🔺 Shapes and collage

A ball is round like a circle, but it is also a shape you can hold and roll.

Almost every picture is secretly built from simple shapes like circles, squares, triangles and rectangles, even ones that look complicated at first glance. A house might really just be a square with a triangle roof on top, and a face might be built from one big circle plus some smaller ovals and dots. Learning to spot these hidden shapes can actually make drawing easier, since breaking a tricky object down into simple pieces feels much less overwhelming than trying to draw the whole thing at once.

A square has four sides that are all the same length, like a window or a book cover.

A collage is a picture made by cutting or tearing pieces of paper, fabric, or other flat materials and gluing them together onto a surface instead of drawing or painting every part by hand. You can mix photos, coloured paper, magazine clippings, or even bits of nature like leaves, layering them together to build up a picture piece by piece. Collage lets you experiment freely, since you can move pieces around and try different arrangements before gluing anything down for good.

You can fold, tear, or roll paper to make something new, like a hat, a boat or a ball.

A pattern is a shape, colour or line that repeats over and over, like stripes, dots or zigzags. Artists use patterns to make a picture feel neat, repeating and lively. Repeating a small shape can fill a big space quickly, without having to invent something new for every inch. Patterns show up everywhere outside of art too, like the stripes on a bee or the tiles on a floor.

A single flat piece of paper can become almost anything, folded into an airplane or a boat, cut into snowflakes or paper dolls, rolled into a tube, or crumpled and shaped into something completely different. Paper bends and folds easily but still holds its shape once you crease it firmly, which is exactly why folding turns out to be such a powerful way to build 3D shapes from something totally flat. Trying different folds, cuts and rolls on paper is a cheap, easy way to explore how flat materials can become something that stands up, holds together or even moves.

Cutting shapes out of paper and gluing them down lets you build a whole new picture, piece by piece.