Sunday, October 23, 2005

And after Light came Space

One of the difficulties with visual art is representing the three-dimensional world in two dimensions. The flat surfaces we use to communicate ideas, including print, television, the Web, and motion pictures, all present information in two dimensions.

Phase Two: The Illusion of Depth

To perfect my drawing at the Waverley Station of last Friday I have to find some effective techniques for representing the three-dimensional world using more limited two-dimensional media.


There are two simple rules about representing depth. Size decreases with distance, meaning objects that are further away from the viewer appear to be smaller. Objects also overlap when one is in front of the other, hiding part or all of the farther object(s). These two observations are the basis for perspective.

The easiest way to understand how perspective works is to imagine standing in the middle of train tracks (not recommended for safety reasons) and looking along the tracks into the distance. Visually follow the tracks to the horizon (where the earth meets the sky) and the tracks appear to meet at a point in the distance. This converging point is called the vanishing point.

Now imagine that as you look at the train tracks converge into the distance, you are holding a piece of rectangular glass directly in front of you. If you traced what you saw onto the glass with a marker, you would be drawing onto the picture plane. Perspective is a method for representing what is seen through the picture plane on another two-dimensional surface.

The train tracks are an example of one-point perspective, the easiest of the perspective methods. This method is useful when representing landscapes, city streets, and other environments in which things are aligned and converge to one central point.

One-Point Perspective, courtesy of Andrew Kator

One-point perspective images have a tendency to draw the viewer along the lines to the vanishing point. This effect can be used to greater advantage by placing the subject of an image in front of or near the vanishing point. The viewers will more naturally focus their attention because most of the lines in the image converge onto that area. This effective technique has been used for centuries and can easily be seen in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and works from other artists.

"Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci using a one-point perspective

The boxes to the left to the tracks in the one-point perspective example have one face perfectly aligned parallel to the picture plane. This is a limitation of one point perspective. Another problem with this technique is that objects become more distorted the further they are from the vanishing point, as can be seen with the far left box in the example.

Although I was at a Train Station, my scene was definitely not one-point perspective, so I had to learn more...


Two-Point Perspective, courtesy of Andrew Kator






Coming back to our Waverly Station stairs of my drawing assignment, below are the perspective lines drawn on top of the picture.

Waverley Station Stairs with lines in two-point perspective.

Three-Point Perspective, courtesy of Andrew Kator



1 comment:

Doerak said...

I'm curious if my short comments reach you under Doerak.
It'is getting more and more interesting t look at all the details in the study! We could start to join you with such a clear explanation. You never know ....