Straight lines and circles without a ruler
Two drills, twenty minutes, and the reason your circles close badly.
Draft copy. This piece was written during the site build and is waiting on an editorial pass — the facts are checked, the prose is not final.
Straight lines
Put two dots on the page about fifteen centimetres apart. Look at the second dot, not at the pen, and draw to it in one movement.
That is the whole technique. Your hand goes where your eye is already looking. Watching the pen tip is what produces a line that drifts.
Do it thirty times. Then do it at different angles, because most people are good at one diagonal and bad at the other.
Circles
Circles fail at the join, almost always, and the reason is that people draw them in one slow careful pass and the two ends do not meet.
Instead: ghost it first. Move the pen in the circle three or four times just above the paper, at speed, then lower it and let the fourth pass land. The motion is already established, so the join is wherever the motion says it is rather than wherever your anxiety puts it.
What to practise
Fill a page with circles of three sizes. Do not erase any of them. The page is the record of a session, not a finished piece — and keeping the bad ones is how you see the improvement a week later.
Next lesson
Dot grids: your first kolam
A 3×3 grid, one unbroken line, about fifteen minutes. The oldest drawing lesson there is.
Keep going
Other lessons
Start here: how to hold the pen
Ten minutes on grip, speed and pressure. Everything else in this section assumes you have done this once.
Dividing a circle: the root of every mandala
Six, eight and twelve divisions with a compass. Half an hour, and after it the geometry families stop being mysterious.
Building a girih pattern from the five tiles
Draw the tile set, lay it out, then draw the strapwork across it and rub the tiles out. Forty-five minutes.