In Drawing for the Absolute, and Utter Beginner I continued my practice this evening by moving onto more complete shapes based upon lines, ellipses and circles. For starters Claire Watson Garcia asked me to draw a whole sequence of cylinders using a couple of ellipses and some straight lines; the tricky part was trying to make the shapes symmetrical around a vertical line. To be honest not many of my attempts pass this test but Rome wasn't built in a day:
After this I moved onto combining an ellipse with a semi-circle to create a bowl - using a central line and occasionally a funnel to help myself along. The main issue that I encountered was an inability to make the two quarters of the bowl match as one side or the other came out too flat. By this measure I'm not satisfied with any of the bowls here but at least I know what I'm aiming for now:
Finally came the chance to combine both of these shapes into something very recognisable - a bottle. In some respects this part of the practice felt a little easier as the bowl and the cylinder played off of each other with the whole being more than the sum of the parts:
This also meant that I was able to put another technique into effect which is drawing a number of guidelines in pencil and then choosing the best of them to follow in pen - with the pencil then being rubbed out. I quite like the pair of bottles which I've inked in here although I do worry that I've drawn how I think a bottle should look rather than how it actually looks when observed. A common fear I'm sure!