Shape Drawing - The Definitive Guide To Drawing With Shapes (2024)
Drawing with shapes is one of the most important skills you need to learn to create beautiful drawings.
Take a look at this master painting by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, where I increased the contrast and reduced color saturation to expose the “shape drawing layer”.
Beauty in realism is built on abstract shape design (portrait of Princess Leonilla by Franz Xaver Winterhalter).
As you can see, even though color and details are gone, the abstract arrangement and design of shapes creates an image that in itself is harmonious, beautiful, and reads clearly.
That’s the power of shape design. Often invisible to the untrained eye, it works “behind the scenes” of any painting.
A simple rule to live by: If the shapes of your drawings don’t work, your drawing won’t work. Period.
No matter how much beautiful detail or texture you render on top, if the shape design “underneath” your drawing doesn’t work, the drawing won’t come out right.
Shape design study of Sargent. More on that later in the article.
In this article, you’ll learn about shape drawing from the ground up, from what it is and why it matters, all the way to how to practice it, and eventually what process to use for creating a final drawing, like the one above.
Let’s get into it!
Shape Drawing For Beginners
What Is Shape Drawing?
Forms are 3D, shapes are 2D.
Shapes are 2D depictions of what you see, the most basic shapes being the circle, the square and the triangle.
Our eyes tend to see the world in simple shapes.
Simplifying the complex real world into simple shapes is a very powerful concept in drawing, as it can greatly improve how your drawing “reads”, meaning how the viewer navigates through the drawing.
Some shapes are more obvious to the untrained eye to see, e.g. the light and shadow shapes of your subject. Other shapes can be tough to notice without trained eyes, such as subtle shapes in the mid-tones, or shapes that flow like rhythms through the image but are “hidden” by beautifully rendered form, texture and details.
Why Do Shapes Matter For Realism?
If this sounds a little bit abstract, that’s because it is: To design shapes you have to switch off your “realism” brain for a second and realize that this is an exercise in “abstract” design.
The illusion of realism is created by hanging a few rendering techniques on a layer of abstract shape design.
Shape Design study of eyes from a John Singer Sargent painting. Rendering built on top of abstract shape design.
Another way to think about shape is that it’s comparable something like rhythm in music. You might not notice it as your ear gets distracted by the beautiful melody, but it’s in the background structuring the song, directing your attention and pulling you in.
Just like there are a million ways to use rhythm in music, there are limitless ways to use shape in drawing….
…but let’s not get overwhelmed!
To make things simple, shapes can be reduced to two categories.
Two Types Of Shapes
Simply put, there are two types of shapes: linear shapes and tonal shapes.
Linear shapes vs tonal shapes.
Both have their own uses. You can think of them as follows:
Linear shapes
Created by “Lassoing” a shape with line
To design, sketch, construct or add detail
Tonal shapes
Created by drawing light & shadow patterns
Can be layered on top of linear shapes, or immediately gone into and tweaked
You’ll see how to use both types of shapes in the exercise section very soon, but before that you might be wondering:
Why Care About Shape Drawing?
How the shapes of your drawing relate to each other, feel together, flow into each other, guide the eye of the viewer…
…greatly enhances or weakens the visual impact of your drawing.
Let’s take a look at two master paintings to give some proof.
Here is a portrait of Madame Errazuri by John Singer Sargent:
Increasing the contrast and removing color shows the simple shape design underneath.
As you can see, the simple shapes of the black and white version create a very powerful representation of the original.
Interestingly, the black and white version already has a strong sense of “form”. That’s because light & shadow shapes combined with simple edge manipulation creates a 3D illusion. Worth remembering!
Example two, a painting of a girl by Anders Zorn:
Beautiful shape design by Anders Zorn.
This time I increased the contrast only slightly, so that you can see the greys as well.
Notice how the lighter shapes of value on the face create beautiful surface plane transitions on the forehead and cheeks, the darker shapes of value on the clothering create atmospheric deep shadow patterns.
All in all, I hope it proves to you this:
All the great masters were masters of shape design. Shapes make or break your drawing. Given that, let’s get into how you can practice shape drawing today, and improve your drawings!
How To Practice Shape Drawing
Before getting into the exercises, a note on materials:
Especially for beginners, it’s easier to draw accurate shapes with a linear drawing tool like a ballpoint pen or a pencil (HB - 2B range).
They allow you to capture the nuances of the shape through linear drawing, which is what most of you are still used to and most comfortable with.
Of course you can build up some value with both tools as well, so they are great to get started.
Shape Drawing Exercise 1: Sketching With Shapes
Everything is a shape.
The fastest way to learn the power of shapes is by sketching, especially “non-human things” like animals, plants, buildings, objects, vehicles and the like.
Likeness doesn’t matter as much there as in a figure or portrait drawing, so you can be fully free to experiment with shape design.
Simply go on Google, and search for references (e.g. “cats walking”) and try to simplify what you see into basic shapes.
Some shape sketching tips:
Use a ballpoint pen and “lasso” the shapes you see.
Experiment with exaggerating the shapes to enhance their visual impact.
Capture the shadow and light shapes, and feel free to render shadow shapes to get a basic “value pop”.
