All the practice sessions so far have been about the two-dimensional surface of the paper. It is helpful to start in two dimensions, as that is what the end design eventually becomes: a configuration of two-dimensional abstract elements: shapes and lines.

But this configuration of abstract elements represents the three-dimensional world, and imbuing the image with that three-dimensionality brings it to life.

This practice session will be about moving into three dimensions. As with the previous chapters, we will focus on developing an instinct for where the lines need to go. This chapter will naturally consider perspective, but we won’t delve into precise construction, instead favoring the development of an instinct for it.

I don’t intend to make this a perspective course. There are already fantastic educational resources on perspective drawing. This book, Perspective Made Easy by Ernest R. Norling , is free, in the public domain, and available from archive.org , but it can also be found here:

If you don’t know about perspective, I recommend you read that book because the rest of the course will assume you have a working knowledge of perspective, eg, that you know what horizons and vanishing points are.

You can also go to the Gridspective page and play with drawing lines using a perspective grid and gain intuition about drawing three-dimensional things that way. See the link below.

In this course, I will use the word “shape” if I mean a two-dimensional shape, and “form” when I mean a three-dimensional form.

We will begin by moving from two to three dimensions. A more extensive article on the subject can be found here.

First, we will consider a two-dimensional shape and then “extruding” it into a third dimension, effectively creating a three-dimensional volume.

Let’s see what that looks like. Let’s first start with a rectangle.

In the image, you can see the steps taken. The rectangle is in space. You can see the lines go to the same vanishing points on a horizon, a key feature of perspective. Two ribs of the box go to the one vanishing point, and the other two ribs go to the other vanishing point.

Now, the third dimension is downward, so the lines from the corners of the rectangle that go into the third dimension need to go toward a vanishing point somewhere below the rectangle.

We can then start to construct a rectangle somewhere below the first rectangle, intersecting the vertical lines. The ribs of this second rectangle go to the same vanishing points as the ribs of the first rectangle.

And voila! We went from a two-dimensional shape to 3D.

We took a simple rectangle and made an extruded form from it, turning it into a box. But we can also use more complex 2D shapes to create an extruded form, too.

A demonstration of how to do this with any arbitrary shape can be found here:

This section is about going from two to three dimensions, and there is one more approach to going from two to three dimensions, going from a shape to a form, and that is the following idea: we first start with a two-dimensional shape, a blob-like form:

And then we imagine it as a three-dimensional object, and we draw what we call “contour lines” around it.

Contour lines follow the form and indicate the underlying form.

Don’t draw too many contour lines: a few contour lines are enough to suggest the form. If you draw too many, it will start to look cluttered.

There are different ways you can choose contour lines; there is no one best way. Which one you should use depends on how you want to look at the object. Here are two different ways you can do contour lines on a sphere: a “radial” form and one using iso height lines on a blob 3D model:

Which approach is best depends on the situation. The sphere is cylindrically symmetric, so the radial contour lines can be more useful. In the general case, as with the blob, the iso height lines approach is the only practical option.

We initially drew the box by starting with a rectangle and constructing an extruded form from it.

The box is worth examining more closely because it is so useful. Next to the other primitive forms that will be introduced later in this chapter, you can construct more complex forms from it. But the box is unique because you can also use it to place objects inside it. Other primitive forms can also be used, but the box is the most generally useful form.

So far, we have drawn many arbitrary boxes. But what we often need is to be able to draw the same box in various orientations and positions. This is especially useful if you can put objects inside boxes because it allows you to move and rotate any object in space by first adjusting its bounding box, and then drawing the object inside it.

First, let’s start with a little game that helps you practice drawing the same box rotated.

The following exercises are designed to help you practice moving the same box around through space.

You see now why I let you develop an instinct for where lines need to go. You were able to use that to first practice drawing 3D models from observation, getting a feel for where lines need to go, so you could then do that from imagination. It’s a much more fun way to draw, for me at least.

Now that we have the box under control, we can start using it to place the other primitive forms, namely the cylinder, sphere, cone, and pyramid, inside boxes. With that, we can move and rotate them any way we wish.

You can find a video on how to draw cylinders here.

YouTube Video - Draw Cylinders, Use 3D Models

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