Tutorial: Same-Width Arches 1

Arches for doors and windows- even-width arches, that is...


It's not at all difficult to draw an arch...but to draw one with sides of even width, well, that's a bit trickier!

When drawing one straight-on, as with the above images, one could just simply use a ruler, a piece of paper, trace with graph paper...anything that would yield edges of the same width.

The problem comes in when trying to draw an arch at an angle. Since things seem to get smaller as they go off into the distance, those tricks cannot be used, because in a drawing of any kind the edges are NOT the same width- this is how the illusion of depth is created.

What to do, then?

This goes back to the basics, and once again no matter how good you get at this- even if you become five times as good as anything this tutorial shows- it almost always has the basics as the key.

In Fig. 1 I've drawn an arch- but it is enclosed in a nice rectangle. Why?

Because it's easy to shrink or expand squares and rectangles, explained earlier in this tutorial. So- if something, like, say, an arch, is in a rectangle, and a smaller or larger one can be drawn, then maybe whatever is in it can be smaller or larger, too, and it would have to have even edges, since everything would be reduced or enlarged the same way!

And that's the key here.

In Fig. 2, just like in the early part, the classic "X" was drawn. The "X," so important for so much. This is used to expand or shrink shapes; in this case, let's shrink it.

Since the top point of the arch is on the middle of the top line of the rectangle, above the "X," finding it on the other rectangle, bigger or smaller, will be easy. The tricky part are those two other points of the arch, the ones not on the corners.

Just draw lines from them to the center.

That's it- really, honest!

In Fig. 3, a reduced shape was drawn. You can see that the top point will go in the middle of the top of the smaller shape, and as for the other two points? On to...

Fig. 4. Those two go right where the dotted lines meet the smaller shape. That's all there is to it; the rest is just finish-up work.

In Fig. 5, the points were connected, and, since we want an arch, I simply ignored the bottom of the smaller rectangle and drew the side lines all the way down.

And there it is- an arch with evenly-wide sides.

But- does it work for angled arches? On to Part 2!

(Hint: yes it does!)


Part 2:

[link]