Doing Fast Perspective Setups in the Field

Part 2: Some concepts

I would like to start by preemptively answering the question, "Why can't I just copy what I see?" If you are able to do it, then it's an option, but I have tried this in the past, and everything I draw comes out just a little bit wonky if I don't bother to reconcile it with a horizon line and vanishing points.  Some people get around this using tools like a viewfinder that has a grid on it, but this leaves you unable to change anything you see.  While sketching outdoors, I usually cannot stand exactly where I would like to, to get exactly the view I want, because that would have me standing in the middle of the street.

It's also helpful to be able to rotate things, move the camera up or down for dramatic effect, widen the angle of view past what the human eye can actually see, or introduce fisheye effects. 




All these things become possible with a basic working knowledge of perspective.

Despite having a ruler, the perspective grid I setup is mostly fake, because the vanishing points are far off the page.  To make the fake grid look real enough, we're going to exploit a few basic tricks.

The first trick: accurately bisecting an angle by eye is quite easy for most people to do.  If I were to give you a slice of pie and ask you to cut it into two equal slices, you would be able to do that very accurately.

The second trick: the longer a line is, the easier it is to guesstimate the angle.  That's why we're going to use our ruler, and we are often going to extend short lines longer than they need to be.

The third trick: suppose a bunch of perspective grid lines are converging to a vanishing point which is off the page.  These grid lines will intersect the edge of the page that evenly spaced intervals.  This means you can create a pretty good grid by starting with evenly spaced tick marks on the edges of the picture frame, without bothering with precisely where the vanishing point is located.

To be continued in part three

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
  Doing Fast Perspective Setups in the Field Part 5: Tips and tricks And now, a few helpful facts. To find the center of a rectangle, you can draw an x from corner to corner. This also works if the rectangle is in perspective. This is how you find the perspective center of a rectangular object. You can extend this fact to place a series of regularly spaced objects, such as telephone poles, out to the horizon, in perspective.  To freehand an ellipse, start by drawing the perspective rectangle that bounds the ellipse. Then draw an x to find the perspective center of the rectangle, and draw a plus through the center. Mark each arm of the x about a third of the way in from the edge, and now you have all the points you need to freehand the ellipse. This is a very useful technique for drawing things like car tires. Figures of equal height will intersect the horizon line at the same point on their bodies. So if the horizon line is at head level, it will intersect the heads of all the...
Read more
Image
New Project: Folk Arcana  This is going to be a system-agnostic TTRPG supplement of folk magic items, inspired by the collection in the Oxford Ashmolean Museum . These are actual artifacts that people in the UK discover inside their walls, while remodeling old houses. So here's the idea: it's not so much that magic items in D&D are overpowered (although, IMO, they are), it's that they're obsessed with power. Their conception of magic is very tactical-wargame-y; this sword gives you a combat bonus, that potion gives you some hit points back, that sort of thing. These items are going to be more like talismans you might buy from a local witch or druid; they are meant to function more as writing prompts than as power widgets in a video game. Each item has a narrative behind it, and a down-side to using it. When you use magic, you are tampering with forces beyond our ken. You can't, as they say, get the genie back in the bottle. Even minor magic should not be taken l...
Read more
Image
Doing Fast Perspective Setups in the Field Part 3: The Grid Now, finally, we are going to talk about how to freehand a perspective grid in the field. I actually don't like to start a drawing with the grid on a blank page, because it is difficult to envision how things are going to come out. Instead, I freehand the most important object in the scene, then reverse engineer the grid to fit it, so I know that the grid will make the most important object come out the way I want.  But before you do anything, start by placing the horizon line where you want the eye level to be. Don't place the horizon line too high. If the point of view is higher than the height of an average person, the picture will end up looking strange because we do not normally see the world fro this point of view. Unless you want it to look like a picture that was taken by a flying drone, place the horizon at eye level, or even lower. Placing it at waist level has a dramatic effect. Next, freehand the most impor...
Read more