Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Laskowski
● Core Video Transcriptions:
○ Welcome to Part 01 of Drawing Perspective. in this video we’ll quickly cover the
basic terminology I’ll be using from this point forward when describing building
various aspects of your scene you want to draw.
■ Point of View (POV)
■ Point of View, or POV, is a term you’ll hear mentioned throughout
this tutorial series. Your point of view simply describes the
viewpoint we’re using to see the scene whether it be through
your (or another character’s) eyes, or through the lens of a
camera. Imagine that you’re holding a camera. If you wanted a
higher point of view, you’d simply hold the camera higher, or lower
for a lower point of view closer to the ground. You’d tilt the camera
forward or back to look more up or down, roll it from side to side
for an offaxis angle these things adjust the vision of your scene
that will define ultimately how it’s set up. When we refer to making
changes to the POV, we’re talking about simply altering how this
“camera” is oriented to view the scene, rather than making
physical changes to the scene itself.
■ The Picture Plane:
■ Unlike the canvas or paper you’re drawing on, the picture plane is
the actual window we’re looking through to see your scene. When
drawing scenery, it’s usually a good idea to draw in an inset
cropped area because sometimes you may need to make marks
or indications of objects OUTSIDE of the picture plane in order to
understand their scale and spatial relationships to other objects. It
also allows for some play in readjusting the crop and aspect ratio
of your scene. After all, if all you do is draw on full sheets of 9x12”
paper, all of your drawings will have the same size and shape.
Instead, make a choice! Choosing a vertical or horizontally
oriented picture, a wide or square shaped aspect ratio, these are
decisions that support the feel of the scene you’ll be drawing.
■ The Horizon Line
■ The most basic (and arguably important) compositional element of
your drawing, the Horizon Line is what it sounds like it
represents the most distant part of your scene, where all details
merge to a single point, it separates the sky and the ground,
above from below. Don’t mistake the horizon line FOR the horizon
itself, however. Every scene with perspective will always have a
horizon line, but not every scene with perspective will have a
HORIZON. For instance, a scene that takes place in space will still
exhibit detail that merges to a horizon line even though there’s no
horizon to see! Some scenes may even have more than one
horizon line! (Don’t worry, we’ll talk about this in a later video.) The
horizon line’s placement in your picture plane determines which
way we’re looking in relative to it. If you look up, the horizon line
gets lower in your vision and you see more sky. Tilt your head, it
tilts too. Sometimes a scene won’t even have the horizon line in
the picture plane. Think about the kind of composition that would
create!
■ Vanishing Points
■ As the name implies, the vanishing point is the spot where most
details in your scene aim to merge to. Not all vanishing points will
exist on the horizon line, but in most cases, one or two will for
more basic perspective setups. As we move forward through the
lessons, the names OnePoint, TwoPoint, and ThreePoint
perspective are referring to the number of primary vanishing points
there are in your scene.
■ What is an Orthogonal?
■ Orthogonals, by their definition, are lines that radiate outward from
the perpendicular of another point. In drawing perspective,
orthogonals don’t have to exist at 90degree angles from one
another, but they do radiate outward from a vanishing point.
Orthogonals are guidelines that help you draw objects which
properly recede back to the vanishing point they’re oriented to.
Typically an orthogonal will radiate out from the vanishing point to
help form the edges of an object, to be erased later once the
object is complete.
■ Each vanishing point can have its own set of orthogonals to help
form the different sides of threedimensional objects. Orthogonals
also don’t have to be drawn you can measure an orthogonal
simply by overlaying a guide such as a ruler and marking only the
line you need, just as long as it recedes back to the vanishing
point.
■ WrapUp:
■ So, this is pretty much the basic terminology of perspective! Now
that you’ve been properly introduced? Why don’t se step things up
in the next video to put these ideas into practice!
● What is FOV?
● Field of View, (or FOV,) is a function of vision that determines how much we can see
laterally. You can think of FOV as referring to how close together the vanishing points
are to each other on the horizon line. Note that FOV does not include the third vanishing
point as scaling the distance between all three vanishing points at once is Zooming,
the same as you would Zoom on a camera. Adjusting just the distance of the two horizon
line vanishing points meanwhile, can radically change the way your scene looks.
● The distance of the two vanishing points under normal FOV circumstances should
usually be about 90degrees away from each other even if the picture plane is narrow
unlike our eyesight. If the FOV is increased (the points move closer together) as the
picture plane crops inward, your scene can suffer from extremely wideangle distortion
unless you shrink the scale of all objects to match, effectively zooming out to avoid
distortion. Meanwhile, if you keep the vanishing points locked to the sides of the picture
plane even for a narrow, tall image and keep objects close up to the foreground you'll
find that the distortion will be excessively heavy to the point of unusability.
