How to Make your Drawings more Realistic... Less Flat

Do you love to draw but think your drawings look flat? In this video, I'm going to show you how breaking down objects into 3D shapes can really help step up your game, and show you a few examples and tips. The natural approach that most people take when they first start learning how to draw is to outline the subject's outer boundaries, sections of high contrast, and obvious edges, and there's a lot of guesswork involved, most of the time resulting in a flat drawing. It's great if that's your stylistic choice, but if you want to give your drawings more three-dimensional feeling, you need to think about the object as something that has volume, something that occupies space in three dimensions, not just a flat 2D image. You can get your brain into that mode of thinking by analyzing the object's different sides, or planes. Which direction is each plane facing? Get a feel for the object in space. Once you've identified the planes, it should help you with breaking down the object into fundamental shapes. It's easier to draw your subject if you first break it down into simple 3D shapes like boxes, cylinders, or spheres, and then fill in the finer details. I'll walk you through a few examples of that later in the video. If you first construct your drawings with 3D forms, you'll have a more solid structure to begin with, that you can later build upon or cut away from. Drawing like this provides us with guidelines from the very beginning that make the rest of the drawing process feel like a breeze. It also makes it easier for you to draw from memory and imagination, because it's so easy to remember that the bulk of this car is made of these two shapes, rather than trying to recall all the tiny details. An added benefit of getting into the habit of breaking down objects into simple 3D shapes is that once you remember the shapes it's made up of, you can draw the object from any angle. It takes practice to be able to look at a subject and recognize which 3D forms can be used to construct them. Let's go through a few examples together. What 3D shape can you use to simplify this table? Ignore all the tiny details for now, and look at the edges for clues. Starting with the biggest shape, what single shape do you think could encompass the small table? The whole thing would definitely be able to fit in a tall box. Then you can deconstruct it a little further using a smaller box for the drawer. Now with a good foundation to build your drawing on top of, the table will look more solid instead of wobbly, like the one on the left that was drawn without 3D guidelines. What shapes do you see here? Unlike the table, this finger has no hard edges or flat surfaces to observe. Sometimes you can find obvious clues that help you better understand the contours of what you're looking at. Have a close look at the major creases that wrap around the underside of each joint. They're round, indicating a round contour. If we were to slice through it, the cross section would look something like this. It looks like the finger can be broken down into small cylindrical shapes. Now if you can learn how to draw a cylinder from any angle, you can construct fingers pointing in any direction. But not only that, we see cylinders everywhere from arms and legs to cups and wheels. What shapes do you see for this one? Since we can look through the glass, it's clear that the threaded section of our light bulb is a cylinder. The very bottom looks like a tapered cylinder, where one end is smaller than the other. It's normal to want to lump the glass portion of the light bulb as one shape, but it's kind of an odd shape that's difficult to rotate in your mind, making it a challenge to draw this object at different angles. So let's see if we can break it down into two separate shapes. The first shape I'm using is a sphere, and the second shape is just a tapered cylinder. Two very simple shapes. A lot of the times, you'll need to modify basic shapes to fit the object that you're deconstructing. In case you're wondering, I drew a straight line down the very center of the light bulb to mark its angle, which helps to keep my drawing symmetrical, because it can be kind of difficult to draw things at an angle. Don't let weirdly shaped objects trick you. Some things may look complicated, but are actually easy to break down. Try to start with the biggest shapes that you see, then pick out the smaller ones. We've been looking at still images, but when you practice on your own, you'll want to look at objects from your surroundings that you can pick up and observe from multiple angles, to get a really good understanding of what it is that you're looking at. If you're able to visualize the shapes in your head, but struggle with actually drawing them, a great resource you can learn from is Ethan Wynn's class called Drawing Fundamentals 2, Perspective Basics for 3D Sketching, where he not only shows you how to draw the basic 3D forms from different angles, but also how to easily modify them by adding or removing from them in different ways, to draw cool things like sliced lemons. Just really awesome, easy to understand instructions and examples. This is a class that you can find on Skillshare, which is the sponsor of this video. Skillshare is an online learning community that offers thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people, on topics including illustration, fine art, graphic design, and so much more. It's curated specifically for learning, meaning there are no ads, and they're always launching new premium classes, so you can stay focused and follow wherever your creativity leads you. They're offering the first 1000 of my subscribers that click the link in the description, a one month free trial, so you can start exploring Ethan's class or other fun classes today. One I'm into right now is Thomas Frank's class on Real Productivity, how to build habits that last, a topic that I'm really interested in because I want to improve my productivity, so I can make more content for you guys. One simple but effective piece of advice was to tailor my environment to encourage habits that I want to build. His example was, if you want to practice playing your guitar every day, put it somewhere where you can quickly and easily access it, like in the living room, not in its case in the back of your closet. Anyway, I'm gonna go work on improving my productivity. I hope this video gave you some ideas on how to take your drawings to the next level by implementing simple 3D shapes into your drawing process. The great thing about this exercise is you don't need anything to start, so what are you waiting for? Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.