Pay attention to the background shape, negative spaces, and less obvious shapes that run through the image.
Don’t be scared, when in doubt, turn what you see into a simple shape and see how it looks.
The idea is to free yourself from having to produce a final drawing. Give yourself 3-5 minutes per sketch and consciously experiment simplifying what you see into basic shapes.
If a shape seems off, change it and notice if it gets better or worse! Keep tweaking your shape design until you like its impact as you look at it.
Shape Drawing Exercise 2: Master Study of Shape Composition
Learning shape design from the masters - a proven way to get great.
This exercise is excellent at teaching you how to use an abstract shape structure to lay the groundwork of your drawing or painting.
If you’ve never done such a master study, you’ll immediately feel the power of this exercise, as you do it.
Simply take a painting by an old master that you really love, and free hand draw it, reducing it to it’s most basic shapes, using an HB pencil.
Build the shape design step by step.
Once you’ve got the basics, take a slightly darker pencil (B or 2B), and fully commit to the shapes. Consciously use straights and curved lines to reinforce the shape you wan to “read” through the drawing.
Once you got clear shapes, build up value in the darks, and render the form as usual, “on top of the shape layer”.
This exercise helps you absorb, feel and intuitively understand why the shape design of the master painting is powerful. In my experience it alters what you consider to be an effective shape, and you’ll inevitably use that sensitivity as you execute your next drawing.
This is an exercise I return to again, and again, and find it brings me returns to this day (I originally learned it from my mentor Chris Legaspi).
Shape Drawing Exercise 3: Anatomy Shape Design Study
Studying anatomy design from John Singer Sargent.
This is another exercise I love that’s highly effective.
It’s about studying the shape design solutions masters came up with for specific anatomical parts of the figure.
Simply take an area of anatomy you struggle with, e.g. the eyes, and find a master painting that has handled that area particularly well. From there do the following:
Take 10 minutes to just look at the feature (in this case eyes), and take note of straight lines, curved lines, big, medium and small shapes.
Start building basic shapes with an HB pencil.
Once it’s roughly right, go in with a B or 2B pencil and recommit to the shapes
From there render as usual (e.g. using cross contour drawing).
In the drawing above I learned the following:
Sargent designs the eyes with asymmetry: The left eye has a completely different design to the right eye.
He uses a lot of straights in his eye design, which give it a piercing, heavy look.
This is a high-return exercise, that can be even more effective than normal anatomy studies.
Applying Shape Drawing In Finished Drawings
Now you might ask:
“I get now how to use shapes in my sketches and study them from master paintings, but how do I use shapes for longer drawings, without making the drawing just look like shapes”?
Good question!
This question actually goes right to the heart of what drawing is:
The ability to apply several concepts at once in a balanced way, within a coherent process.
So let’s take a look at it step by step!
Step 1: Lay-in & Composition Phase
HB pencils allow for light shape design, without having to commit too early.
Many artists use the lay-in phase to purely focus on shape drawing and measurements.
By using a lighter touch for your lines with an HB pencil, you can take the time to design the shapes of your drawing, adjust them where needed, and still layer rendering techniques on top later.
In this phase you should already design the light and shadow shapes, and sometimes it can make sense to add some light tone for the shadows, as it makes proportional mistakes more apparent.
Step 2: Fine-tune Big, Medium and Small Shapes
Recommit to shapes using a B or 2B pencil. Pay attention to how the shape pattern “feels”.
From there it’s important to take a break, step back from your drawing, if you can even turn the drawing and the subject around, and look for the following:
Do any shapes feel like they are bothering you?
Do any shapes block the “flow” of the image?
Do the shapes create a natural focal point in the image?
Should any shapes be more straight, or more curvy?
Are there any unnecessary “exits” in the image?
Take a few mental notes, then sit down again and adjust the shapes. Wash-rinse repeat the process.
As you iterate a few times, you’ll find the shape design of your later drawing is much better than in version one.
Step 3: Layer Form, Texture, Edges and Value on Top
The shape design is still working it’s magic in the background.
If you kept the previous steps relatively light, you can now layer other visual fundamentals on top:
Render the form using a cross-contour drawing
Fine-tune the values of the drawing
Soften or harden edges
Add texture
Etc.
The result:
A final drawing that is built on strong shape architecture.
Building on top of shapes, step by step.
Closing Thoughts
I hope this article could convince you that studying shapes has the potential to greatly improve your drawings…
…because it does!
It’s a fundamental drawing skill, that might hold your skill level back for years if you never consciously learn about it. But once you do a whole new world opens up.
And as you go from basic understanding to real competency, you’ll learn how to enhance or reduce the visibility of your shape design, depending on the aesthetic you are going for. Making your drawings look more graphic, or hiding the shape design beneath beautifully rendered form.
In fact, it’s such an important fundamental, that I dedicated a whole module to it in my video course Drawing Fundamentals In 7 Days.
If you liked this article, definitely check out the course, as it goes deep into how to learn the drawing fundamentals fast.
Either way, shape design is a tool in your toolbox now, so go and use it!
Until next time!
Felix
