Drawing The 12-point Ellipse

Below is one of the sets of handouts I gave my games students yesterday as a supplement to the perspective they learned in another class last semester.  Like the line-weight documents I shared last week, I'm presenting these without the attendant lecture and white board demonstration so it's best for people who already know enough about 1,2 and 3-perspective to draw a square on any plane.

I know several people who can easily freehand ellipses while sketching and that's often good enough, but this method has served me well when the ellipses have to be accurate or freehand drawing isn't working well.

Diagonals!

Had a frustrating day introducing 2-point perspective, but I was actually quite surprised at what seemed to be tripping some of these students up. It's a pretty simple concept -- at least I think it is -- but I thought it might be a good idea to put the relevant info together either to make a handout (which I think promotes intellectual laziness) or a web resource of some sort (which may still inspire some students to be less mentally disciplined, but may save me from explaining the same concept weeks after it was initially introduced).

If this proves useful I might end up doing my whole curriculum in this manner and start a site or blog just to host it as a resource.

So, here's my primer on rectangles and diagonals in perspective.

Note:

The code for this entry got horribly messed up as I uploaded some corrections so I deleted the previous version and just put it up as a new entry -- sorry about the lost comments as a result.

Also, I seemed to have glossed over it in the original: this isn't a full perspective lesson by any means and much of the above info could be quite confusing to anyone not aware of the terminology and set up I'm using with my students.

~R