Learning to Draw: Identify the Shape of the Subject First

When learning to draw for your design projects, it’s important for you to create and organize your composition in your mind before taking your pencil to paper. It helps to ask yourself specific questions in order to strive for visual balance. Questions like:

1. What size would I like my composition to be?

2. Where do I want to place the major elements of the picture to establish the center of interest?

3. How can I utilize directional and sight lines so the viewer finds what I want him to see?

4. Which angle conveys the theme that I’m trying to express? The scene will look different when observed from different angles, so experiment until you find the one that best suites your vision.

5. Follow up by asking yourself, how can I use color, shadows, textures, and light to create the mood and emotions necessary for my expression to come to life?

The important thing to remember when learning to draw or layout a design is to identify the subject’s shapes first. The best way to do this is to stare at the subject in the photograph or the object that you are trying to draw. This way you don’t have to rely on your memory, you have something concrete to follow. Start by drawing the individual shapes of the object your looking at, slowly and lightly, onto your wall or paper while you look up at the object. This technique is based on the theory that everything is made up of a few basic forms like a sphere, a cube, a cylinder, a pyramid, or a cone. These basic forms are usually found modified or in combinations with each other in all subjects you would draw.

For example, if you wanted to draw a cat onto the wall in your child’s bedroom, you would lightly draw a circle for the face, two small pyramids for the ears, a thick long cylinder for the body, and so on. Always think of the things you draw as if they are transparent and you can see through them. Always sketch the hidden lines too. You can erase them later if you lay them in, lightly, in broken lines on your initial drawing. By drawing shapes you’ll learn to draw realistic looking subjects and scenes. By drawing through your objects you’ll gain an understanding of the depth and space they occupy which will help you see perspective better.

Congratulations! You’ve opened your artistic mind. You’ve drawn some shapes of some objects, and chosen a compositional layout for the photograph that you’d like to bring to life in your drawing. Now tape the original photo of your subject onto a separate piece of paper and mount it next to where you’ll be working. If you’re using an object, move it close to you, so that you can keep it within your eye’s view as you begin to sketch in the details onto your drawing. One of the best ways to show the form of things in your drawings is through the carefully planned use of light and shadow through shading. Everything you need to create a perfect replica of your photograph or object is in the object that’s staring back at you, if only you’d see it.

Begin by applying the following visualization/memorization technique:

1. Stare at the photo or object until you have implanted everything about it into your mind’s eye.

2. Now, close your eyes and try to visualize the photo or object from memory in complete detail.

3. Do you see what I see? Do you see light and shadows?

4. Do you see variations of textures and colors?

Think back, remember when you were a kid and you used to do paint by numbers? Ready, set, go, start at one corner of your drawing and begin to lightly map out the specific shapes within the shapes of your drawing, just as if you were creating a paint by numbers. Try to sketch in every detail exactly as it looks in the photograph or the object.

Regardless of the medium you choose to render your drawings in like pencils, pens, charcoal, watercolor paint, chalk, colored pencils, or oil paint, etc. the marvelous characteristics of color and their various degrees of reflections of light will always influence each other in terms of high key, middle key, low key. Remember that very light far apart strokes called hatching lines, (that look like this – ////) will show the most amount of light, where closer shadings of hatching lines will show the shadows.

Here are the four properties of color and they way they appear to the human eye:

1. HUE – The colors that pigments produce that we give family names to, like red and blue.

2. VALUE – Lightness and darkness of color. Light colors look lighter when surrounded by dark colors, and vice versa. A color’s value contrasts will diminish as its distance increases, black will appear dark gray and light gray.

3. INTENSITY – The richness or saturation of a color. High intensity colors stand out when sprinkled around low intensity colors. Colors become more gray as objects drift back into space.

4. TEMPERATURE – Warm colors seem to move forward, while cool colors recede and appear farther away. Think of the sun and how objects cool off the further they get away from a source of heat.

If you prepare a specific color scheme in advance for each picture by studying the actual colors of your subject, you can organize your painting around a predominate choice of colors and know in advance how they will affect each other. All it takes is some acute observation on your part when laying out your painting. By building your painting around a predominate choice of colors you’ll know in advance how they will affect each other. The colors you choose should be consistent with the reality of your subject in order to give a correct awareness of light, feeling of time, prevalent mood, general atmosphere, accurate perspective, and sense of place.