The Basics - Shapes
When you draw, be it humans or buildings or animals, you first need to know where to start. Some people start off with a faint outline of the image, then fill in details as they go. Others draw each part of the image individually, starting with the eyes and face, then moving down the neck to the chest and so on.
The most standard way of starting off a drawing is by using shapes. When an artist draws a building, he may first draw elongated blocks to represent the buildings, then draw in the windows and doors as the image develops. It is the same with humans. Though, unlike buildings, human bodys are not limited to just simple blocks. We are made of many other shapes. Your head, for example. It does not look blocky, does it? No, it's actually round. Because our heads are round, instead of using blocks, we use spheres (no, not pointy sticks that cavemen used to kill animals--think of a basketball).
|
To the right are a few of the many shapes that you can use to create the foundation of a human: spheres, cubes, rectangular blocks, half-spheres, you name it. Drawing the shapes in 3D gives a feeling of depth and mass, so your drawings don't appear flat. |
|
|
Combine these shapes to create the human form. As you can see on the left, a block and a sphere have been drawn together to make out the shape of a head. Can you identify the body parts by looking at the combined shapes? |