An Iinterruption

Taking a break from the exercise that we are in the middle of, I would like to post a couple of drawings that I did this morning.





These drawings were made with a kind of charcoal called vine charcoal. It is very lightweight, compared with regular compressed charcoal. It is very easy to sketch something, wipe it away and keep drawing and is also excellent when used in conjunction with other media. You can more easily achieve lighter shades of gray than you can with regular charcoal, but it is also hard to keep a finished project in good condition without using a fixative (or impossible).

Real Life Vanishing Point

For the next perspective exercise, we will do a real life vanishing point. I gave some examples last time of some real instances of vanishing point: a road going off in the distance with telephone poles on either side, a railroad, etc.
These are perfect examples, given that they go straight out in front of you.

So, give it a try. One realistic vanishing point, coming up.

First Perspective Exercise, Complete

Here is the completed example drawing for our first lesson in perspective drawing. (Yes, I folded it to get the shapes in the right spots.)


We want to give the illusion that the shapes are going into the distance, not just a bunch of different sized shapes sitting next to each other.

I neglected to mention that as objects are farther away, in addition to appearing smaller, they also seem to be closer together. This is quite noticeable while looking at telephone poles going into the distance.

There is quite a bit more about perspective to learn, but this is a good start.

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.

Finished: Shapes Composite

Here is the finished basic shapes composite drawing--it contains all three of the basic shapes that we started with in one drawing, to show the interaction between the shapes. By including shade and shadow, we can see how one shape casts shadows on another.

This was just a very basic drawing, just to get a bit more practice with shade and shadow.