Art of Drawing

Drawing: Blog 5

For my last blog I decided to try combining different techniques. I drew a rectangle and I drew alantern inside of it. The author says, “As we have explained in the last section, you can draw anything if you can break down the model into a few basic forms” (Sanmiguel 104). In order to draw the lantern, I had to break apart the structure so that there was a 3D rectangle. Inside of that I drew the basic parts of the lantern so that I could imagine what I wanted it to look like. I think that drawing the lantern inside the rectangle became easier since there was an outline, so I knew how big to make everything and it looked more proportioned.

After I had the rectangle and the basic outline I added more detailed shapes to build up the structure. As the author, David Sanmiguel says, after you have the basic shapes you can add more parts of the structure. For this you don’t really need to add too much detail, only the more prominent shapes so that the structure is more defined. For the last step you can finish off the rest of the details and add whatever you want. You can also erase the rectangle, make the outline more defined and then shade the object or color it, however I chose to only define the outline more.

Personally, I think that using a geometric shape to help form the object is really helpful. It helps you keep the object you’re drawing more proportioned and you get to decide how large or small you want it to be from the beginning. Using this technique makes the process of drawing simpler because you don’t have to worry about not knowing how to draw something. As long as you can break down the structure of the drawing you can draw whatever you want. Do you have any suggestions for what else I could draw using this technique? 

Sanmiguel, David. Art of Drawing: The Complete Course. Sterling Publisher, 2003.