Isometric projection

Okay, imagine you have a big toy box sitting in front of you. Now imagine you want to draw it on a piece of paper, but you want to make it look like it's not just flat on the paper but like it's 3-dimensional, as if you could reach out and touch it.

One way to do that would be to draw it from a certain angle called an "isometric projection."

What that means is that you're going to imagine that you're looking at the toy box from a very specific angle: you're going to imagine that you're looking at it straight-on from one corner, but instead of just seeing a flat box sitting on the ground, you're also going to imagine that you can see both the top and the sides of the box at the same time.

So the way you would draw the toy box would be to first draw the bottom and one of the sides of the box, like you would if you were drawing it from above, but then you would tilt those lines upward a bit so that you can see the top of the box too. Then you would draw the top of the box, but again tilt those lines downward so that you can also see the side of the box.

And that's basically how you would draw anything using an isometric projection: you're imagining that you're looking at it from a specific angle that lets you see multiple sides of the object at the same time, and then you're drawing the object as if you were looking at it from that angle.

It's kind of like playing with a toy and imagining that the toy is a different thing, like pretending a box is a car or a castle, except instead of just imagining it, you're using that imagination to draw the object in a way that makes it look 3-dimensional.