so you can see from the picture at the top of page uh 18 it's important to be able to draw ellipses not just to do car wheels and stereo knobs and uh eyeballs and things like that but also to do uh things in uh in the environment and in architecture so let's start um and I'll do a little quick review of this uh page 18 page 19 so first thing to do just like when you were doing the straight line L is to train your arm to draw nice ellipses and what you want to do is just practice drawing a bunch of these fill up a page draw them different degrees right the degree is how thin or how wide right how narrow or how wide the ellipse is and we're just going to talk a little bit about Anatomy now we're not going to place them yet in perspective so all you want to do is try to draw nice ellipses look where like this disc that didn't connect so try to focus on that and don't don't draw like this super hairy a whole bunch of them because somewhere in there is the perfect ellipse but unfortunately we can't see it because it's covered by all these bad ones so it's a great idea to try and just train your arm to draw one nice ellipse and one clean ellipse that's drawn nicely right even if it's a little bit lumpy but the fact that the line is nice and clean your brain will always think that this is a better ellipse than this one this one just shows everybody hey look here I was having trouble drawing that ellipse so what you want to try and do is just fill up a page s I'm keep smearing this thing I should grab a different pen um for this exact demo it doesn't really matter what you draw with pencil ballpoint now when you draw these if you'll notice right the minor axis for me almost always points in the the direction of my arm so if my forearms here the minor axis when I draw okay tends to point sort of in the direction of my pin but also in the direction of my arm so I know if I need to align my M my ellipse on a minor axis I can just move my arm so if I want to put an ellipse with a minor axis going this way I just move my pad of paper right and if I draw like this I'm drawing the same ellipses as these but now the minor AIS is pointing out right this direction in alignment with my arm so again spinning the pad to locate new uh make new alignments so let's review a little bit of what's talked about on those pages so we already started with that you you fill up a page of nice ellipses right try not to do too many lines over the top try to get no flat spots um now an ellipse has basically some Anatomy we need to be aware of if you divide an ellipse across the narrow Dimension with a line that makes these two sides symmetrical so that you could fold the piece of paper on that minor axis in fact let's just try that here if I fold this piece of paper on the minor axis okay almost got it right there okay so if I fold that okay those two halves will line up on top of each other and you can actually see that they do okay so we can actually see through this paper let's do one that's incorrect let me try to treat this as my minor axis right here okay so there's a nicely drawn ellipse but this minor axis is not right the true minor axis the true minor axis of this ellipse is here so if I fold it along this line right which I already had my fold you'll notice that the two sides do not line up on top of each other whereas on this one they did so this minor axis is correct and this one is not but this one would be the right one okay because I realigned it we'd have to fold the piece of paper let's try that let's realign that put it on my minor axis there we go so I'm folding it on there and you can see pretty close it's a little bit long and pointy on that end but the sides here look very nice and aligned okay so that would be the proper minor axis for this ellipse so after you have a page of these like so what you want to do is go back and try to identify the minor axis so just take these ellipses you have to get your head sort of right over it and I want don't want to block the camera here so let's try and just estimate probably right about there for the minor axis here right let's find one that's a little bit rotated there and so what you can do to check those is do what I did here and just fold the piece of paper and see if they line up on each other if they don't it's incorrect so it's a really simple way for you to go back and check your own work okay now there's one other axis which is the major axis now the major axis divides each half of an ellipse okay and makes each half equal equal along the widest dimension of the ellipse but we never really use it for sketching so you can pretty much forget about it so minor axis that's the last need you to think about Minor axis though is all important major axis not so much okay and you'll see why in the coming pages so one last um thing to practice is uh what you see at the bottom of page 19 you can try to draw almost like you were drawing a cylinder just to give yourself more practice this is not an easy thing to do um let's see draw two straight lines like this and then divide them in the middle like that and draw another straight line and then see if you can line up ellipses that are on treat this as your minor axis okay and draw an ellipse on the minor axis that touches tangent to each one of those lines like I said this is not easy so probably not warmed up enough for this today but let's give it a shot okay draw them in different degrees we're not placing them yet really in perspective we're just trying to practice drawing ellipses on a minor axis right with some constraint because it's these kinds of constraints these mechanical constraints of tangency and a minor axis alignment that we need to master before we can start to place the ellipses in perspective another good one is just start with a line kind of like I did there but I didn't I won't have the constraints of tangency to worry about just align it with however it likes to line up naturally with your arm to help you get a little mechanical advantage and then just try to draw ellipses of varying widths right which is called the degree so how narrow or how wide an ellipse is all right and see if you can place them on that minor axis so those are the things to master before moving on and uh go for it get comfortable with that you're probably going to burn through some pages so maybe work on some really cheap paper copy paper or whatever you've got around drawing medium doesn't matter matter um a like this Copic multi-liner pin is very unforgiving because it's straight black so if you're using a Sharpie or something that unforgiving nature the medium will force you to have better uh craftsmanship but pencil pen doesn't really make a difference but what matters is you start to build a little muscle memory and most importantly of all you start to recognize the minor axis and be able to locate and draw ellipses on the minor axis okay that's job one for this part of the starting part of the book got to have that mastered before we can put them into perspective