Why I advocate drawing TYRES!?!

No, I'm not a petrol head....

Here’s one of my recent characters… Timmy does train impressions on his nose flute! About a month ago, drawing that recorder would have been a nightmare. I would have spent 20 minutes trying to find a recorder at exactly the right angle to pop into his left nostril. But no more!

Chantelle 2.0 grabbed any old image of a recorder and used her newly acquired knowledge of perspective to draw it at exactly the angle needed to fit snug in that nostril. Choo choo!

The trick? Drawing tyres:

As inflated cylinders, they are the perfect subject to practise drawing ellipses (circles in perspective) which appear on so many common objects you might want to draw… cups, watches, door knobs, nose flutes….

I didn’t come up with this exercise; it’s a challenge from Drawabox.com, a free exercise based approach to learning perspective that I would highly recommend if you want a really accessible way to start improving your perspective skills.

(P.S. I not a modern day Michelangelo: I didn’t free hand those ellipses … I used an ellipse template which looks a bit like this:

They can be a bit pricey but I managed to get a cheap set off Ebay.)

That’s all for today!

Thanks for dropping by,

Chantelle