How to start drawing in perspective with this New drawing tool: The MICRODOT®

I am publishing something new for you guys.
It’s to introduce you to a Kickstarter Campaign for beginner designers!

It is a New drawing tool that help you draw basic volumes using ISOMETRIC perspective: The MICRODOT®. 🙂 

If you love it and wanna receive your own MICRODOT® (international delivery) for £3 (about $4 USD) you can join and support the Kickstarter project.

John Donnelly is the creator of the MICRODOT®,
I let you discover more about the drawing tool below.

“Many thanks to Chou-Tac for letting me feature in his blog!”

If you struggle with drawing 3D isometric perspective drawing,
I have a stencil I have created that is
available few more days on Kickstarter now.

You might well ask, ‘What’s in it for me?’, Well I’ll tell you.

If you want to get good at sketching on paper,
you must understand how to communicate your idea
in as simpler form as possible.

This starts with being able to draw straight lines that form a crate
that has depth on a page.

Some people find this hard,
but it is the starting point for any good sketch.

If you find this hard, please read on.

I’m a teacher from the UK, Manchester, and teach pupils
how to design and make, in the UK,
this subject is called ‘Design and Technology.

It seems that most teachers in the UK start
teaching pupils to draw 2D views first,
then 3D views that are based on a 30-degree isometric view,
then when this is established they move on to freehand
perspective sketching (this is the end goal).

I believe there are advantages to starting right away
with perspective drawing, but I also understand
why this method of sketching can be broken down
so that a pupil can build up to perspective drawing from 2D,
to 3D then to perspective.

From the point of view of a teacher,
pupils can normally draw 2D shapes because they are taught
from an early age how to draw simple 2D geometric shapes;
squares, rectangles, circles, and triangles.

As soon as children are asked to draw something with a 3D view,
they often get the angles all wrong and can soon feel like giving up.

Every new skill is hard until you get good at it.
Determination and resilience are key to getting good at sketching,
and thinking about, this applies to pretty much everything in life!

30-degree isometric drawing is important because
it trains the pupils’ eyes to draw an object with depth.

To draw perspective sketches takes time.
Confidence is needed to even draw a straight line,
let alone draw a perspective crate that might have vanishing points off the page.

I do teach pupils to draw like this,
as it is undoubtedly the best way, but for many,
I feel they need to start with an isometric view.

This is where my drawing stencil comes in.

Whilst isometric is not as realistic as 3-point perspective,
it does show three sides to a product and communicates
an overall form well.

My stencil works on the principle of dot-to-dot drawings that
many of you will have done in books when you were a child.

My thought is, that if a pupil can draw a good cube,
they should be able to manipulate the cube to
become a drawing of a product.

The stencil has a series of holes that make up the isometric cube,
the cubes can be added together to produce as many joined up crates as you need.

The beauty about the stencil is that the dots
still need to be joined, by hand.

This joining of dots really helps pupils develop
the confidence to progress to draw using a 3-point perspective view.

Once pupils can join the dots to make an isometric form,
they soon start to be able to pull the lines
in slightly so that the crate has diminished perspective as the form gets longer.

The MICRODOT drawing stencil should be like ‘stabilizers’ on a bike.

It is there to give confidence in drawing an object with depth
and will train you to start to sketch freely and with confidence.

A YouTube video of me using the stencil can be viewed here:
https://youtu.be/-vWsPpZzsoE

The campaign ends on 14th August,
there are many ways to back the project,
my personal favorite is the A4 hard case that contains a MICRODOT® stencil,
an Edding 89 fine liner pen and two color-matched
Winsor and Newton markers, this is just £10.

There are YouTube videos and free worksheets that will be included with the stencils, so you can see how I use them.

Thank you for reading this far!
John