How to draw people, objects and backgrounds, simply and quickly! - A con...

If you want to learn to draw anything and everything, there are many drawing methods of drawing to learn. You could use a structural method where you see everything as cylinders, cones, cubes and construction lines or use geometric shapes like squares and circles to build objects. They are all useful techniques and there is no one right or wrong. 

My favourite method- one that I use the most, and also find the most useful, is the contour drawing method. This is where I see everything as flat 2-D shapes and I just draw those shapes. Easy, right? Anyone can copy a random flat 2-D shape no matter how bizarre that shape is. But looking at a real object and imagining it as a 2-D shape instead of the object is very challenging for most people. People would often say that they can't see those 2-D shapes no matter how much I tell them to "See that girl as a shape! See that arm as a shape! See that building as a shape! See that car as a shape!" If they can't see things as 2-D shapes, a person, a car or even a tree can be very complex things to draw.

To overcome this, some recommend turning the picture of a scene upside down to draw it, so the brain has a hard time identifying objects. But how do you turn a scene upside down when you are doing outdoor sketching?! Some recommend blind contour drawing where you don't look at your paper as you draw. But that often results in a funny mess!

So what's the solution? I've discovered that if I combine multiple objects together (in my mind) and see them all as one big shape, I'm able to see objects as shapes more easily. In the above video, I try my best to explain how this works. Hopefully, you will be able to catch it and have as much fun drawing with this method as I do!:)