Ellipse Drawing Guide - Ran Art Blog

My latest drawing, and some tips for drawing ellipses.

An ellipse (in most cases) is a foreshortened circle.
When you see a circle if front of you it is perfect, but when it is along your line of sight, it gets distorted (becomes an ellipse).

Here you can see the amount of foreshortening clearly (the more a circle is along your line of sight, the more it is foreshortened).

The horizon line is in front of your eyes.
The closer a circle is to the horizon line (assuming it is along your line of sight), the more it is foreshortened.
For a cylinder, it means the top and bottom parts are in different amount of foreshortening.

An ellipse has a Major Axis, and a Minor Axis. They both divide the ellipse to two equal parts.
The minor axis determines the amount of foreshortening.

In addition, the minor axis determines the direction of foreshortening.

Sometimes, it is easy to think of an ellipse as part of a cylinder. The direction of the cylinder is the minor axis.

The center of an ellipse is super important too!
After deciding the amount of foreshortening for each ellipse, if it is built from several parts, they meet in the center of the ellipse.

After your drawing is in perspective, you can render it with textures.

If you are new to texture drawing, you might want to visit my texture drawing guide.

When drawing a watch, its hands and the hour symbols point to the middle of the ellipse.

Tip: To make the hands elevated, draw cast shadows below them (remember to use soft edges for cast shadows).

For a wrist watch, the center of the wrist strap is the point from which you can draw the minor axis, depending on where you want your watch to face.

Here are some examples:

As mentioned above, the center of the ellipse is super important.
Objects that are arranged in a circle can be drawn using an ellipse.
For example, the legs (or wheels) of an office chair:

The same works for propellers and fans.

Once you determine the amount and direction of foreshortening, you can render your drawing.

Wind turbines are just the same. Here I used perspective.

If you are new to perspective, visit my linear perspective guide.

Ran

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