Drawing circles sounds easy, but drawing a perfect circle freehand is almost impossible.
The 11th century artist, Giotto, was asked to send the Pope an example of his drawing skills before he was commissioned to paint a work of art. To show how good he was, he sent the Pope a perfect freehand drawing of a circle. Giotto got the job!
You can draw circles by drawing round circular objects like plates or jar lids, or you can use a compass.
The width between the point of the compass and the pencil is the radius of the circle. The line you create is the circumference, meeting up where you began, creating a circle centred around the point of the compass.
A circle fits perfectly inside a square, only touching the midpoints of each the four lines that make up the outside of the square. We can use this fact to help us draw a circle freehand.
Drawing circles freehand is not easy. You need to loosen up a bit. One good exercise is to draw circles round and round in a scribbly fashion, to get your hand moving freely and smoothly. Then draw pages of circles of different sizes.
If you get tired, stop. there is no point practicing to draw bad circles! try and draw the best circles you can. With a little daily practice, your circles will improve.
It might seem a bit silly drawing so many circles, but this was exactly how you learned to write your abc, filling pages with letters of the alphabet, and that worked!
This creates what is called muscle memory. Just as you learn to ride a bicycle, you can learn to draw circles and the muscles in your hands will remember how to do it again and again, just as you don’t have to think about the physical act of writing while you write a note or a shopping list.
Learn to draw circles confidently as so many drawn objects are based on this shape.
Task: Draw circles. Start with some sweeping circles with maybe ten revolutions for each circle. Then fill the rest of the page with circles. Do this every day as a quick warm-up exercise and you will soon be drawing beautiful circles.
The index for this course is at http://www.shooraynerdrawing.com/..