LESSON 12 · DRAWING FUNDAMENTALS, DIGITALLY

Three-point perspective, ellipses, and the beginnings of a real environment. Ellipses get most of the room here on purpose: circles in perspective are the single most commonly botched skill in self-taught drawing, and getting them right instantly makes wheels, cups, bottles, barrels and eyes stop looking wrong.

SOFTWARE

Finish first: L11

• A mug and a bottle on the desk in front of you
• The L11 grid template, or a fresh 6000x2400 canvas
• Stabilization set low from L6 - you want the wobble visible

WATCH

moderndayjames — The best free explanation of the minor axis rule, which is the whole game with ellipses.

Winged Canvas — A short, unfussy introduction to the third vanishing point without drowning you in construction lines.

THE LESSON

In one- and two-point perspective, verticals stay vertical. That is only true while you are looking straight ahead. Tilt your head up at a tower and those verticals visibly lean towards each other; tilt it down from a rooftop and they splay apart below you. Give them a vanishing point of their own and you have three-point perspective.

The third vanishing point sits far above the picture for a worm's-eye view and far below it for a bird's-eye view. How far decides how dramatic the shot feels. Bring it close and the building appears to fall over. Push it a long way out and you get a mild, believable lean, which is what most illustration wants.

Cone-of-vision discipline matters even more here. Three-point drawings collapse into nonsense faster than two-point ones when the points are crowded, so work on an oversized canvas, keep the subject in the middle, and crop.

Almost everything cylindrical in the world - wheels, cups, cans, tins, barrels, pipes, tyres, the iris of an eye, the top of a hat - is a circle sitting in space. Draw those circles badly and the entire object looks broken, no matter how good the shading is. Two terms make all of it manageable.

The major axis is the longest line you can draw across the ellipse. The minor axis is the shortest, and it always crosses the major axis at ninety degrees, dead in the middle. Every ellipse has exactly one of each, and if you can place those two lines correctly the ellipse itself is easy.

Here is the rule that fixes most people's cylinders permanently: the minor axis of the ellipse lies along the axis of the cylinder. If you are drawing a mug standing upright on a table, the mug's axis is vertical, so the minor axis of the rim ellipse is vertical too - which means the major axis is horizontal. If you tip the mug over at thirty degrees, the whole ellipse rotates with it so the minor axis still runs down the middle of the mug. Draw the axis line through the object first, then build the ellipse around it. Do not draw the ellipse and hope.

The degree of an ellipse is how open it is, from a flat line at zero to a full circle at ninety. Degree is decided by how far the circle is from your eye level. Hold a mug up to your eyes and the rim flattens to almost a line. Lower it to the desk and it opens up. That gives you a check you can run on any drawing: on a vertical cylinder, the end that is further from the horizon must be the more open ellipse. If the bottom of your glass is narrower than its rim, the glass is wrong.

Four errors account for nearly all bad ellipses. First, pointy ends - an ellipse curves continuously and has no corners, but a wobbly hand produces something shaped like a lemon. Second, tilting the ellipse to match the edge of the box it sits in, instead of keeping the minor axis on the object's axis. Third, drawing both ends of a cylinder at the same degree. Fourth, drawing from the wrist, which physically cannot produce a smooth long curve.

The fix for the last one is the ghosting habit from Lesson 6. Hover the pen and swing the shape three or four times without touching the glass, moving from the elbow and shoulder, then commit. Draw through the ellipse - go round two or three times in one continuous motion rather than trying to close it in a single careful lap. The overlapping loops look scruffy and are far more accurate, and you can always put a clean pass on a layer above.

Photoshop can draw a perfect ellipse. Take the Elliptical Marquee, drag one out, then use Select > Transform Selection to rotate it, and Edit > Stroke to lay a line on the selection edge. That is a genuinely useful tool - but not for making your ellipses. Use it to mark your homework.

Draw your ellipse freehand on one layer. Then, on a layer above in a different colour, drop a perfect marquee ellipse over it and look at the difference. You will usually find that your freehand version is slightly asymmetrical and that its minor axis is a few degrees off. That feedback loop, run twenty times, will teach your arm more in a week than tracing perfect ellipses will teach it in a year.

You also need a way to repeat things evenly as they recede - fence posts, windows, floor tiles, ceiling lights. Even spacing in the world is not even spacing on the page.

Draw the first rectangle in perspective, say the first section of fence. Draw both diagonals across it; where they cross is the perspective centre of that rectangle, not the measured centre. Now draw a line from the top of the near post, through that crossing point, and continue it until it meets the ground line. That point is where the next post goes. Repeat and the spacing is correct all the way to the vanishing point, with no measuring at all.

That one construction, plus boxes, plus ellipses, is enough to build a room, a street or a workshop. Everything else in environment drawing is detail hung on those three things.

PRACTICE · 45 MIN

1. On a fresh layer, draw a horizontal line for the horizon across the middle of the canvas.
2. Draw twenty-five vertical axis lines scattered above and below it. For each one, draw an ellipse centred on the line with its minor axis on that line, opening up as it gets further from the horizon.
3. Now draw twenty-five more on axis lines tilted at random angles. Same rule: the minor axis stays on the line.
4. Ghost every one of them three times before committing, and draw through each ellipse two full laps.
5. On a new layer in a second colour, drop perfect Elliptical Marquee strokes over five of your ellipses and compare. Note whether your error is in the degree or in the axis angle.
6. Put your real mug on the desk below eye level. Construct it: axis line, rim ellipse, base ellipse more open than the rim, walls, then the handle built as a flattened tube.
7. Tip the mug on its side and construct it again from the same viewpoint.

Done when: Fifty ellipses drawn through with the arm, five of them checked against perfect ones, and two constructed mugs whose base ellipse is visibly more open than the rim.

Download these and work along with the lesson.

CHECK YOURSELF

Answer out loud first, then open each one to compare.