#07 • The wonderful box and what I can do for you
Let’s take a step back and explore another 3D shape concept that can be a little technically daunting at first, but can skyrocket your character art If you take the time to understand it. I give you the box. Boxes are helpful because they help us to understand how our characters are placed oriented in 3D space.
Construction
Boxes are made up of six planes. Specifically, planes for the front, back, top, bottom, and the sides. One of the easiest methods of creating a box is to draw a square and then draw another square behind it, offset and overlapping to your liking. Then we simply connect the corners. It’s helpful to always draw through our box so we can better understand. I use dashed lines when drawing the behind the front plane.
2. Putting them into action
Boxes can be rotated or we can rotate ourselves around a box to view it from different angles. If we are to get close up to the box, the lines start to converge. If we draw Xbox with diverging lines, it will always look wrong. The farther away we view the box, the more of the lines flatten out looking parallel or isometric. For the sake of simplicity, we will draw our characters using boxes with parallel lines (without convergence), but practicing drawing boxes with converging lines will help master the idea of spatial recognition and perspective.
3. Mixing it Up
The center of a box plane can be found by drawing an x through it. Knowing where the center is can help us construct other spatially accurate shapes, like cylinders or pyramids.
Now Let ‘s take these ideas and spend 10 minutes turning shapes into characters
Assignment: Create a grid of rotated boxes and draw the head inside.