Following on from my thoughts yesterday on how tricky it is to draw ellipses accurately I decided on some focused practice today. To get this off the ground I combined my filtered photo of some cans with a variety of ellipses created in Microsoft Word. What immediately struck me is just how non-circular the tops of the cans are; the central lid is around twice as wide as it is high while the other ends are very far from circular. I also hadn't realised how much the sides of the middle can draw together but I guess that perspective is important even at close quarters:
So, for the sake of practice, I printed three copies of the worksheet and worked through them one after the other. The idea here is that I'm trying to create some muscle memory for all of the ways in which I'm going to see ellipses in real life. Also, with the second sheet, I realised the foolishness of trying to draw the many elliptical indentations in the can lids - it's impossible to draw a line which matches the edge of the lid and, as a result, the faults in both lines are obvious:
With the third sheet I tried to relax a little and to see if the line would flow. In reality it sort of did but my hand would keep stopping for no good reason and tended to veer off the line. I also thought I'd add some of the label detail to the tins and this was also a touch tricky - mainly because perspective again changed some of the lines which my mind imagined to be parallel. This drawing lark isn't as easy as it looks!
