How to Draw a Circle

Whilst you might not be able to draw a perfect circle for which Giotto – the great Italian painter of the middle ages – was renowned, and you might not have a pair of compases or a spike and a length of string to hand very readily, it’s still very much more than possible to draw a circle using just pen and eye.

This is, essentially, how it’s done:

Establish the centre of your circle.  You can mark it in some way, or just remember it – but obviously marking it is better.  Once you  have this, mark out north, south, east and west equidistant from it, at the boundary of the circle you want to draw.  Then mark the four directions in between and then, unless the circle you wish to draw is small enough to be drawn with just these  eight points, all you need do is join the dots.  Of course, if the circle is bigger, mark the points in between, and so on until you feel comfortable with drawing the circle from the points you’ve marked.

A circle is one of the most powerful symbols – of protection, of continuation, of all sorts of things.  It is roughly the shape of the stars and planets, and  has  been a comforter to our ancestors into antiquity.