The Secrets to Drawing
and Painting Almost Anything
Mini Lesson #1

The Secrets

The secrets to drawing and painting almost anything really come down to learning to see complex things as being a combination of a few simple shapes.

So, if you learn to recognize these simple shapes and learn how to draw and paint each of them, you will, with practice, be able to draw and paint almost anything that contains these simple shapes.

You have to admit that is a very powerful concept.

If something that sounds so simple is that powerful, why isn't anybody else teaching it?

It astounds me to say that I've never run across anyone else who teaches these secrets to drawing and painting.

Hey, that's why I call them secrets.

When I went to art school, these secrets to drawing and painting were never mentioned. When I've taken art classes and workshops since then, these secrets to drawing and painting were never mentioned.

You have probably had similar experiences. Why is that?

It may have something to do with my rather unique background for a fine artist. You see I learned these secrets a long time ago in a specialized program that had nothing to do with fine art.

The Origin of These Secrets to Drawing and Painting

After high school I went to a technical institute to learn to be a technical illustrator.

In part of this course students were taught how to draw machines and devices from the blueprints of their parts.

Like the drawing you see on the left.

In the other part of this course we were taught how to take these line drawings and create realistic interpretations of how the machines or devices would look.

This was done, I might add, without having the actual machine or a picture of it to work from.

We were able to make these finished drawings because we were taught that machines were really just a few simple shapes combined in various ways to form the whole.

Like the partially completed drawing of the sander you see here.

Once we learned to recognize these simple shapes and learned how light and shadow appear on each of them, from that we could figure out how light and shadow would appear on the machine as a whole.

A very valuable drawing secret.

But, if these secrets were only useful for drawing machines and machine parts, they wouldn't be very valuable to most people.

But, it turns out this information can be applied much more broadly. It just took me a while to figure that out.

These Secrets Apply to Almost Everything.

It wasn't until much later in my career when I became a commercial illustrator, doing art for advertising agencies, design firms and publishers, that I began to understand how valuable this information really was.

It is not only machines that are made up of these simple shapes.

I began to realize that almost everything I might want to draw or paint is made up of these simple shapes combined in some way.

Once I began to really look around at my world I could see these simple shapes everywhere. And so will you.

Next Mini Lesson: The Simple Shapes

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