SOLIDWORKS has many ready-made commands that we can use to create simple sketch shapes such as lines, squares, circles, ellipses, arcs, and so on. We will learn about these sketching commands in this chapter. However, it is important to understand that all complex sketches are a combination of different simpler sketches.

Let's illustrate this with an example. The following image shows a sketch of a relatively complex shape:

Note that the complex shape is made up of a combination of different simple elements, such as lines and arcs. This image can be easily made with four different sketching commands: lines, arcs, circles, and slots. The following image shows how we can break down the complex sketch into these four sketching commands. All the unmarked elements of the sketch are repetitions of the marked ones. We can refer to each of these elements (a line or an arc, for example) as sketch entities:

Simplifying complex sketches so that they're simple elements is a skill that takes time to build. This book will help you develop this skill, but you will become better at it with experience. Since we've just started with sketching, we may face difficulties simplifying complex sketches. Now that we know what sketches are, we can start defining the elements that are involved in our sketches. We will start with sketch planes.