If You Can Draw a Form, You Can Draw EVERYTHING

As I mentioned before, FULLY grasping the basic yet essential idea of form—in contrast to knowing it but not fully getting it—has changed the way I draw.

Before I continue, let's distinguish form from shape. Per artist and instructor Marshall Vandruff, the simple difference is: a shape is flat; a form is thick. Here's how Andrew Loomis illustrates the difference in his "Fun With a Pencil" book:





Throughout all of my studying of accomplished artists, this same concept is stressed.

Pages from Glenn Vilppu's "The Drawing Manual":






A page from the original Famous Artists Course:



Screenshots from Stan Prokopenko's free Drawing Basics series:





From the Watts Atelier drawing course:



Clearly, the understanding of forms should NOT be overlooked. I'll be spending a lot of time drawing these basic forms and training my eye to reduce everything I see into those forms.

2 comments:

  1. When drawing forms based on overlapping spheres as in the Vilppu examples, how do you know where to draw the lines that indicate the intersections? He doesn't explain that, and neither do you. For example, in the bottom left form in Vilppu's Illustration No. 2, there's a little inverted-Y halfway down the lefthand side. That indicates the concave curvature there. But what are the rules for drawing the lines that do this?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for your comment and I apologize for the late response.

    My understanding of Vilppu's overlapping spheres is that you, as the artist, have to determine for yourself how the spheres are sitting in space. In the example you referenced, the large, top sphere is coming towards the viewer while the lower part is further away. As a result, the top sphere will overlap the bottom one and the lines you referenced are an indication of the bending of the sphere away from the viewer.

    I think the only "rules" for drawing those curvature/overlapping/compressing lines is to know in your mind what it is you want to indicate and then draw the lines based on the form you're showing. In that example, those are the logical lines that would be created if one spherical form was attached to another and bending in that way.

    Hopefully this explanation was of some help!

    ReplyDelete