How to Draw ANYTHING Using Simple Shapes

Drawing is so much easier when you break things down into simple shapes. You can do this with anything. Using simple shapes to construct your drawing first gives you confidence that you have a good solid structure on the page. You know everything's in the right place, is the right size, and if something's off, you can easily fix it before you commit hours to drawing all the details. Let's walk through this process together. What shapes do you see? I see a rectangle and two trapezoids. A trapezoid is like a triangle with the top cut off. Once I'm happy with the size and position of my guideline shapes, I can confidently sketch the actual soda can. Sketch lightly until you're absolutely confident with what you have, then darken your drawing. I'm drawing it really dark so you can clearly see what I'm doing because I'm making very small changes right now, like rounding off the edges. The 7 resembles a triangle that's cut at the bottom. The letters fit into a rectangle, and since they're the same width, they get an equal amount of spacing. Instead of using three shapes to draw the soda can, we could simplify it further and draw just a rectangle, then cut off the corners and continue with the rest of the sketch. Try both ways to see what you prefer. There are many ways to break down a subject. The important thing is what works for you. You can practice finding shapes by drawing on a magazine. Try to find the major shapes and outline those first, and then identify secondary shapes, and so on. You can use more or less shapes if it helps you. Sketch lightly, then once you're confident, you can darken your lines, making all the construction lines less noticeable. What shapes do you see here? I see the body as an oval. I'm deciding on the size and where I want it in the frame, making sure I leave enough room for the tail. This part looks triangly. So does the tail. I see a small circle for the head. You can check if your angles are correct by matching the side of your pencil to your drawing, and compare it to the photo. If I draw a straight line here, you see that the head comes out too much. I'll just move the circle over. It's very easy to fix at this point. The legs kind of form a triangle. You can check the angle of each leg for accuracy, like I did earlier. The beak is also a triangle. The bottom branch curves upward to the left, forming a very narrow triangle down below. Sometimes it's helpful to look at the negative space around your subject. This negative space resembles a very pointy triangle. Now you don't have to draw exactly what you see. I like to move things around to fit it in my frame, and make it look more interesting. The wing is another triangle. Let's draw a small circle for the eye, and two tiny circles for the foot. You can connect and smooth out your shapes a little. When you're confident and happy with your construction lines, you can add more detail and darken your strokes. I seem to have missed a triangle right here. And I'm just taking a few creative liberties with the branches, just to give the drawing more interest. You can see how quick and easy it is to plan out and construct an entire drawing when you use simple shapes. Before I show you some more examples, let me introduce the sponsor for this video, which is Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people. You can find topics like illustration, animation, fine art, and more. Explore new skills, deepen existing passions, and get lost in creativity. A fun class I'm watching is Mastering Illustration, Sketching, Inking, and Color Essentials by Jazza, or Jazza Brooks. He takes us through his process creating original characters and scenes. Hearing him explain his thought process and why he makes certain creative decisions is very valuable. I love his idea of sketching even our doubts or questions because it's really a great way to explore ideas. Skillshare classes include a combination of video lessons and a class project where you can submit your work. I love that I can see all the creative work that other people have submitted. Skillshare is curated specifically for learning, so there are no ads, and they're always launching new premium classes so you can stay focused and follow your creativity wherever it leads you. The first 1000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get a one month free trial of Skillshare so you can start exploring your creativity today. Alright, let's get back to the tutorial. When sketching people, we naturally want to be more accurate with our sketch. We can do so by measuring and comparing parts of the photo. For example, we can sketch the hat first, giving it our best guess. Then check to see if the ratio between the width and the length are correct by measuring your reference photo. It looks like the length is two times the width. Now check your sketch. If you're off, just erase and redraw what's needed until the ratio matches up with the photo. Once you're confident with the hat, you can then use it to measure so many things, like how tall the boy is. He's a little more than six hats tall. You can check the angle of the arm in your sketch against the one in the photo or the angle from the foot to the hand. Drawing a straight vertical or horizontal line will help you understand the angles and see how things line up with each other. More detailed instruction on this topic will be covered in a separate video. I'm using a hat in this example, but you can use the measurement of heads or if you're drawing a bicycle, tires. On the flip side, here's a rough sketch. Just quickly getting the scene onto the page. The girl was drawn using a triangle, square and circle. It's not exact, but I was happy with how the scene was captured. So really you can be as detailed or as rough as you'd like. And again, there's no one right way to do it. You'll want to try different shapes to see what works for you. Some people like to draw with shapes that very loosely define their subject and then they carve it as they work on their drawing further. Other people like to break their drawing down into many small shapes right from the get-go. You can try both to see what you prefer. Here's an example where I use different shapes to sketch a motorcycle. I start by sketching the more obvious shapes I see, carefully placing them where I think they belong. I'm not too fixated on accuracy. I'm going for a more loose interpretation. Once I'm happy with where all the shapes are and I think it resembles my subject, I'll start refining the shapes further. I'm drawing really dark here so you can clearly see what I'm doing. Let's do it again, using slightly different shapes. I found that I could actually fit the entire lower portion of the motorcycle pretty well within a large rectangle. Now, the rectangle doesn't perfectly define the shape of the motorcycle but it does allow me to quickly position almost the entire motorcycle exactly where I want it on my sketchbook, using just one shape. And it also helps me see the motorcycle in a new light. I'm now more aware of how long the kickstand comes down because I have a line running from one tire to the other. And my attention is also brought to the negative space here. These shapes will help me better understand my subject and help me with my sketching accuracy. At the construction phase of your sketch, it's very easy to make adjustments so don't be afraid to do so. I enjoyed drawing the first one more because it felt more freeing whereas the second one made me feel more boxed in, more restrained. But that's just my personal preference. You might like having a big container shape. Even though I approached this using slightly different shapes, the results look very similar to each other. Here are some reference photos that you can practice with. Once you're done with these, you can go through them again using different shapes that you didn't use the first time. If you want to do this directly on a photo, you can practice drawing shapes directly on a magazine. Let me know in the comments if you'd like to see a more detailed step-by-step tutorial of this construction process. Don't forget to check out the link in the description. The first 1000 of my subscribers to click the link will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare. If you enjoyed this video, please hit that like button and subscribe if you want to see more. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.