by Drawing can be a wonderful pastime (or career if you’re lucky/not lucky), but not necessarily the easiest to get into unless somehow you were born blessed with artistic talents. For everyone else it takes a lot of practice and repetition, and even then the perfectionists among us will consistently find fault in their own work or everyone else’s. As a beginner myself I am interested in any kind of cheat codes that will help me fast-track my way to greatness. In this post I will explain how sketching 3D shapes with box guidelines can help you draw objects from different angles.
Why Should You Sketch with Boxes?
Although boxes can be boring, they can also be quite handy. Aside from storing countless kitchen utensils that seemed a good idea when you bought them, sketching with them can help you visualize your final drawing by showing you the correct placement of the shapes you want to illustrate.
For example, if you wanted to draw a letter of the alphabet in 3D, you draw the box first and decide which way around you want your letter to face.
Then you can use the edges of the box to sketch along and form the outline of the letter in perspective view. The sketch above shows vertical lines straight up/down, and the other lines of the letter L are running in the same directions of the edges of the box.
Here’s another attempt where a cute teapot can be turned into a 3D sketch using 2 boxes stuck together.
And finally here’s an umbrella (because who doesn’t like an umbrella?) You get the idea.
Sketching with box guidelines can be a helpful way for beginners to understand the parts of an object, but it’s not just for beginners. It can help you sketch much more complex objects or characters with many parts.
To understand more about sketching there is a beginners course called Sketching for Animators Who Can’t Draw on Udemy which probably won’t be solely responsible for turning you into a famous artist, but it will teach you why sketching is important and how to draw simple 2D and 3D character poses.