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5:28 AM, Tuesday November 2nd 2021

Thanks once again for all your remarks. I failed big time... I started to focus on drawing a year ago with Draw a Box so I get I have a awful lot to learn compared students from together backgrounds.

That's why I still tend to cling to symbolic drawing as it is difficult for me to see all the construction process behind a picture right away. I definitely need to add more construction lines when I draw my plants and more step into creating my drawing.

If I start right away with contours and (even small) texture details, they'll tend to keep on appearing flat.

Anyway I have a question. In the critics It often comes up that I tend not to draw through ellipses. I think I understood what It means but I would like to confirm it. Not drawing through my ellipses means I tend to disassociate the flow with the center of the ellipse is that right?

But Marshall Vandruuf in his perspective lessons on black board with chalks explains they are some cases like when drawing a wheel and its axe. In this case, the center of the ellipse does not coïncide with the center of the circle...

How can I check if I'm drawing though my ellipses (or not)? Should I use my french curves and draw a funnel around? The exercice when we learn to draw through ellipses is the funnel exercice isn't it?

2:31 PM, Tuesday November 2nd 2021

So you may have forgotten what it means to 'draw through' ellipses, because it's much simpler than that - although to be fair, we do use the term "draw through" for two independent things, which obviously lends to the confusion. In the context of drawing forms (like boxes), it means drawing as though we have x-ray vision, so we can see all of its edges, including the ones that are blocked from view. So for example, in terms of what I mentioned about your clusters of flower petals or groups of leaves, I'd want you to "draw through" them (in other words, draw each one in its entirety, not cutting them off where they're overlapped by another).

In the context of ellipses however, I'm referring to what's explained here in Lesson 1 - the idea of simply drawing around the ellipse two full times before lifting your pen.

Hopefully that clarifies things.

4:31 PM, Tuesday November 2nd 2021

I see... I would have use the expression "gosthing method" in this case.. So my problem is that when I draw the ellipses to construct my branches, I tend not to make enough rotations...

Now that I recall, my first first table of ellipses was very much like that....

Thanks for the clarification...

6:27 PM, Wednesday November 3rd 2021

That would imply something quite different. The ghosting method is where we go through the motion of drawing the mark, without the pen touching the page. What we do for ellipses specifically involves having the pen fully touch the page and draw two loops of the ellipse shape before lifting off.

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