when redoing the cylinder class, I realized that the best way to maintain the shading color, stroke color, and fill color is to draw two arcs with the same fill color: one draws the shading and the other draws the stroke color and completes the circle so it looks like a stack of ellipses but it's actually a stack of arcs
I've found that using the pen tool on Illustrator and trasnferring the points to a Processing file is a much more rewarding process than trying to figure out bezier curves and doing the incredibly slow math of trying to figure out the control points compared to the anchor points, it is significantly less frustrating, but still requires some work to figure out missing points so it doesn't feel like the computer is doing all the work
additionally, I don't feel more inclined to copy the picture exactly just because it's now a feasable possiblility, but, rather, I feel that I am able to choose paintings that I otherwise would have shied away from because I feel like I'm able to solve more complex problems