Hello WereVrock,

It definitely can be challenging to figure out how large to draw those initial ellipses for your major masses, and it does get easier with practice- as long as you’re mindful about what you’re doing.

I appreciate that the above might come across as a dismissive answer, so I can talk a little bit about how to take some of the guesswork out of placing those first ellipses. This is something we don’t talk about in the lesson instructions, as it involves some 2D thinking, and the course is all about getting students to think in 3D.

So, before we put any marks on the page we need to decide where to draw the first ellipse, and how big it is going to be. I’ll use your stag beetle as a reference for this example. I generally find it easiest to start with the largest mass, but you can follow this logic to draw whichever of the major forms you’d like.

Let’s say we’re going to start with the abdomen. It is the lowest and furthest left of the 3 major masses, so we’ll want to place it towards the lower left of the page. We do need to leave space for the legs though, and to decide how much space we need, we can make a simple comparison between the size of the abdomen and the length of the legs. This is something to estimate by observing the reference, however I have physically marked the comparisons on the page here to help you understand what to look for when doing this kind of analysis. We can use a similar logic to decide how much room to leave above and to the right, to fit the head on the page as shown here. We can then use these comparisons to make a more informed choice about the size and placement of the first ellipse, as shown here rather than purely guessing.

Of course our goal isn’t to replicate the reference at all costs, and it is normal to make mistakes. Hopefully the above explanation gives you an idea of what to think about when trying figure out how to place your first ellipses. If despite your best efforts you wind up in a situation where a part of the construction won’t fit on the page (for example a foot or a tail) you can “cap off” the form with an ellipse to keep the construction contained on the page, much like we used ellipses to contain the ends of the branches in lesson 3.