Working only in line can have a flattening effect. But growing up looking at cartoons, logos, and diagrams, we're often quick to think in terms of outline and not in terms of form. In this video I'll show you how to combat that urge by drawing through the form. You might have grown up using children's drawing books, where forms are broken down into geometric primitives like circles, triangles, and rectangles. Well, this process works great for kids that are trying to copy pictures of dinosaurs, but it doesn't help you learn very much because it's purely a two-dimensional abstraction. It only recreates the dinosaur from one camera angle. So if you want to draw some subject matter like this coffee cup, or a similar object from your imagination, the best approach is to envision them as a collection of three dimensional shapes. So if you envision it first as a simple pile of three-dimensional primitives, it's a lot easier to try and rotate this object in your mind's eye. It helps you imagine it from different angles. And as an illustrator, this technique is much more versatile than thinking only in contour or outline drawings. And usually drawing through the form like this is just the first stage in a series of refinements that I'll make. It's really just a preliminary drawing before the actual contour drawing goes on top. So even if I end up with a clean contour line, I'll start with this structural understanding first. There's a lot to love about this mindset, but one of the biggest gains is the ability to envision objects in 3D space. An exercise that I've recently started is to take a simple form, either from observation or from a photo, and then try drawing it from all different imagined camera angles. This really exercises the mind's eye, and it's a great deal harder than you might imagine. Forcing yourself to internalize a 3D object like this will really help you dream up fantasy objects and creatures of your own design. So go find some simple object, draw it first from observation, and then draw it from a variety of imagined camera angles. Good luck, and thanks for watching.