Any scene can initially be seen as a composition of a series of forms that are all related to four basic geometric solids: the brick, the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone. In this article we concentrate on the brick, i.e., we will detail its properties and its place in the overall scheme of a drawing.

An exact brick is a six-sided geometric solid such that two opposing sides are parallel to each other and intersecting sides are perpendicular to each other. A brick has 12 ribs of which, in a typical scene, there are usually only 9 visible.

A brick-like object can of course have any kind of orientation within your scene. The keys to drawing such arbitrarily oriented brick correctly are:

* Observation - Although it is absolutely necessary to learn the basics of perspective, in the end, the best guide to drawing realistically, is to develop your powers of observation, i.e., practice "seeing reality as it is and not as you think it is".

Leave the built-in prejudices behind. These prejudices have been built into the memory for good reason. In your normal day to day activities it is not necessary to see every object in full detail. This would be a waste of time and would slow us down considerably. The brain therefore creates symbols of these objects with a minimum of detail. That this is so can easily be seen from children's (and many adult's) drawings. The sun, for example, is represented by a circle and some radiating lines.

Correctly observing a brick involves judging angles and lengths of lines as they really appear in the scene.

* Perspective - To greatly help you with seeing correctly you can make use of the rules of simple perspective.

A brick has three sets of four parallel ribs, each set having a different direction. Each set of parallel lines can be drawn in the same manner.

First choose two ribs out of a set and judge the angle they make. In reality the two ribs are parallel but due to perspective they will usually not look parallel (unless they are verticals).

You can now see where the two ribs will intersect. This gives you their vanishing point. The two other ribs in the set will also intersect in that same vanishing point, this according to the rules of perspective.

You can now repeat the same procedure for the remaining two sets of four parallel ribs. This will give you two more vanishing points.

With a bit of practice you will soon be able to draw any kind of brick with sufficient accuracy and the right perspective. Train yourself to draw each rib free-hand and in one relatively quick stroke. Note that the vanishing points usually reside outside the borders of your drawing paper and can therefore not always actually be drawn. But, after a while, you get a good feel for the location of these vanishing points and even a good feel for how a brick looks like in the correct perspective. The trick, as always, is practice and more practice.

Finally, brick-like objects very often are not perfect bricks. However, the first cut at it can be drawn as a regular brick as discussed above. After that, you can add corrections with pencil and eraser until the object looks on your paper as it does in the real scene. The deviations occur as unequal and/or non-perpendicular or non-parallel line segments.

In this article we discussed how to produce a line drawing of a brick-like object. What we outlined above should be enough to get you started in the right direction. It should not take more than a couple of days to draw just about any brick-like object in a very convincing and correct manner.