April 28, 2014 by

After working on shape and proportion you really want to move on to perspective, for me perspective was one of the hardest things to do and to be honest I still get it wrong. You can draw flat figures in different shapes and it can still be amazing but often to give depth to an image perspective is the key. Perspective can give the illusion of 3D within a 2D setting. This can be to varying levels and depending on what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve. On all levels perspective is the one thing to this day I still struggle with and is the cause of constant frustration...so if you can pick this up easily then you are ahead of me. If not then know that it is just really hard to understand angles and shapes along with depth of field.

Before you really look at perspective though you have to ask yourself what is it that you want to achieve, ideally when ever you set out to draw an image you have it in mind what it is that you want to have at the end.  Have a clear idea in your head what it is you want to achieve is really going to be the key to your success in converting that in to an actual drawing. If you are not really sure what you want to do then look around for inspiration, look at other people's art work and see the sorts of things that you might want to do. I usually look to comic book characters as I love comics, they are drawings which helps and they often have some great characters that you can either adapt, update or just copy. You are not so much looking for the character though as the type of image that you want to produce. Is it action? Someone falling, jumping, climbing etc. Or is it more of a still life, someone sitting, standing etc.

The other good way to come up with things I have found is to simply scratch on some paper as to the type of thing you might want to do you might see a shape or an idea come out of that.

The thing that is hard about perspective from my point of view....is well point of view. If you change the angle you look at something the thing changes. You can see different parts of the body, from above the neck is hidden by the head, from below the crown of the head is hidden by the underside of the face and so on.

In the most basic of terms perspective is that things that are closer to you are larger than things further away from you (proportionally so) The more interesting or contorted the shape you are drawing the harder this become to convey accurately. So for the basics just try and draw a standing figure from different angles.

Now artists often use tricks like mannequins, looking in the mirror, photographs and so on. So don't think that using reference material is cheating or takes away from the skill that is required to still get that right. If you are in to photography than getting something like a static 50mm lens and photographing objects from different distances and different angles will help you in this regard. (50mm lens is supposedly the closest to what the human eye sees) Early on when I was a kid I would get stuffed toys or action figures and put them in various position (yes sometimes sexual) and photograph them (kinky) from different angles. So I hung a bear over the banisters of our stairs and photographed him from the top looking down at him, then went down stairs and took a photo of him from below then took one from the stairs getting him a sort of 3/4 perspective angle.  From there i could see how the object looked from all those angles. I had to wait two weeks for he photos to be developed. That's right some of you reading this are born in the world of digital cameras and instant results, I sadly had to deal with film cameras and had to have the pictures developed at great cost. A later did a photography course...no idea why they charged so much! To be fair I was just developing black and white which is far easier than colour. At any rate with the digital age as it is you can take shots and they don't have to cost you anything to take and you can just re-take and re-take until you get the angle or perspective that you require.

What ever it is you are looking at referencing from doesn't have to be what you draw, you are just looking at how that object looks. So I could replace Mr.Bear with Spider-Man because with the photograph I could see that I would see his hand as large, his head fairly big and the top of it, his feet would be small and barely visible (if they hung straight down) the shoulder and chest would block most of the view of his other arm and lower body.

A lot of artist will use a horizon line to help them decide the size and shape of how things should look. There are a number of good websites and images that can explain horizon lines and perspective far better than I ever could a quick search on the internet should reveal some really good stuff.(sorry not to have included any, but a fair bulk of time spent typing anyway) When learning to do horizon lines I would draw simple square boxes that then become houses and building and so on. It isn't just landscapes though that are affected by the vanishing point it is also any figures that you want to draw in perspective. It isn't important to have things drawn this way though, 2D drawings with little to no perspective are often still very good. It's only if you want to add a level of realism to the picture in some way that you might want to consider this technique?

Below are some crappy drawings that I have done in order to demonstrate how crappy my drawing is as well as how you can scratch a sketch out and start to think about how you would like things to look what "story" are you trying to tell with the image you are creating.



So as you can see the middle image was me scratching an idea out, you can also see from it what I was saying in lesson one and 2. Everything can be made up from straight lines and circles/ovals.

The drawing on the right is a re-drawing of the same idea only this time I did it fleshing the figure out, you can still see though that it is a combination of semi circles, circles and straight lines. I added a box in the back ground to give a little more perspective.

The drawing on the left is a little closer to where you might want to end up, it is no perfect, nor finished it might take another 2-3 re-draws (never put too much detail in until you are happy..redrawing everything from scratch can be demoralising.)

You can see though what I mentioned earlier about the bear in this image. The hand is much larger than other parts of the body due to it being closer, everything gets smaller as it fades away from that point in to what would be the vanishing point. Now the reason I don't like the image is because the angle of the body is still wrong....it should be far more straight down. If you were to move your head slightly to the left (pretending this was a real situation) you would change the angle of your view and you would see more like what you can see in the right hand image.

The image can still work as it is though as it could be due to the body swinging that you can see more at this angle, or due to the character trying to pull up and his muscles moving his body to a different position. As I mentioned earlier your image is telling a story. In order to make the image a little more detailed I threw in some buildings giving them the same sort of perspective and chucked in some little cars on the road in order to give the illusion of height.

Perspective is a huge course and not always required so whether you care to worry about it or not will depend on how much you really want to get in to drawing or whether you just want to improve ever so slightly, just so you can do a few things for enjoyment. So it is more for your consideration that I mention it. I can give examples at another point maybe?

Apologies for not really explaining this in full or really how to do it, it is a big, big subject and is only required if you want to add that layer of real depth...most of the time I get away without really thinking about it. (using very basic things in the background are small things in the foreground big, but not making them individually sized)

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