In this article we will deal with the most fundamental property of any object in relation to the act of pencil drawing. This fundamental property is the form or structure of the object. Ultimately, it is the drawing of form that is most responsible for the reproduction of the actual scene on your drawing paper.
It is important to possess a simple but complete mental image or memory of the property of form. This mental image is very useful to you as a pencil artist because it will lead you to a simple and systematic way of approaching the drawing of any object under the sun. It will give you the essential tools of the first phase of a drawing.
The idea of dealing with the numerous forms that constitute any real scene involves a visual decomposition of the scene's forms into a set of basic geometric forms followed by a reconstitution of those forms into a likeness of the original real object.
With some practice, you will find that this analysis and reconstitution becomes very quickly second nature and will help you tremendously in approaching a drawing in a logical manner.
After analyzing the form of numerous objects, artists of the past came to the following conclusions:
* All object forms can be seen as a composition of four basic geometric solids: the brick, the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone.
Of course, the actual forms will almost always more or less deviate from these perfect geometric forms. Therefore, part of the drawing process will consist of adding these variations. But all that is done in a later phase of the drawing process.
* Concentrating on those four large geometric forms allows you to see the overall structure or composition of the global scene in a very logical and interconnected manner.
* The extent of these large forms is fairly easy to discern and the dimensions easily estimated. Therefore, the large forms can be drawn first without paying any attention to the smaller forms and the myriad of details.
* Drawing a real scene while constantly thinking of bricks, spheres, cylinders, and cones will automatically give your drawing three-dimensionality and a certain amount of gravitas. With some practice you will soon notice that you have become a much faster and more accurate draftsperson.
This approach to viewing a scene, i.e., seeing the scene as a composition of basic solid geometric shapes, naturally separates the big picture from the details and gives you an excellent starting-point for tackling any drawing. You won't have to ponder or hesitate on how to start your drawing. You just start by tackling one big shape and link all the others together like a chain link fence.
Once the large geometric shapes are in place you should already see a good likeness of the scene as a whole. You can then concentrate on the details without having to worry about whether or not all the objects are in the right overall position.
In this article we developed a method which initially views an arbitrary pictorial scene as a composition of four basic geometric shapes: the brick, the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder. This allows us to separate the big picture from the detail. You just take one large shape at a time and fill in the details. The idea is to be acutely aware of the immediate neighborhood of the detail you are drawing so that the orientation and size of the detail fits in correctly in the neighborhood.
The task then is to render each basic geometric shape while at the same time reconstituting the overall scene, i.e., putting each geometric form in its correct position.