Why do my ellipses look like bent coins?

Cups, bottles, wheels, tins, plant pots, arches and the rims of every vessel you will ever draw are ellipses, and a wrong one is instantly visible even to someone who cannot say why. There are only about four things that go wrong, and once you can name them you can correct an ellipse in seconds instead of redrawing it five times.

Step by step

1. Draw the axis of the object before the ellipse.For a cylinder standing upright, that is a vertical line up the centre. For a tilted glass, it is the line the glass points along. Everything else hangs off this line, so get it right first.
2. Put the minor axis on that line.An ellipse has a long axis and a short one, at right angles to each other. The short one — the minor axis — always lies along the object's axis. This single rule is what stops a wheel looking as though it has fallen off its hub, and it is the rule most often broken.
3. Make the ellipse symmetrical about both axes.Fold it mentally across the long axis: the two halves must match. Fold across the short axis: those two halves must match too. Beginners routinely make one end fatter than the other, which is only correct in a proper perspective construction of a very wide object, and almost never what has actually happened.
4. Round both ends.The commonest fault after the axis is a pointed end, like a leaf or an eye shape. A circle in perspective never comes to a point. If anything the ends of an ellipse are the parts of the curve that turn fastest but they are still curves.
5. Judge the degree by how far the circle is from your eye level.The nearer a circle is to your eye level, the flatter its ellipse. At eye level exactly it is a straight line. The further above or below your eye level it sits, the more open it becomes towards a full circle. That is why the rim of a cup opens up as you lower it and closes as you raise it.
6. Open the ellipses as they get further from eye level on the same object.On a tall glass with the eye level near the rim, the top ellipse is narrow and the base ellipse is noticeably rounder. Drawing both the same is a very common error and it makes the glass look like a flat sticker.
7. Draw it as one continuous movement, not in segments.Ghost the shape two or three times, then go round in a single sweep from the arm — or several fast overlapping sweeps and pick the best line. Ellipses drawn in four separate arcs get corners at the joins.
8. Check it by turning the paper upside down.Asymmetry that was invisible becomes obvious the moment the drawing is rotated. It is the fastest check there is.

Tips

• The visible base of an opaque cylinder is the front half of that lower ellipse. Draw the whole ellipse lightly, then erase the back half — cups drawn without doing this almost always sit wrong.
• For a wheel on a car or a bike, the minor axis lies along the axle. That is why a wheel drawn upright on a receding car looks so badly wrong.
• An ellipse guide or template is not cheating and every industrial designer owns a set. Learn to draw them freehand as well, because a template will never be exactly the degree you want.
• Practise by filling a page with ellipses of one degree, all with their minor axes parallel. Ten minutes of this measurably improves everything cylindrical you draw.

Common mistakes

• Aligning the ellipse with the edge of the paper rather than the object — On a tilted object the ellipse tilts with it. Keeping it horizontal because the page is horizontal is what makes a leaning bottle look broken at the neck.
• Pointed ends — It turns a circle into an eye shape or a lens. Circles in perspective have no corners at any viewing angle.
• Making the far half of the ellipse shallower than the near half — It is an over-application of perspective. At any sane viewing distance the difference is imperceptible, and forcing it makes the ellipse lopsided.

If it doesn't work

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