Why Does Everyone Tell You To Practice Drawing Cubes And Cylinders???

Comments · 66

• TH

  @TheDrawingCodex · 2 months ago (edited) · pinned

  Check out the Line and Color Academy: <a href="https://www.thedrawingcodex.com/pin/line-and-color-academy">https://www.thedrawingcodex.com/pin/line-and-color-academy</a> - Master the Art of Line and Color Illustration

• LU

  @lulamidgeable · 4 years ago (edited)

  This is so spot on. I&apos;ve made myself do a lot of shape and perspective stuff but only in small time frames, because I found it so boring. But even the way I&apos;ve done it has had a big effect. I think due to consistent practise 4/5 times a week even if it was small amounts of time. I always tell myself - it&apos;s doing the really boring stuff that makes me a better artist. But it&apos;s true!

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• DO

  @donidewit · 3 years ago

  I really hate practicing the fundamentals, but every time I have a problem with drawing something at a certain angle (i.e. a hand), it&apos;s always that damn cube that saves me in the end.<br>Not the friend I wanted, but the one I&apos;ve always needed.

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• AR

  @areweserioushere96 · 4 years ago

  all of this really resonated with me and really makes me want to pursue McBurnie&apos;s other lessons. He may already be one of my favorite online instructors out there

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• WI

  @WileyLynch · 4 years ago

  I do this stuff for the entire day and enjoy it because the tenth cube I produce can be made into a building and then I really get to see how much I get it.<br>Then back to shapes for the next three.<br>Slowly going into more complex stuff but always from the shapes.<br>I never get bored.<br>And it&apos;s a bit of a puzzle to figure out why my mind just isn&apos;t understanding certain angles.

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• AA

  @aaronamadeus928 · 4 years ago

  I like to draw &quot;snakes consisting of spheres and cylinders&quot; and really try to push the perspective and making it move close to the camera and far into the third dimension. Or I make these forms interact in a physical way, like bowling. It&apos;s more fun for me this way and I sometimes use it for warm-ups when I really don&apos;t know what to draw, but I use these forms more to push perspectives than for shading.

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• DA

  @Darknight0681 · 2 years ago

  Honestly, I think the issue stems from the fact that let’s be honest, we have egos that tell us that basic fundamental shapes aren’t necessary to know. &nbsp;Despite EVERYTHING being made up of the primary three. &nbsp;Let that ego go, and you’ll start making progress in ways that you would’ve never suspected beforehand.

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• ZE

  @zellos2cats1dog · 4 years ago

  I like drawing rocks for this sort of practice, because they come in all different shapes and sizes. Sometimes rocks are spherical and sometimes they&apos;re triangular and sometimes rectangular. And rocks can be found in a lot of backgrounds of the more interesting things, so unless you&apos;re exclusively doing portraits, you&apos;re doing to eventually need to learn how to draw a rock. At least that&apos;s my logic.

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• NO

  @nochipmunks8692 · 4 years ago

  i never stuck and watched 30mins youtube video , you’re that good , i just love your channel

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• JH

  @JH-pe3ro · 4 years ago

  Something I&apos;ve noticed about my own constructive practice is that - with rare exception - I don&apos;t use the boxes and cylinders to start an illustrative drawing. I use them to supplement and correct what I already have on the canvas, but what I put down initially is all shape: A figure in a certain pose is just something I either observe from a reference, or memorize from a bunch of perspectives. If I get focused on form too quickly, I lose the shape and it gets out of proportion - so I avoid doing that. Instead, I do a second pass where I add ruler lines(which in digital, with straight line or polygon tools, is really, really fast), and at that point I can correct towards a box or towards a cylinder and figure out some planes for shading, and then I can do another pass where I go back to freehand and loosen the lines again while adding detail, and then another pass with rulers, and at that point, the drawing is probably tight enough to do finished rendering over. Obviously, the better I am at the initial shape the less I have to rely on my rulers, but as soon as I do bring them out, some errors become obvious that weren&apos;t before. And doing breakdown studies over existing images, I&apos;ll turn to the boxes and cylinders to do that, because that tells me how to construct things in the way another artist did. But if I have to achieve some kind of strange scenario like a character&apos;s elbow thrust towards the viewer foreshortened, I&apos;m going to get a reference to do that - I&apos;m not going to use constructive geometry to figure it out, because I&apos;d be guessing far too much at the initial shape. Yet I see tutorial after tutorial that vaguely alludes to using construction to build figures and scenes, but leaves a sort of open-ended suggestion that if one simply puts some boxes onto the page, you will suddenly be able to draw any figure you want. It&apos;s not so - you have to have initial proportions that are worth working with, and those are going to come from reference.<br><br>I think of the technical studies as the counterpart to observational studies: if you draw with sight-size for a long time and get used to measuring everything carefully, you get better at choosing the angle and length of your lines with an intentional process, and to recognize specific shadows, highlights and textures as intentional shapes. And if you learn to see cubes in everything, you get better at seeing what shapes more difficult forms make, and how to calculate values described by light sources and obstructions. You want some of both of that. And you want to learn active recall of things you&apos;ve observed so that you can reinvent them on demand.<br><br>The use of technology is key to the practice and also what makes this difficult: when we use a ruler or a grid, trace something, use computer graphics, or all the other ways we have of achieving accuracy and recall, we&apos;re introducing technology into the workflow; and when we do these studies, we limit the technology used to <b>make</b> the drawing, but we apply as much as necessary to <b>check</b> the work we did. Because the implication is that the technology is better than we are and sets the benchmark, and recognizing that immediately makes people both not want to go through the effort and to also actively disparage the technology as &quot;cheating&quot;, because, after all - anyone could just use it directly, and then where&apos;s the skill in that? It&apos;s a way of scapegoating. But what it should be seen at, really, is a little game that, if you play it often, it moves some of the ability out of the technology and into your hands.

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• AN

  @anthonywyndham · 4 years ago

  :) I am introducing my year 8&apos;s to this stuff next semester....wish me luck hahahaha

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• SM

  @SmooveKevArt · 3 years ago

  I recently got some transparent shapes to practice with. The kind made for 3rd graders😂😂😂 I love using them though

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