● Look over the chart attached here to see what I'm talking about and keep this in
consideration!
● OnePoint Video Transcription:
■ There are three major types of perspective that relate to the number of
primary vanishing points in your scene. This video is all about the first
type, One Point Perspective.
■ Just as there are three dimensions in space, (the vertical, the horizontal,
and depth,) there can be three vanishing points to create orthogonals for
each visible side of the object. Now, this isn’t to say onepoint perspective
creates onedimensional images all perspective is three dimensional.
However, without a vanishing point to recede to, that particular dimension
remains parallel. Since onepoint perspective has only one vanishing
point, two of the three dimensions in your scene will remain straight and
parallel to each other usually the height and length dimensions. The
third dimension, meanwhile, will recede to the vanishing point to create a
sense of 3D depth and distance.
○ Horizon Line Placement
■ As stated in the previous video, the horizon line of your scene is important
to consider as it determines much about the look and feel of your final
image. Its position can help make or break different senses of scale and
importance of details in your scene. A low horizon line implies a point of
view that is looking up or is placed close to the ground. For example, a
point of view that is close to the ground better illustrates scale of distant
objects such as tall buildings or mountains. A high horizon line shows
mostly ground, and is implying looking down or having some amount of
height for a better vantage point over the scene you’re illustrating. For
example, looking down at the street from the window of a tall building.
The horizon line placed more towards the center of the picture plane
implies a more normal forwardlooking point of view, and often works best
at around standard eyeheight from the ground to establish a relatable
sense of place in your scene.
○ Vanishing Point Placement
■ In one point perspective, the primary vanishing point should always exist
somewhere on your scene’s horizon line. Due to the nature of onepoint
perspective, the vanishing point should be somewhere within the confines
of your picture plane. Since onepoint perspective only deals with the
recession of depth in your scene with parallel vertical and horizontal lines,
the farther your vanishing point gets from the center of your picture plane,
the most distorted the perspective will appear from reality. This distortion
is rectified by the introduction of more vanishing points which will be
explained in the next couple videos. For now, best results will come from
keeping within your picture plane.
○ Foreshortening with distance
■ Something that may take some time to wrap your head around is learning
how to draw details in depth as they recede back toward the vanishing
point. Foreshortening is the phenomena of longer, horizontal objects
appearing shorter and compressed as we view them from more fronton
perspectives. The human arm is commonly used as an example for
foreshortening. Viewed from the side, we clearly see the arm’s length and
curves. However, when viewed from a slight fronton angle, the arm
appears shorter since those curves have begun overlapping in
perspective. The same happens with all objects, from treebranches to
cars, to buildings! It’s important to understand how foreshortening works
in the scene you’re constructing. For example, it’s easy to overestimate
how far back a building will recede into the distance, and it will end up
looking TOO long and distorted as a result. There’s no easy way to figure
out the foreshortening of a scene, but know that the effect becomes more
pronounced the farther back into the distance you draw. If you’re standing
right next to a long building, it will appear as long as it should. Place that
same building a mile down the road in front of you, and it’s length will no
longer be apparent. If you have a row of squares all the same size spaced
the same distance apart all lined up to recede to the vanishing point, you’ll
find that their length becomes progressively narrower the farther away
they get. Use this to your advantage in drawing scenery, especially
buildings far away ones can be drawn much simpler and flatter than
ones closer up, saving you time and effort!
○ Practical applications of One Point
■ OnePoint perspective is the easiest form of perspective to draw, but that
doesn’t mean it’s only used by beginners. It’s a stylistic and compositional
tool that can be extremely effective when combined with the right scene.
Even professional artists commonly draw in onepoint perspective if it
lends to the particular look they were going for in the image. Onepoint
perspective is very clean and orderly. Since all depth recedes back to one
point, it can be used to generate a STRONG center of focus within your
image. It’s very common in onepointperspective artworks to find the
center of focus located at somewhere around the vanishing point. If not,
the scene will commonly be much shallower in depth by either having
another object block the vanishing point, or use fog or lighting effects to
shift your focus elsewhere in the image.
● TwoPoint Video Transcription:
■ We now know that onepoint perspective is used mostly for straighton
looking points of view. If you want to turn the camera to be
nonperpendicular to the rest of the scene, you need to introduce a new
vanishing point to prevent awkward distortion of objects. This is what
twopoint perspective is all about.
■ As previously mentioned, each vanishing point in your scene relates to
one of the three dimensions that make up the visible sides of the objects
you’re drawing. Since one point perspective has only one vanishing point
to recede the depth dimension of objects, adding another vanishing point
will cause another of the two remaining dimensions to recede as well
leaving only one dimension left with straight parallel lines.
