Drawing Ellipses

How to draw an ellipse – or how to correct a squashed turnip shape.

Many people struggle to draw ellipses. They normally end up looking something like this a squashed Turnip:

Now there’s nothing wrong with a squashed turnip if that is what you wanted to draw, but normally we were trying to convey the perfect circle of a cup, created on a machine, with not a hint of a wobble, normally, unless you brought it from the seconds shop, then you may have a hint of a wobble.

Firstly lets think about what we know about ellipses. The one I am trying to create is really a circle seen from an angle. The axis is flat and horizontal.It has no pointed corners. It is symmetrical about it’s two axis, so the top half is the same

On our squashed turnip shape we can see the horizontal axis is not horizontal giving it the feeling that it is leaning over – fine if it is on a slope, but normally it is not. Also the top half is smaller than the bottom.

So first draw a horizontal line. Run your little finger down the edge of your sketchpad as you do this to ensure a straight line – this is usually OK if it’s a pad otherwise as we all know there is nothing worse than an paper cut. Although I have considered that having your head cut off may be worse!

Then draw two lines which will be your top and bottom marks the same distance from the middle one. Draw a vertical centre line and then mark on where the two side lines are, again these should be equidistance from the centre line.

Now we just play dot the dot to join up our ellipse. Making sure that it meets all four of the small outer  lines. The curve is quite flat at the front and back but gradually gets tighter as it meets the edges.

I hope this has been useful to you. I would welcome any feedback you can give.