Ellipses

This time we were drawing Ellipses, which I was dreading seeing as I found rectangles in perspective hard enough. We started off by drawing various objects in the studio, trying to get the angle and look of the ellipses right.

This took me a while to get in to. But once Jen demonstrated to me that although the ellipses at the mouth of the mug looks like it has a tight curve around it, you still have to draw it with a smooth gentle curve so the viewer can see it more clearly as a mug, I found this exercise a little easier. Again, I never knew about the tweaking of what you see so that you can draw what is actually there.

After we had practiced on these, we had to go out and look at the ellipses in cars. This was a struggle with the various angles of the car wheels, and the fact these wheels had depth to them that had to be portrayed right to give the impression of a correct car wheel.

I started off by drawing squares with a cross through around where the wheels should be, I found this very helpful with getting the size and even angle correct. I would then turn these squares into cubes to see how deep the wheels should be. This made the beginning process a lot easier to visualise and to see how I had gone wrong. And so I practiced this method on a few cars.