🪐 Ellipse Orbit

$ man ellipses

Draw the ellipse that touches all four sides of each dashed box. Start anywhere on the curve; the small accent ticks mark where it should touch. That dashed box has a name — artists call it the plane, and every ellipse you will ever draw sits inside one.

You may lift. A full loop is a long way to drag, and a trackpad simply runs out of room — press again near where you stopped and the same loop carries on. An unfinished loop is never scored: it just waits for you.

Scored on how tightly you hug the true ellipse, going the whole way round, and closing the loop. Five boxes per round, round to slim. The tolerance is set for whatever you are drawing with — the HUD says which — so a mouse is judged as a mouse, not as a pen.

After each loop the truth tilts into view: a real circle rotating in 3D until it matches the target — every ellipse is just a circle seen at an angle. How far it has turned is the ellipse's degree, the word you will meet everywhere else in art instruction. The reveal holds until you tap, and the last box stays up at round end.

Studio tip: ghost it first — with a pen, two or three light passes just above the paper; with a mouse or trackpad, two or three passes without pressing the button — then commit. Speed is not scored: the stroke is resampled to even spacing first, so a fast loop and a slow one are judged on the same geometry. With a pen, going fast is the shortest route to a rounder arc; with a trackpad, steady beats fast, because the cursor speeds up more than your finger does.