How to Draw Simple Shapes

Series Summary

Since the dawn of the Stone Age, drawing has been a primary method of human expression, one of man’s many tools of reflection and interpretation. But it wasn't until paper became widely available in Renaissance Europe that drawing masters such as Leonardo da Vinci could show the world what amazing things could be done with simple lines and shapes. Ever since, a growing number of people have embraced drawing in its myriad forms and applications: doodling, sketching, cartoons, caricatures, architectural blueprints, engineering, planning, inventing, modeling—and the list goes on.

In these intermediate drawing lessons, learn how to transform simple shapes into an abstract creation. Our expert will help you understand how to use cubes and prisms, as well as bend the rules of perspective, to create a feeling of dynamic action in your drawings. The effects shown here can be achieved easily with a little creativity, practice, and a smattering of Euclidean geometry. In each drawing video, our expert will walk you through step-by-step, demonstrating how to form complicated shapes from basic ones, as well as how to add depth and dimension to your work through shading and highlighting.

So, let’s get started!

Video Transcript

"CRAIG BROWDER: All right, today on this section, I'm going to do--I've got another 2-point perspective, but we're going to get a lot crazier with the shapes. We're going to use--we're going to kind of start off with your basic shape like a box, but then we're going to start going into different planes and doing cut throughs, and all sorts of crazy stuff. And eventually, we're going to--I'm going to show you how to break the rules by using the rules. So let's get started if you're ready. Today's lesson is kind of just to show you how to see through all the lines and pick up your shapes that you're working with. So go ahead and line this guy up. Okay, we've got the starting of this box here, but since this is how we're going to do more like, more creative shapes, we're going to totally just kind of start jamming other boxes together and how we could do that. So this is kind of, how you how to, so we're going to--instead having this guy kind of come off, we're actually going to send up, so let's do another parallel line but we're going to start from this line here. And you could any point in the line, it doesn't really matter, but I', just going to pick a rim spot and make sure its parallel with--on the other parallel lines you've got going here. And we're actually going to go above."