Assignment - Melted Pancakes with Philip Dimitriadis
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LESSON NOTES
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Philip Dimitriadis teaches how to draw organic shapes using the Melted Pancakes technique. In this lesson, you'll learn:
- Two Methods for Drawing Melted Pancakes:
- Method 1: Using center lines and wrapping to create three-dimensional lumps.
- Method 2: Drawing walls and mimicking curves for solid forms.
- Understanding the Horizon Line: Learn how the position relative to the horizon line affects the appearance of shapes.
- Creating Depth: Stack shapes and use overlap to convey depth in your drawings.
- Slicing Shapes at Angles: Add complexity by cutting shapes to reveal new surfaces.
- Composition Techniques: Use scale, connect shapes, and guide the viewer's eye through your artwork.
- Drawing Through Shapes: Enhance spatial awareness by visualizing and sketching hidden edges.
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assignment-melted-pancakes-with-philip-dimitriadis.mp4
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assignment-melted-pancakes-with-philip-dimitriadis-transcript-english.txt
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assignment-melted-pancakes-with-philip-dimitriadis-transcript-spanish.txt
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assignment-melted-pancakes-with-philip-dimitriadis-captions-english.srt
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assignment-melted-pancakes-with-philip-dimitriadis-captions-spanish.srt
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ASSIGNMENTS![]()
![Hussein Abdallah]()
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![Rebecca Wood]()
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![@hampop]()
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![Patrick Bosworth]()
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![Laura Taylor]()
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![Neill Burton]()
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![Jules Peppler]()
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![David D]()
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![Milena Radosavljevic]()
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![Milena Radosavljevic]()
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![Christopher G]()
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![Clément Douziech]()
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![Jack Frumkes]()
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![Gloria Wickman]()
Drawing Organic Shapes with Depth and Perspective
- Objective: Learn to draw organic shapes with depth and perspective.
- Steps:
- Draw the First Type of Pancake:
- Place a horizon line in the middle of the page.
- Start by drawing an organic shape split by a middle line.
- Freehand two isometric lines, intersect them, and create a rounded top like a roller coaster.
- Draw the contours over the top to give the shape depth, using dotted lines for additional effect.
- Draw the Second Type of Shape:
- Mimic the line from the first shape both above and below the horizon line.
- Pay attention to the thinness of the ellipses as they approach the horizon.
- Divide the shape with a line to see through it for better understanding.
- Practice Stacking Shapes:
- Draw some shapes under and some over the horizon line.
- Stack different shapes on top of each other to see how the perspective changes.
- Always draw through the shape, which helps in understanding and visualizing the 3D aspect.
- Draw the First Type of Pancake:
- Timing:
- Spend 20 to 30 minutes per page, or more if you are a beginner.
- Try different speeds: set a timer for 5 to 10 minutes on some pages to challenge your pace.
Deadline - submit by Mar 05, 2025 for a chance to be in the critique video!
This was very fun, the digital one is my serious attempt, the pencil ones were drawalongs with Phil.
I love this! It’s hard for me to break into overlapping shapes in a space like this, and this has been a really useful exercise! I’m going to try and do 20 mins of this a day for a week or so.
I do automatically keep going back into doing the cross sections in one point perspective - forgetting that objects can have their own point of perspective, but that’s just something to work on I think.
and this is a great exercise for practicing diminution and atmospheric perspective too!
I think I did okay. I focused on really filling in the entire page and making each pancake feels that is a part of the larger image.
What I don’t like is the messy line quality. The problem is that if I don’t draw slowly, I don’t get the depth quite right and I’m much less precise in general when I try to draw faster. However with speed I can draw more cleanly. Not quite sure what exercises i should do to fix my line quality. I’m spending a lot of time just drawing straight lines, circles, ellipses in various shapes sizes orientations, speeds, but I feel like my skills there don’t transfer to “real assignments” and most of my drawings look messy.
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8d
These look great, I think your line quality is pretty clean here! In general the more you practice drawing from your shoulder, you'll dial in your speed/line quality with time. You can also continue to build up your line weights at this point using tapered strokes. Start to increase the line weight of objects closer to the viewer and let the objects in the background recede into the distance with lighter line weight. Here are a couple videos on line quality and line weight from the Basics Course. Keep up the good work!
https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/how-to-draw-confident-lines-the-tapered-stroke
https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/6-habits-for-good-line-quality
https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/how-to-draw-with-line-weight
a fun exercise to play around with stuff, but it made me more eager to learn how to do this accurately.
To be honest I found this one a little hard to pay attention to. I liked the finished picture when it was done, but doing blobs randomly and then adding stacking them up did not give me much motivation to finish the pictures. I did 4 small ones and one large one. I think i got the general feeling right.
Hey!
Nice work here. I've seen you posting over the last few days.
The technique Mr. Dimitriadis shares here is more of a mental exercise to make sure we keep drawing through our objects and to know exactly where they sit in perspective. As he noted, it is easy to get lazy and stop drawing our lines on the other side. Also, this is a way of creating without feeling absolutely bound to a grid or certain set of rules. This is a great way to fill out a sketchbook page without any of the pressure we usually give ourselves of trying to make a beautiful picture. I like your iterations!
First attempt - maybe this is the “wad” paper he was talking about.
I feel like I can make an individual stack fine, but cohesion and composition don’t seem to gel.
I don’t know - maybe that’s just something that takes time?
I will do this practice regularly, I know I need more repetition to improve and I'm not as quick and deliberate as I would like. In those 30 min I still don't have the mental capacity to be thinking about the composition. Consistency of the ellipses getting thinner as they come closer to the horizon line should be better
But I guess it's fine as it was my first time attempting this practice and I do naturally think in this direction when working
This is my favorite assignment so far :) I wanna do a lot of these! I attempted this once on paper, then digital, and then while I was at work the next day I got my sketchbook out and did two 15-minute pages. I really like experimenting with different horizon lines and groups of pancakes, but I feel like mine all look like a very similar shape? Like they're mostly neat cylinders. I'm gonna watch the critique and look at everyone else's before I do more.
Here is my first pancake cave landscape.
I love the frame tips. I felt it really helps to stay focus on what I was drawing.
Here is my attempt. I tried to make weird shapes to challenge myself. Looking at it back I think it looks okay maybe I'll go back and do more. Need to work on cleaner lines though.
I don't think this came together well as a composition but I learned a lot more about thinking in terms of 3d forms. I also realized my gut instinct is to always show the top plane even when it shouldn't be visible because its above the horizon line, so I found myself having to correct that a lot.
