Seeing Shapes

This lesson is to train your eyes to see things in a very 2 dimensional manner. Don’t worry about values anymore but only focus on seeing the shapes.

Forget that the subject used for this exercise (see video below) is a statue but look at what’s in front of you as a whole and in flat shapes, even without differentiating the statue fron its background. Only see as flat graphic shapes without colors and values. So you must see and treat the negative shapes of the background just as importantly. Negative shape means shapes surrounding the object such as the empty background area.

Try to make more out of the shapes that you see, even for the negative shapes surrounding the statue shape. It helps to look at them as distinctive characters or animals such as an alligator or a tiger etc. Here I'm seeing some side views of random strange faces. 

Only use straight lines to draw out the shapes. Keep cutting into the straight lines to give illusion of curves, but with the marks, keep them all straight lines.

Important: Start with largest overall shapes then cut into them into smaller shapes to details.

Feel free to erase as much as needed. My example is pretty rough but you can make it much more refined and cleaner. 

Try to fill up a sketchbook with this exercise, untill you become adept and seeing the shapes accurately this way.