Study day: Drawing spirals

Occasionally, in the course of my work, or just for fun, I end up learning about something new. I figured in the spirit of student teaching I would summarise the things that I learned. This week: drawing spirals!

I wanted to draw a spiral galaxy for an upcoming project, so I tried a few different things. This is mostly a cautionary tale about how hard spirals are to draw. Here's my first one:

As you can see, it was pretty wonky. I also quite liked the idea of the spiral having wider arms, like a barred spiral galaxy. So I gave that a try.

This was, uh, not what I was hoping for. It would have made a pretty good batarang for some alternate-universe Batman, or maybe a very confused Wu-Tang sign. Maybe if I did one filled in?

Nope.

I tried drawing the spiral using dots instead of lines, and actually I really like the way this came out. Unfortunately, everything else in the project was line art, so while this looked good, it was also really out of place.

So then I draw another one kind of like the first one, which worked out okay. And by okay I mean still wonky, but no so wonky that I didn't use it anyway.

Afterwards, I discovered that drawing spirals is actually difficult for everyone (I thought it was just my lack of drawing skills), and that people who want to draw good spirals just use a compass or some approximation thereof. So that's my lesson for the day: check if you actually need to do something the hard way before you do it.