Line and shape: learning to measure what you see

Most drawings that "look wrong" are not wrong in detail. They are wrong in proportion: the jug is a little too tall, the bowl a little too narrow, the angle of the table a few degrees off. Your eye forgives this while you work, and the camera does not. This module gives you three tools that fix it, and they are the same tools painters have used for centuries.

Simple shapes first

Every object can be reduced to a box, a cylinder, a sphere or a cone. Before you draw a single detail, find the big shape. A mug is a cylinder with a handle; a pear is two spheres. Detail placed on a correct big shape looks right; detail placed on a wrong one never will.