How to create three-dimensional images
A sheet of paper is flat, but your drawings don't have to be as well! 

In an age like this one, where 3D seems to be the minimum requirement even in TV and movies, your drawings can't afford to be flat!
As already covered in the "Visual perception" and "Volume" articles previously posted on this blog, we can easily deceive our brain to see volume and depth.

The skills to describe depth and form in drawing are not acquired only by doing hundreds of full color, complex illustrations, but are learnt in the preliminary phases of the creation of artwork, the sketch phase.The really important work is done in the beginning, when we translate what we see or imagine in our minds and we put it down on a flat, white sheet of paper.

Today, throught digital painting and the possibilities of seeing and experimenting different techniques with a load of different softwares and applications, we tend to rush towards the final picture without giving the sufficient attention to the study of shapes and their spacial arrangement.
Too often we see illustration with a good painting technique and an obsessive attention to detail but with a poorly structured base, in both composition, anatomy and volume.

We'll talk about this subject and will often get back to it as part of this blog's philosophy.
Drawing is not a mere mechanical procedure.We try to draw with out hand, our brain and will eventually end up to put our soul into it as well.
It might sound weird but if you'll follow this method you will understand yourself.

Every line you put down must have a meaning and be related to all the rest of the lines that form the picture.
Copy objects from life, starting from simple ones and moving on to more complex ones, putting effort in imagining their solidity, their weight and volume.

The brain has the power to dissect what we see and translate it into simpler shapes.
Train yourself while you draw, look for simple, basic shapes that compose objects of all kinds, be it cilinders, spheres, boxes and wedges.

You can do it with your USB key,your cell phone, your microwave, your kitchen table.

Once you've familiarised yourself with simple shapes you'll be able to move on to more complex shapes, both organinc and inorganic, including humans and animals.
Do not rush!
We will tackle it in the "advanced" version of this post!





SUGGESTIONS:

-Look "through" objects, always draw the construction lines that make up the object you intend to represent, imaging where even parts you can't directly see merge and cross each other.

-Limit yourself to a couple of complexity "layers", don't get too bothered with detail, especially when working on humans or animals.

-Follow the suggested order of difficulty, going from simple objects (single simple shapes) to complex ones (more than one shape) and then onto organic objects.

-If working from photographs, choose clear and simple images, and if they are umans and animals, choose simple poses.

The ideal condition would be to study both from photo and from life.With digital photography all this has become incredibly simple, snap a picture of your PC, your microwave or chair and copy it from life and from the 2d photo you took.While drawing from the 2d image, keeping an eye on the real object will make volumes and shapes clearer, and improve your own 3D mental image of the object.

Enjoy!

Translation by Ryan Lovelock Thanx!