Presto Sketching

Chapter 6. Tackling More Complex Objects

BY NOW, YOU’RE GETTING to know your way around a marker or two. Give yourself a congratulatory fist bump on the shoulder—well done! You can start to bring figures and faces into your presentations now, and I’ll bet that anything you draw on the whiteboard in meetings will already be improving, even with just a few frames and separators.

It’s time to take it up a gear and tackle some more complex—and more interesting—objects. For this, we’ll look at drawing “inside out,” not “outside in” like you might already have been doing, and then applying that technique to objects that come up in the world of products and services.

In particular, we’ll focus on sketching hands, in various positions and holding products (such as mobile phones).

Let’s Go Inside Out

Want some good news? If you can draw the objects in the previous chapter, based on one shape (like a rectangle or circle), you can draw just about any object you want. It’s all a matter of seeing those basic shapes within whatever it is that you want to draw and then drawing those shapes as foundation lines to help you sketch the entire thing.

Let’s break it down. Figure 6-1 shows a picture of a pair of headphones on the left. On the right is another picture for which I’ve turned on my mental X-ray machine, showing the simple shapes that I see. Do you see the two semicircles for the speaker bits? Do ...