It's hard to believe that I'm 40 days into this project already and I still can't draw circles or ellipses very well. This was made obvious to me with yesterday's study of the pencil sharpener and so today I plumped for a little revision. To achieve this I outlined three circles on a piece of paper and attempted to sketch them when the paper was set at different angles. The idea here was to try and make the ellipses look comfortable in their plane just as they do in these photos:
Just looking at these photos it's clear that the circles are being presented at some angle even lacking any further evidence. However capturing this effect is slightly more tricky. With my first set of sketches I went with the circles face-on (so no distortion) and then set at an angle left to right as well as leaning back slightly. This produced some ellipses where the front edge was somehow most prominent while also narrowing from the bottom upwards. I tried to match this by rotating the axis of the ellipse and this almost worked:
With the second drawing I set the sheet to lean backwards and then to lean forwards at an even steeper angle. In practice this makes the resulting shapes look similar but I think it's clear that something is happening with the plane even if it's not obvious what this is:
I do quite like the ellipses here even if they're not as regular as they should be. So I need to go away and practice some pure ellipses but still this exercise makes it clear how knowing what happens with circles when they're not face-on can help to improve observational drawing of objects with just these characteristics.