Keep It Simple, Stupid With This Drawing Tutorial

Who remembers shape sorting buckets? You know, where you have to drop different plastic shapes into a bucket through corresponding holes in the lid. Turns out, they were handy little tool kits! With the simplest of shapes—such as a square, a rectangle, a circle, an oval, and a triangle—you can draw just about anything you like.

Think back to drawing as a kid. How would you draw a house? For example, you might draw a square for the walls, a triangle for the roof, smaller squares for windows, and a rectangle for the door. From a young age, our brains make sense of pictures by dismantling them into smaller counterparts, or different shapes. It’s an effective technique that has limitless applications; you can use shapes to draw landscapes, people, and even animals, as you’ll see in the fun videos below!

We’re good at complicating life as adults, but we don’t need to over-complicate our drawings, too. Instead of considering the picture in its entirety, try breaking it down into simple shapes and mapping them out on your paper. Shapes offer proportion and structure, providing us with a framework to build the sketch from. Drawing with shapes is kind of like painting with numbers, in the way it allows us to concentrate on one part at a time, and makes completing the end product feel less overwhelming. The best part is, you don’t need any experience or fancy equipment to draw! All you need is a pencil, some paper, and a swinging bucket of shapes (hypothetical or otherwise, we’ll leave that up to you!).