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Shape and Form (Again)

12:21 AM, Tuesday January 6th 2026

Hello. so recently i was drawing some character design that was stuck in my head and i wanted to get it out. i would count this as being apart of my 50% percent but i wasnt thinking about that at the time. as i was drawing i was using alot of the fundamentals i was learning from both here and other courses and by the end something about the drawing was bothering me, i couldn't explain until i eventually realize that i was treating one of the elements of the drawing as a shape rather than a form and this had me thinking again about shape vs form. when constructing a drawing what role does shape have in comparison to form? form is how this speifically draws constructs objects with but some other courses use shapes, whats the difference between the two? does it matter which one a artist uses? does shape have revelance as a fundamental in art especially with the stuff this course focuses on?

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6:49 PM, Tuesday January 6th 2026

When we draw things that exist in three dimensions, we're working with form. That doesn't necessarily mean that we're drawing them with all of their internal edges - sometimes, frankly, often times, we just end up drawing the silhouettes of those forms, which are likely what you're labelling as "shape" - but it's important to understand that it is still derived from forms that exist in 3D space. Of course, one might then apply stylistic choices that actually do flatten those forms into actual 2D shapes, but style exists as a layer on top of the fundamentals, so that doesn't necessarily change how we understand the underlying things we're representing.

When it comes to design, there are things like form/shape language (where one pushes to achieve silhouettes with certain kinds of properties, as opposed to allowing those silhouettes to turn out however they will based on the forms being built up), but successful use of shape language still needs to be grounded in the 3D reality of form (again, this can be stretched to some extremes through stylization) otherwise it ceases to be believable.

So at the end of the day, we may make specific choices on the kind of shapes we want our resulting 2D drawing to have, but how those shapes come about and are achieved is still grounded in the fact that those 2D shapes are derived from the forms that make up whatever it is you're drawing.

7:28 PM, Tuesday January 6th 2026

What your saying is a bit complicated but i do think i get it, if i don't feel free to correct me. essentially shapes are forms without their internal edges, doesn't matter the angle of the shape in question. those shapes however are ultimately representive of form and exist in 3d space like forms unless your stylizing them as being directly 2d like certain cartoons. you can design form and shapes to achieve certain effects

10:22 PM, Tuesday January 6th 2026

Yup, that's correct.

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Michael Hampton's Gesture Course

Michael Hampton's Gesture Course

Michael Hampton is one of my favourite figure drawing teachers, specifically because of how he approaches things from a basis of structure, which as you have probably noted from Drawabox, is a big priority for me. Gesture however is the opposite of structure however - they both exist at opposite ends of a spectrum, where structure promotes solidity and structure (and can on its own result in stiffness and rigidity), gesture focuses on motion and fluidity, which can result in things that are ephemeral, not quite feeling solid and stable.

With structure and spatial reasoning in his very bones, he still provides an excellent exploration of gesture, but in a visual language in something that we here appreciate greatly, and that's not something you can find everywhere.

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