When I was young I saw how-to-draw books that broke things down into basic shapes and I thought they were lame. The drawings in those books didn’t seem to match the highly rendered pieces that I responded to and used as an aspirational goal. So, as most of us, I focused on rendering and shading and learned how to do it well. That was drawing to me.
But the more I learned post-high school, I started to see the pattern of truth re-emerge: Basic shapes REALLY ARE the way to draw. And it starts with training our eyes and minds to simplify down what we see to the most basic elements.