perspective??

[astridv]

I've been thinking for a while that it could be fun to make a series of short posts on how to draw perspective. Two of my offline friends have expressed interest, and at least one of my LJ friends. And it's of interest to me as well, since I seem to have misplaced all the material from perspective drawing class and it couldn't hurt to brush up on certain details. I've been eyeballing my vanishing lines for years, so in some cases I'd have to look up the exact way how to construct something. (The cool thing is that once you really know how to construct a perspective, you can promptly forget most of that, just follow your gut and save a lot of time.)

Would anybody else here be interested in reading about that? And if so, is there anything you'd find particularly interesting? I'm thinking of briefly covering the most often used forms of parallel projection and then moving on to one-point, two-point, three point perspective, basically. Starting with very simple drawings, and then more complex settings.

(I learned about this stuff in German so I have to look up the English terminology... if I got it wrong let me know!)

Comments

[ratcreature]

I'd be interested, because despite having read one comic, two books and several tutorial on perspective I still have trouble to connect the theory to drawings in practice. What I mean is that I can construct something like a block (or even a cylinder such) when I have one, two or three vanishing points, but when I roughly imagine a scene I don't know how to find the correct vanishing points that would make it look like what I imagine and allow to construct what I want, and then there is the problem that I never quite know how to deal with the fact that in non-distorted pictures they are always so far outside the image.

[astridv]

Cool. It's gonna be a few posts until I get to the relevant part but I think I have a few basic tips for that.

[yhlee]

I'd definitely be interested. I have two books on perspective oriented toward comic artists, but I've never sat down and worked through all the exercises because I feel so intimidated. (I keep telling myself that it's applied geometry! Surely geometry can't be so bad!)

[astridv]

Yep, it's applied geometry, nothing else. Actually the name of the class was Darstellende Geometrie (descriptive geometry)

[sholio]

I'm definitely interested. :)

[astridv]

There's more interest than I thought, excellent. I think I'll get to it once I mailed the latest batch of sketches.

[havocthecat]

I would love to read this! I'm not very proficient at drawing, but I love the theory of it. (My practice of it is terrible, which is why I do it rarely and then don't share the results.)

[astridv]

I might have something by tomorrow. You gotta let me know if it makes any sense...

[havocthecat]

I'll try! But my last art class was in high school, so it might be that I don't understand things due to my lack of practice.

[rheanna]

Commenting very late, but I would find this really interesting. I can't even draw convincing stick-men, so anything about how drawing actually works is fascinating to me.

[astridv]

Cool. I've just written the intro of part 1. :) Now comes the tricky part - explaining how to actually do it, in as few words as possible. And to sketch many little sketches to illustrate it. I'm tempted to snag some from google images but I'm really unsure about the copyright situation for something like that, so I better make them myself.