It kind of is at some level if you train yourself to see everything built up of simple shapes. Yesterday we talked about O-Mode and I-Mode drawing. After doing observational drawing a potential in-between step is to translate your drawing into simple building blocks.
You could simplify anything into simple shapes.
And once you’ve done that you can reverse engineer a drawing starting from the shapes first.
Example 1: Bear
Example 2: Car
Example 3: Kid
You can also modify the shapes to create different versions of what you are trying to draw. This could mean different poses, different proportions, even different shapes.
If you’re creating characters for a book, it would be valuable to learn the shapes of those characters, so you can easily pose them over and over again.
This video is an amazing resource for thinking about simplifying shapes by Lisa Bardot.
TEN MINUTES ARTIST PROMPT
Find the shapes from these 4 References.
Beyond this make it a practice just to breakdown images into shapes, consider it part of your observational drawing practice. Hang on to these shapes, we’ll put them to use in part of this series.
