Combinations Of Letters To Form Symbols

My professor is a man who enjoys making his students form large, but often simple symbols with smaller letters. That might not have clarified much, so let me demonstrate:

VVVVVVV
VVVVV
VVV
V
Or...
X X
X X
X
X X
X X
Or lastly...
O
O O
O O
O O
O

My problem is, that I've always been bad at figuring out the logic behind these.

I can kinda' see it (somewhat) in my head though... I'd need a double for-loop which depend on the sizes, one that monitors the spaces and one that monitors the symbols, with some conditionals in there. How to make symbols like this, using letters, in Java.