Ellipses - My Mortal Enemy

The shape of an ellipse is my achilles heel. I never manage to get the shape right. But, It's a critical part of drawing and I know that I need to practice it. It's for this reason that I'm doing the classroom exercises from Wet Canvas; particularly the ellipses.

Here's what I did tonight. This is from a single 18"x24" piece of newspaper that I used tonight. I scanned it in quarters. Because it's essentially just doodles breaking it up doesn't cause any real issues.

I'm aware that this isn't especially interesting reading. But, I need to catalog these efforts for a couple of reasons. First, it keeps me accountable. Second, it helps me to see how I'm progressing and allows me to see later what helped me the most.

First Foray in Figure Drawing - Scribbles and Sketch

Today I made a trip to a crafts store to buy a few items including a figure drawing mannequin.   So, I did some scribble drawing, which I read about in "Basic Figure Drawing Techniques," by Greg Albert.  The premise being that you draw for about a minute while constantly keeping the pencil moving and in contact with the paper.  Below are my first two attempts. 

 

Afterwards, I decided to do a slightly more involved sketch of the mannequin.  This took about 15 minutes. 

After this I decided to sketch a Nutcracker that we still had out from Christmas.  The results were horrible.  I've realized that I have a terrible sense of scale when dealing with live objects.  I'm far better working from a photo.  But, I assume that it's worth the effort to learn to draw from a live model/object.  All in all, I'd say it wasn't a good night for drawing, but hopefully this is just me paying my dues.