What's Next...

Perspective.

Now, you may ask (or not), what is perspective? It is how we represent things as our eyes see them. We don't see things sitting flat on one plane: we see everything in 3 dimensions, some things are closer than others.
When you draw something that has a foreground and a background, you don't draw them the same. If there are people in the foreground and also people in the background, what can we do so that they look like they are standing in the background?

You make them smaller. The things that are further away from us, appear to be smaller, even when we know that they are not as small as they look.

The first exercise with perspective is fairly simple. We will continue to use the basic shapes.

Choose one basic shape (here is circle/sphere)
Make a number of shapes like in the diagram below, making them get smaller and smaller as they 'go into the distance.'
Keep the corresponding shapes the same size and gradually make them smaller as they go in to the center vanishing point.
Once you have the outline drawn, shade and shadow them. Make sure to use just one light source (example: light is coming from one side only, not from two.)
This is all about creating an illusion: the illusion of 3d on a 2d surface.


Things to keep in mind:
Light source--important for shading and shadowing correctly
Vanishing point--the point at which the image (or scene) disappears from view. Imagine a road getting smaller and smaller in front of you until you can't see it any more.


There are several types of perspective (one, two and three point, even zero point!) but we will focus on the most basic (one point) and not worry about anything more complex. For more in depth info, check out the Wikipedia article about perspective.

Soon we will draw a real-life perspective scene. We are almost done with limiting ourselves to just the basic shapes. Just a few more exercises before things get more complicated.
Good luck.