Simplifying Perspective

A Step-by-Step Guide for Visual Artists

Robert Pastrana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135036218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

Master the art of linear perspective.

If you're an animator, illustrator, comic book artist, game artist or anything in between, you need to be able to create images that accurately and realistically show space, dimension and form. Simplifying Perspective is the one and only guide that thoughtfully and clearly breaks down the principles of perspective into something that's easy to understand and use. With approachable lessons and clear visual step-by-step instruction, Robert Pastrana provides you with powerful techniques that help you turn a troubled drawing into a living, breathing, dimensional scene.

With Simplifying Perspective, you'll never have to wade through dense, complex technical manuals again – this comprehensive guide to perspective is tailored specifically for artists who need to learn the ins and outs of one, two, and three-point perspective, measuring, shadows, reflections, and more. Simplifying Perspective presents complex drawing concepts in an easy-to-follow, approachable manner so you can finally learn the essentials of perspective without the anticipated frustration.

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• Provides clarity, depth, and a wealth of examples – this is your must-have guide to understanding and using linear perspective

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• Detailed visual instruction includes hundreds of color coded, step-by-step diagrams that allow you to easily follow the technical process of each construction

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• Comprehensive companion website includes additional resources on perspective with a range of work to help further your skills

Chapter 1
Before We Start

Before we dive into perspective, we first need to address what it does and where it fits into the creative process. We’ll then talk about the inherent but minor pitfalls of working in perspective and the best ways to manage the drawing process. We’ll end by going over the traditional and digital tools necessary to work in perspective.

What Perspective Can and Can’t Do for You

Perspective has a singular mission. It helps you draw your subject matter accurately as you place it in believable space. That’s it – it won’t make your idea a good one and it doesn’t compose your picture for you. A general composition needs to be roughed out before you can put it in perspective. If you don’t first spend enough time coming up with a great idea and then doing enough sketches to find the best composition for that idea, then you’ll only be using perspective to clearly and accurately present weak concepts and poor compositions. By doing the right things in the right order, you can avoid this very common problem. With that in mind, let’s quickly review some ideas about the creative process.

The Creative Process – Getting from A to Z

Some people approach their work as if they are being led by the wind – moving back and forth, making major decisions and changes all the way until the very end. This only makes sense if you don’t have a specific goal in mind. That’s how you should work if you’re exploring in a sketchbook or experimenting on a personal project without any specific deadline. On the other hand, anytime you do work for someone else – a class assignment, a freelance commission, or as an employee, there’s an expectation that the work will be complete (and wonderful) by a specific due date. This is where having a rock-solid working process is a great help. The process outlined below will get you from an initial assignment to a finished painting. It has nothing to do with technique – whether you’re working with paint, pixels, or pencils, here’s how the pros handle their work.

Clarify Your Goals

There’s something really important that needs to happen before you start – even before you go looking for ideas. You have to be completely clear on what you need to communicate to your audience. A picture is so much more than its subject matter. How you convey your idea is as important as the idea itself. It helps to think of a picture as a visual record of every decision you made in order to express your idea. If you start with the end in mind – that is, deciding what you need to get across to your audience, you’ll have both an easier time assessing your ideas and you’ll establish a specific visual direction for your work.

Getting Ideas

Now it’s time to find specific ideas that will help you visually express what you hope to communicate. A common mistake is to immediately start drawing. Visuals are always representations of ideas – a better way to start would be to spend some time just thinking and writing down words or phrases related to your problem. Write down anything that comes to mind. Don’t edit; that’s best saved for later. It’s too difficult to try to judge your ideas while you’re trying to come up with them. You’ll discover that you’ll have a greater number of better and more diverse ideas if you separate the act of finding them from the act of evaluating. The more you write and think, the more chances you create for your best ideas to show up.

This can also be a place for research. A word of caution – try not to do too much visual research yet. Sometimes, when you look at images too early in the process, it ends up stifling your own creativity and problem solving. It’s the visual equivalent of getting a song stuck in your head. You won’t have a lot of room left to find your own ideas when your mind is crowded with someone else’s. If you value creativity, try looking for inspiration only when you’ve decided on a direction for your work – that is, after getting some viable ideas. Visual reference should mostly support your ideas, not be a stand-in for them.

Sketching

Now that you’ve defined the content of your image, that is, identified the specific things that will be in your picture, it’s time to explore how you want to present them. This is where we start to create visuals. It’s always a good idea to sketch before you draw. Here’s the difference between the two: the goal of drawing is to aesthetically convey, with all necessary detail, the information that visually describes your idea. Before you commit to a drawing, some basic decisions of size, shape, and placement need to be made. That’s what sketching is all about. A good sketch is the compositional foundation of a good drawing. When sketching, you should do many – and then do more after that. Make them small and do them quickly. Don’t be distracted by detail. Sketching can quickly help you identify potential problems with your approach. It’s best to catch them before you start working on your finished piece. Since you’re working simply, you should be able to do a lot of exploring in a short amount of time. When people draw when they instead should be sketching, they don’t typically get to explore enough compositionally. Save the act of drawing for a composition that’s worth your time and effort. There’s another problem with drawing without first sketching – it’s harder to be objective about a composition when you’ve drawn something successfully. For example, you may be happy with the way you’ve drawn a pair of hands, or maybe you finally found some success with drawing a likeness. That success can blind you to the fact that those wonderful hands or that amazing likeness may be the stars of a very poor composition. Sketching helps you to quickly find the best composition for your subject matter. It doesn’t take long, it supports your work and makes it easier to do. Find what you feel are your best few sketches and decide which one would make the best image.

