Fundamentals of How to Draw with Pencil - The Form of Objects

Ultimately, it is the drawing of form that is most responsible for the reproduction on your drawing paper of the actual scene.

It is important to possess a simple but complete mental image or memory of the property of form. This mental image is very useful to you as a pencil artist because it will lead you to a simple and systematic way of approaching the drawing of any object under the sun. It will give you the essential tools of the first phase of a drawing.

The idea of dealing with the numerous forms that constitute any real scene involves a visual decomposition of the scene’s forms into a set of basic geometric forms followed by a reconstitution of those forms into a likeness of the original real object. With some practice, you will find that this analysis and reconstitution becomes very quickly second nature.

After analyzing the form of numerous objects, artists of the past came to the following conclusions.

All object forms can be seen as a composition of four basic geometric solids: the brick, the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone.

Of course, the actual forms will almost always deviate somewhat from these perfect geometric forms so that part of the drawing process will consist of adding the variations. But all that is done in a later phase of the drawing process.

Concentrating on those four large geometric forms allows you to much better see the overall structure or composition of the global scene you wish to draw.

The extent of these large forms is fairly easy to discern and the dimensions easily estimated. Therefore, the large forms can be drawn first without paying any attention to the myriad of details.

Drawing a real scene while constantly thinking of bricks, spheres, cylinders, and cones will automatically give your drawing three-dimensionality and a certain amount of gravitas.

This approach to viewing a scene, i.e., seeing the scene as a composition of basic solid geometric shapes, naturally separates the big picture from the details and gives you an excellent starting-point for tackling any drawing.

Once the large geometric shapes are in place you should already see a good likeness of the scene as a whole. You can then concentrate on the details without having to worry about whether or not all the objects are in the right overall position.

In this article we developed a method which initially views an arbitrary pictorial scene as a composition of four basic geometric shapes: the brick, the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder.

The task then is to render each basic geometric shape while at the same time reconstituting the overall scene, i.e., putting each geometric form in its correct position.

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Posted in: Drawing Tips | | October 2008