"Art comes in many forms, but the fundamentals are still the same. And they start with the building blocks."

Shapes and Forms

From Shapes to Forms

Shapes are the cornerstone when learning 2D art fundamentals. Everything that we see can be broken into primitive shapes and used as building blocks to understand the form that they create. What is a primitive shape, then? They are basically simple geometric shapes like cubes, spheres, and pyramid.

Shapes are two-dimensional images. Therefore, in order to make them look like three-dimensional forms, we need to add contour lines to them.

In this lesson, you get to practice drawing shapes and forms. The step-by-step images and the videos are there to help you if you are a beginner. The final exercises consist of a downloadable image that is "broken" into shapes, and finally, the shapes and forms are used to draw an image of your own.

Exercises

It's your turn to practice drawing the shapes and making them 3D-like. Start with the basic shape, like a circle, and then decide its direction with the contour lines across the circle. It already seems more, 3D but adding the lines to the back will help you understand the image even further.

The process images below present four primitive shapes that are turned into forms step-by-step. Follow the steps and then start experimenting with them. Make them squish and stretch, twist them around, do whatever comes to your mind.

You can do these exercises in any way you want to, either with traditional pen and paper or with digital drawing software. If you are just starting digital art, use this as an opportunity to practice using the software, like Krita.

Step 1: Draw the basic shape. Step 2: Add contour lines. Step 3: To make the form appear more 3D, add the contour lines behind the object.

Process Video of Exercises

The video has examples of how the shapes and forms exercise can be done. As said before, play around with the shapes, and you will get a hang of how to use them. Notice that drawing in the video is quite carefree, as there is no need to concentrate on smoothing the lines or making the forms clean looking.

Tähän tulee video, joka on haettava Risestä.

Breaking Things Down

Next, we are going to apply what we have learned so far and break this character into forms. You can use the image below as a guideline and watch the whole process from a video. You can draw digitally or print the guideline and choose a more traditional method instead. It’s up to you.

A simple character you can download to your device and draw on top to "break it down”. This character has softer shapes, so squish and stretch the spheres, but the make the head remind more of a cube than a circle.

The character is now "broken" down into different forms. This helps artists to understand how something is built and use that knowledge to their advantage to draw in the future.

Sample Character

Tähän tulee video, joka on haettava Risestä.

The point of this exercise is to not only train your drawing but also your eye to see the world around you. It will help you when drawing more complicated objects like animals or cars.

Note that organic objects like trees and animals are rounder and lack sharp edges when things like cars and robots have sharp edges and straight lines.

Further Drawing Further Drawing Let’s practice drawing a little more. This time the exercise starts with the shapes. Trees and rocks are great for this exercise, so look for some photos of them and see if you can replicate them. Rocks are sharper than trees with their lush treetops.

Step 1: Treetops

Start with the treetops. Squish and stretch spheres and draw them in different places on the paper. You can give them contour lines to illustrate the leaves frontline better.

Step 2: Trunk

Draw long cylinders that represent the trunk. The bottom of tree trunks is often wider and gets more thinner moving up.

Step 3: Rocks

Add different shapes of cubes at the bottom of the trunk. These will be our rocks. Now we have the main shapes done and the end result should resemble a tree among rocks.

Step 4: All Done

The final step depends greatly on your own drawing style. Will you do the lineart or jump straight into coloring, for example? Some have a more cartoonish style and others aim for realism, but everyone starts with the basic building blocks. Here is the final image of the exercise done with a stylized style.

The video below includes the entire process from the shapes to a final stylized tree and rocks.

Tähän tulee video, joka on haettava Risestä.

Many artists say that they have drawn for as long as they can remember, but at some point in their career, also studied breaking things down into simpler objects to understand their structure. Colors are also important, so we should also take a look at the basics of color theory.