○ Placement of the second vanishing point
■ Just like before, the second vanishing point in twopoint perspective will
always be placed somewhere on your horizon line. Typically it will be
placed far apart from the first vanishing point, on the opposite side of the
picture plane. Since perspective drawings are almost always dealing with
objects that have perpendicular sides, the vanishing points need to be far
apart enough to allow their sets of orthogonals to intersect at 90degree
angles. Because of this, it’s common to find both vanishing points located
outside of the picture plane, or one of the vanishing points located FAR
outside. The farther outside a vanishing point gets, the shallower the
recession of depth becomes for that dimension until those lines become
parallel, while the other vanishing point moves more toward the center of
the picture plane to maintain those perpendicular angles of the objects.
When pushed to this degree, the scene practically reverts back to
onepoint perspective.
■ Maintaining the proper distance of the vanishing points is key to a good
looking twopoint perspective drawing. If the vanishing points are too
close together, objects will begin to look distorted by appearing too
narrow and elongated similar to the effect obtained by very wideangle
camera lens. If the vanishing points are too far apart, objects in the scene
will appear more flat in appearance than usual, with less recession of
depth. Similar to how things look through a long zoom lens. When the
vanishing points are placed at a distance close to the edges of your
picture, the result should look more normal, similar to what you’d expect
to see with regular eyesight. A good way to think about mimicking
eyesight is that humans can see a horizontal range of approximately 135
degrees in front of them. Since the orthogonals radiating from the two
vanishing points need to intersect at 90degrees, then the points should
be placed nearer the far sides of the picture plane.
■ This graphic is really just to illustrate what’s going on when you’re placing
your vanishing points, I’m not suggesting this is how you should plot them
every single time. But it’s important to fundamentally understand why their
distance from other is locked. When our point of view is at a 45degree
angle to the scene, both vanishing points are placed at equal distance
from the center of the picture plane like in this first example. However as
we turn our view, one vanishing point moves closer inward while the other
moves much farther outward. When one of the vanishing points reaches
the center of the picture plane, the other vanishing point is so far to the
side that all of its orthogonals are parallel causing the image to revert
back to just onepoint perspective. That vanishing point hasn’t just
disappeared you can think of it like directions on a compass. The
vanishing point in front of us is north, while the other has moved to our
side, due east. Our limited field of vision limits us to being able to see only
two vanishing points at a time.
○ Practical Applications of Two Point
■ Don’t be surprised if you find yourself drawing with twopoint perspective
mostoften. It’s very practical to use in just about any levelview scene.
Most photos you see can most likely be redrawn with twopoint
perspective just fine. It’s not until we start to look up or down that an extra
vanishing point is required. But, since we look forward most of the time,
that third vanishing points tends to be unnecessary, so we can represent
most of our daily lives as twopoint perspective.
■ Two point perspective scenes tend to be very different compositionally
from onepoint perspective. In most cases, the center of focus will not be
where the vanishing points are. Twopoint perspective relies more on the
scale and placement of important elements within the scene to really have
a center of focus stand out.
■ Twopoint perspective can also be rotated for verticallyoriented scenes,
where the horizon line is going from top to bottom instead of sidetoside.
In such cases, the horizontal lines of the objects will remain parallel and
have no vanishing point. When used this way, twopoint perspective CAN
be used for a lookingup pointofview, but only when we’re perpendicular
to the rest of the scene.
○ That just about does it for twopoint perspective. I hope that wasn’t confusing to
you. If you have any further questions, you can definitely feel free to ask them in
the Q&A section of this class. See you in the next video!
● ThreePoint Video Transcription:
■ So what happens to twopoint perspective when you want to add a more
up or down tilt to the camera? The remaining parallel dimension will need
to recede somewhere, and this is when the introduction of the third
vanishing point comes into play.
■ In threepoint point perspective, no lines of your scene will be drawn
parallel anymore and the explanation of what to do is really quite
simple: all details from each visible side of an object will recede towards a
vanishing point. Done deal! Except… you’re probably wondering, what’s
up with that third vanishing point? It doesn’t seem to follow the rules of the
other two…? Well, I suppose it does require some explanation.
○ Placing the third vanishing point
■ As you can see, in threepoint perspective, the third vanishing point is
never placed on the horizon line along with the other two. It will be placed
either far above the horizon line when your point of view is tilted up or far
below when it’s tilted down, and almost never located within the picture
plane. In most circumstances, the third vanishing point will exist evenly
between the two points on the horizon line.
