submission was on the 14th, so you'll have to hold onto this until the 28th and post it then. I did however notice, with a quick glance, that through your cylinders in boxes you only seemed to be applying your line extensions to the containing boxes, and were not similarly checking the alignment of your minor axes and contact points for the ellipses of each of those cylinders. That definitely would have helped you get even more out of the exercise.
hanareader
2019-06-25 18:01
So we submit after corrections or after we first post a lesson? Okay, I will do that.
Uncomfortable
2019-06-25 18:04
While the requested revisions can be submitted immediately, you can essentially see "the clock" as being based on the last time you submitted something, including those revisions. This is both to ensure that we're not getting bombarded with too many submissions from a single student in a month, and that the student is not encouraged to rush through any a lesson's work.
hanareader
2019-06-28 18:20
without boxes
with boxes
I don't know what I was thinking, please ignore the early blue lines. I extended the minor axis using a ruler, but only the extensions, the inside line is still ghosted freehand. Sorry about posting too early.
Uncomfortable
2019-06-28 23:36
Whew, okay. So over the course of this set, I'm noticing that you're definitely improving in the overall quality of your ellipses. You're getting pretty good at drawing them evenly and confidently, and while they do stiffen up just a little bit when you put them in planes, I'm seeing a lot of improvement there as well, and the stiffness is pretty minor by the end of it. One thing on that point I want to recommend is that you try and stick to drawing through your ellipses 2 full times - no more than that (and obviously no less). Drawing through it several more times generally comes from a lack of confidence, and you're already getting them in place with those first two passes that the next few are only hurting rather than helping.
One point I do want to mention is that your straight lines - mainly the sides of the cylinders - seem to have a little bit of wavering to them that suggests that you might not be using the ghosting method as conscientiously here as you could be. Your boxes are actually generally well drawn (with a few wobbly lines here and there, but most being quite straight), but the cylinders' lines are a lot more hesitant. Definitely keep on top of that, and don't let yourself get sloppy, even if it means slowing down overall and giving yourself more time.
I actually noticed something pretty interesting when giving your ellipses a close look. When drawing them in the first section (where you were constructing cylinders around an arbitrary minor axis), you actually did a really phenomenal job of aligning them to that central line. You were only off by a little bit, barely enough to really catch with the naked eye (although you still picked up on them when going back over to do your corrections, which is great).
Your cylinders in boxes were a different story, however. The margins by which you were off were a lot larger, and the corrections you put in were also off by quite a bit. You can see the differences on this page, where I've drawn the mathematical minor axes for each ellipse. I picked some from the end of both sections just for comparison's sake and used a tool to find the minor axis of each.
So what's happening is that the fact that you're drawing it in a box is throwing you off, not only when it comes to drawing the ellipses themselves (which is totally normal, as balancing the degree and orientation of an ellipse inside of a plane is very tricky), but also when going back to analyze your mistakes. Of course, ironing out the issues in the latter (by taking more time, and reacquainting yourself with what the minor axis actually is) will help you, in time and with practice, nail down the former.
All in all you've demonstrated a great deal of patience working through this exercise, and while there are plenty of areas for improvement, you're headed in the right direction. Since this doesn't come into play as much until lesson 6, you certainly do have time to continue honing your skills with these. But as far as I'm concerned, this challenge is complete. Congrats on the good work.
mistletine
2019-07-07 02:27
Part 1 and 2 of 250 cylinder challenge:
https://imgur.com/a/V0hpina
https://imgur.com/a/Utg00Wu
Hoping this is satisfactory, I feel like my results at the end weren't as impressive as the 250 box challenge. That said I think I improved. Apologies for the odd numbering, I didn't have as much of a system for how I layed my pages out on this one unfortunately, so it sometimes goes top to bottom, bottom to top, or even sideways. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to look this over, have a great day Boxman!
Uncomfortable
2019-07-07 17:56
Very well done! You've demonstrated a great deal of improvement over the set, and a keen eye for identifying the various elements of your ellipses (such as the true minor axes and such).
Starting with your ellipses constructed around an arbitrary minor axis, I can see your alignments improving a great deal, and from the beginning, you're definitely able to look past the minor axis you were aiming to align to and actually identifying the correct axis for each individual ellipse. This allows you to get the most out of checking your mistakes, and it definitely pays off overall.
One thing I am noticing however is that the degree of your ellipses doesn't seem to shift much in many cases. On cylinders like 132, you've got a healthy shift, but in many others the degrees seem roughly the same across both ellipses. Remember that the far end needs to be at least a little wider than the near end, for the reasons explained here.
Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, you continue to do a pretty great job. Your ability of dropping those ellipses into their containing planes well improves consistently across the set, and as always your analyses after the fact continue to give you a solid grasp of the kinds of mistakes you're making. I can also see fewer and fewer boxes that are proportionally squished - so you're continually trending more towards cuboid/square boxes, and as a result pushing more towards properly circular cylinders. There are still a few that definitely get visibly squashed, but you're still applying all of the correct principles to drop your cylinders inside of them.
All in all, your cylinders are coming along great, and you're definitely demonstrating an even further increased level of comfort with your boxes, which will serve you well as you continue to move forwards. This is pretty remarkable, as you definitely chose the earliest point you could to do this challenge (I accept it anywhere between lesson 2 and lesson 6, though I generally encourage folks to do it on the later end). So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep up the great work, and head onto lesson 3.
aethirsol
2019-07-15 02:39
Here are my 250 cylinders, whew! I feel like I did get better over the course of the set. Thanks for reviewing!
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tzk1g9vfytf7hms/AACIpOC8pahKSOwmAuoiZ6Pba?dl=0
Uncomfortable
2019-07-15 20:27
There's definitely a good deal of improvement over the set in terms of how you're constructing your cylinders (both on those constructed around arbitrary minor axes and those constructed within boxes) but there are a few issues I'd like to point out. Some are related to the kinds of errors that come up in your construction, and others have to do with the line quality itself.
Starting with the line quality, there is definitely a certain unevenness to your ellipses and a stiffness to your lines that suggests that you may be falling out of practice with your use of the ghosting method, and that you may not be drawing from the shoulder for many of these strokes. Remember that these are not techniques that are reserved just for those lesson 1 exercises - they should be used with every mark you put down. We take a complex task (putting a smooth, precise mark on the page) and break it into a series of smaller, more easily handled challenges:
First we think about the mark we need to put down and determine its nature. Where does it start, where does it end, what space does it fill, and so on. We also find a comfortable angle from which to approach it. While in this phase, that is all we think about.
Then we make physical preparations to draw it, going through the motion as needed to develop the necessary muscle memory. We're telling our arm how we want it to move, and what we want it to accomplish.
Finally we execute the mark with a single confident motion. At this point we have committed ourselves - our only responsibility at this point is maintaining a consistent trajectory. The second our pen touches the page, there is nothing we can do to improve our accuracy - all we can do is push through and ensure our line remains smooth.
Based on these steps, when correctly following the ghosting method it's impossible to end up with a wobbly line - just one that misses its mark. And that's a much more manageable problem in the long run, so always remember to apply the ghosting method across the board.
For the individual boxes you were using as containers for your cylinders-in-boxes, there were a couple other issues I noticed:
Give this simplification of 1/2/3 point perspective and when to use which from lesson 1 a read, and keep it in mind. In a lot of cases you are following those principles, but I think you do have a tendency to let your lines just run parallel (towards an infinitely far vanishing point) when it isn't necessarily the best choice for a certain set of lines. If, for example, we've got a corner of a box pointing straight at the viewer, then you will want to have some visible convergence for all three sets of lines.
I noticed that when your cylinders got longer (resulting in longer boxes) you had a tendency to focus on the convergence of a given set of parallel lines in pairs, rather than how all four converged together. This resulted in different vanishing points for each plane, rather than one shared one for all four parallel lines.
Overall you definitely still do have a lot of room for improving upon your boxes' convergences. Make sure that when you're drawing a line as part of a box, that you think about how it is actually going to converge with all the other lines it is meant to run parallel to, including those that haven't yet been drawn. Think about how all of their orientation needs to be set in order to meet at that single vanishing point. Don't jump in thinking about how the lines meet at corners, or how they define a plane. And of course, don't forget about these notes.
Generally setting aside the box containers themselves and the quality of the lines, the actual construction of the cylinders is generally coming along well. The only recommendation I have there is that you should avoid a lot of the extremely exaggeratedly long cylinders you threw in there. They have a tendency of incorporating a lot of foreshortening, which becomes very distracting when trying to focus on learning how to construct a cylinder and mind the minor axes and degrees of its ellipses. It also makes it more likely that you're going to draw a lot of those tiny arms from your wrist or elbow rather than from your shoulder.
I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, but you definitely should continue to practice your freely rotated boxes as part of your regular warmup routines, along with the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 (as I hope you have been doing up til now). Feel free to move onto lesson 6.
aethirsol
2019-07-16 02:05
Thanks so much! :)