Here’s a more obvious example – a creature with 6 eyes: The nose and mouth are also aligned properly down the center of the face compared to the first cat. Notice how the eyes on the cat in the second row wrap around the face more naturally. If you’re drawing a character whose face is tilted, contour lines will act as guidelines to help you find out where to place features on the face, such as where to draw the eyes, nose and mouth. Here are some examples of when you can make use of contour lines. Contour lines can run in any direction along the surface of an object to help you create the illusion of form, giving the object a more meaningful shape. In the second row, the objects have lines wrapped around them which make you visualize their many sides. These lines are called contour lines because they follow the form of the object. The first row of objects below appear completely flat. It’s easy to draw 3D objects when they have obvious vertices or hard edges, but what about weird shapes like circles, blobs, or even people? How do you define the planes/faces on a round object? That’s where contour lines come in. You can now imagine each object having volume. Multiple planes on one object give the illusion of depth. Each face is called a plane and each plane is facing a different direction. The reason why these objects look 3D is because I’ve given them additional faces. I added some shading for you to visualize it better. The image below shows you 2D objects being transformed into 3D. I’m only covering a few in this lesson and will sprinkle more in the following lessons. How in the world can we draw something that looks 3D, while in reality being flat on the page?

In reality, the objects drawn are actually 2D because they have no physical depth. When drawing something realistically, we’re depicting what a 3D object will look like on paper. Lesson 2: Learn to See Things Differently If you haven’t read and applied what you learned in lesson 1 and 2, I encourage you to visit them before you read on.

In this lesson, we’re going to focus on how to give our sketches a 3 dimensional quality.Īt the end of this lesson, we’re going to revisit our homework assignments from the previous 2 lessons and apply the techniques from lesson 3.

3d artwork examples easy