Simple Shapes: The Secrets to
Drawing and Painting Almost
Anything Mini Lesson #2

The Simple Shapes

As I told you in The Secrets to Drawing And Painting Almost Anything Mini Lesson #1, when I went to school to learn to be a technical illustrator I was taught to see the machines and parts of machines we drew as just a few simple shapes combined to make the whole machine.

The basic 3-dimensional shapes that make up almost everything that we might draw or paint are: box shapes, cylinders, cones and spheres.

Take another look at the sander I showed you in Mini Lesson #1.You will see how all of these shapes combined to make my sander.

Are you able to see and understand all the shapes I've indicated on the illustration?

If you found it a little hard to see any of the ones I've labeled, don't worry. When you take the complete The Shapes of Things course, you will learn to easily recognize and draw each of them.

More Simple Shapes

For now, let's look at some examples where these may be easier to see.

Take this soap dispenser that you might find in your own bathroom. It is made up of three of the four basic shapes.

One of the ways knowing about these shapes helps you is by allowing you to ignore or change what you see.

Let me explain.

Look at all the reflections in the shiny metal parts of the soap dispenser, especially the partial cone. These reflections are pretty confusing.

If you paint these reflections exactly as you see them, someone viewing your painting would probably find them confusing, as well.

It would be better to simplify them so they make more sense.

You will be more able to do this when you know how light and shadow appear on the basic shapes.

You can then learn to ignore what you see and create what you want to see based on that knowledge.

I'll tell you more about doing this in the next lesson.

For now, let's look at one more example of these simple shapes in action. Here is a park scene that is probably not much different from one you might find anywhere.

The difference between this example and the last two is that in the picture below I've also indicated some two-dimensional shapes.

I haven't mentioned it before now, but each three-dimensional shape has one or more two-dimensional shapes associated with it.

Box shape – Rectangle
Cylinder – Rectangle/Circle/Ellipse
Cone – Triangle/Circle/Ellipse
Sphere – Circle/Ellipse

Don't worry if not all of these make sense yet. These relationships will become clearer when you study The Shapes of Things course.

Notice that the steps that surround the fountain I have labeled as ellipses.

I did this just to bring ellipses into the discussion. Since these steps have depth, you could just as easily think of them as cylinders.

However you want to think of them, if you wanted to paint this scene there is still the problem of drawing all those ellipses (or cylinders) and getting them to look right.

That may be why I see many artists in their early years shy away from drawing or painting scenes like this that have ellipses.

But in The Shapes of Things: The Secrets to Drawing and Painting Almost Anything course I remove this difficulty by teaching you a solution from my early technical illustration training that is rarely taught in fine art classes.

Next Mini Lesson: Using Simple Shapes in Your Own Work