■ Remember that compass I showed you in the last video, how the
vanishing points we see in twopoint perspective are like the coordinates
for north, west, east, and south? If we were to look at this compass from
an angle, you’ll find the third vanishing points located either directly above
or directly below your head in the center. If we look straightforward, the
third vanishing point is exactly 90degrees to the top of our head and
forms parallel orthogonals as a result, causing the scene to revert back to
twopoint perspective. If we look up or down, however, that third vanishing
point is no longer perpendicular to the top of our head and we can begin
to see its influence on the scene. Looking up or down, even slightly, will
cause vertical recession of depth to some degree. The farther you look up
or down, the closer the third vanishing point gets to the picture plane, and
thus creates steeper recession of depth. And yes, if you look so far up or
down that the third vanishing point reaches the center of your picture
plane you got it the scene reverts all the way back to onepoint
perspective too.
■ Shifting the third vanishing point to the right or left can have a drastic
effect on your scene, but could be a desirable one. Shifting the point
changes where the straight up/down orthogonal lies in your scene,
refocusing the area where all other details in your scene recede toward.
Doing this can really change the feel of the image, causing distortion that
could either be a little awkward, or really dramatic. Experiment to see for
yourself!
○ Practical Applications of Three Point
■ Most threepoint perspective artworks you’ll find largely have a point of
view that just looks forward with just a hint of a tilt up or down. This slight
vertical recession gives a little more visual characteristic to the image
rather than defaulting to parallel verticals with twopoint. It takes a little
more work, but the end result can be striking, and make the environment
feel just that little bit more realistic. It can become a pain to map such
shallow orthogonals to the vanishing point when it’s so far away, though.
So you may want to practice “guessing” the third set of orthogonals which
can really save time and trouble. Just as long as they fan out in a
consistent manner, you should be good to go.
■ For more dynamic and dramatic points of view though, mapping out the
vanishing point and its orthogonals is definitely a good idea. Dynamic
angles like this is really what threepoint is best used for since the effect it
can create is so pronounced. Just remember not to go overboard with
crazy angles all the time in your artworks what may seem like a more
impressive option can become gimmicky if it dominates your portfolio.
● Atmospheric Perspective Transcription:
■ A sense of distance in a scene can still be achieved even without the use
of vanishing points and orthogonals. A landscape without any obviously
geometricallyshaped manmade objects still has perspective, but how do
you show it? This is where atmospheric perspective comes in.
○ Haze & Contrast
■ Due to the fact that our planet has a gaseous atmosphere, light is
absorbed into the air the farther it travels through it. Just as the sky is blue
due to shorterwavelength (blue) light scattering in the upper atmosphere,
the same is true for haze as we look out to the horizon. The farther away
an object is, the more blue in tone and less contrasty it will appear. Our
brains interpret that haze as a mark for distance even if the more
distant objects are larger than the ones closer up! Use this to effect in
your outdoor scenes to help realistically push depth even more.
■ Remember that the color of haze also changes with the time of day based
on the position of the sun. During the afternoon, haze can be more
whitetoblue, while in the evening it can turn anywhere from orange, to
red, to purple!
■ If you’re not doing a colored picture, you can still indicate the presence of
haze by making much thinner, light lines for distant objects. Use thicker,
heavier lines for closer objects to help push the difference.
○ Color & Value
■ Colors can be used to push depth in a scene if it’s utilized properly. A
classic example is bright red versus blue. Red is a very commanding
color, and at full value appears brighter than blue. Red comes forward,
while blue recedes. When these two colors are overlaid, it almost appears
as though the red swatch is floating above the blue one. The same can be
said for the value of a color. When a brighter color is put next to a darker
one, the brighter one will always appear closer in our minds. This doesn’t
mean make your illustrations with high contrast light and dark, red and
blue colors it’s just something to keep in mind. Remember that sunlight
tends to be warm, while shadows tend to be cooler in hue. If you’re
coloring a scene, you can use these color principles to create noticeable
divisions of space in your scene, lending to a better sense of perspective.
Remember that a little can go a long way. You only have to introduce a
little bit of color to for it to start working its magic. But, of course, if it
makes sense for your scene, there’s nothing wrong with going allout
either.
○ Scale
■ It goes without saying that the farther away an object gets, the smaller it
gets too of course. But remember to use scale to your advantage. Place
objects in your scene that the viewer can relate to in order to get a sense
of where they’re standing and how big everything is in relation. Use your
foreground and middleground to good effect. If it makes sense for your
particular scene, place objects up close around the picture plane to flesh
out the environment. Play with the scale relationships of larger distant
objects versus smaller closer up ones. It can lead to interesting
compositions and concepts to draw from.