Perspective

The job of perspective is to transform your sketch into a believable drawing that mimics the specific way we see. Here is where you give the very informal but important decisions you made in the sketch stage believable dimension and space. Later in this book, we’ll discuss some perspective sketching ideas that you can use as a transition between rough initial sketches and your final drawing. It’s an important step. If you’re creating a busy, complicated drawing and you gloss over this part of the process, the mechanics of perspective will lead you away from your intended composition. Only leap into perspective when you’re ready.

Line Drawing

It’s finally time to draw. This is probably the part that you’ve been itching to get to, but because of your patience and discipline, something great will happen – you’ve made it a lot easier for that drawing to be successful. The work that you’ve already done was devoted to resolving some really big decisions about your picture. It’s going to be a lot easier – and faster – to do your drawing because of that. This is where you do the bulk of your visual research. Surround yourself with all the reference material you need to help you flesh out the details of your image and get to work. Know how far you want to go with detail and get your subject matter looking the way you want it to.

Value Studies

If you need to go beyond a refined line drawing, then you’ll have another group of very important decisions to make. You’ll need to establish your lights and darks, and, if your final project will be in color, you’ll eventually need to make those decisions as well. Think through your values first. Value (how light or dark something is) has three important functions. It helps to create mood, it directs the eye through contrast, and it describes form. Approach your value studies the way you approached sketching. Explore your options and keep things simple. Don’t worry so much about details and subtle gradations. Concentrate on large, important shapes and paint them simply. Decide what general value something is. Is it light, more of a middle value, or is it dark? Your goal here is to make sure, through contrast, that the more important parts of your picture stand out first and that secondary elements remain so. If you can already direct the eye to your center of interest without relying on detail and lighting effects, you can be sure that you’ll have an amazing picture once you include that information in your final.

Color Studies

If you’re going to work in color, you have one last set of key decisions to make. The good news is, if you’ve already done some value studies, the hard work is mostly over. Value choices are functional while color, by comparison, is more decorative. Having a great value study means you’ll have a lot of freedom with color – but only if you hold onto the specific tones from your value study. The success of your color is largely related to the values of your color, so work hard on your values and you’re almost there. Once you’ve gained some experience and are comfortable managing both value and color, you can skip the value study and instead establish your values while working out your color study. To gain that experience more quickly, you’re better off separating the ideas of value and color when you do your work.

Final Image

If you look back and analyze the previous steps, you’ll see they were all geared to help you make solid decisions about every important part of your picture. This process is meant to focus your efforts, in a specific and prioritized way, so you can develop a clear idea of what your picture will look like before you start to make it. This makes creating the picture much easier and faster to do. If you’ve made good choices along the way, the only thing left to worry about is technique. Sharpen your pencils, mix your paint, launch your software; you’re fully prepared to enter the most rewarding part of the whole process. You can now devote all of your energy to making your image. On the other hand, if you haven’t managed the process properly – if, for instance, you didn’t spend enough time sketching, or if your color studies never made it out of your head, then you’ve instead made your work much more difficult to do successfully. There’s really no skipping any of these steps – if you didn’t make these decisions when you were supposed to, you’ll instead be making them now, when you should be trying to paint. Working just got a whole lot harder.

Getting the Most out of Perspective

It’s All About Looks

Sometimes, your work can look wrong, even though it’s technically accurate. Let’s examine the image below.

Both images are technically correct. They’re wrong, though, when you consider the goals of drawing. When we draw representationally, we translate the three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional one. This process has many limitations and it’s our job to successfully compensate for them. You can avoid some of these problems by remembering to give your viewer enough visual information so they can easily tell what your object is and what it’s doing. Specifically, think about the general form of your object. Whether it’s organic or geometric, make sure you show enough of the front, side, and either top or bottom planes. When you lose or minimize any of these major planes you’ve hindered the readability of the form. In the real world, it’s less of an issue. When we look at a three-dimensional object with our eyes, each eye has a slightly different vantage point. This gives concrete dimensional information to our brains in ways that a two-dimensional drawing can’t. That, coupled with the fact that we move in space relative to what we’re looking at, means that in the dimensional world, this kind of visual ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 – Before We Start
• Chapter 2 – Creating Space
• Chapter 3 – Setting It All Up
• Chapter 4 – The Cone of Vision
• Chapter 5 – The Setup in Action
• Chapter 6 – Constructing the Basic Forms
• Chapter 7 – Using Grids
• Chapter 8 – Measuring in Perspective
• Chapter 9 – Circles and Ellipses
• Chapter 10 – Mastering Slopes
• Chapter 11 – Indicating Reflections
• Chapter 12 – Casting Shadows
• Chapter 13 – Three-Point Perspective
• In Closing
• Index