Doing Fast Perspective Setups in the Field

Part 4: Variations on Single-Point

A way to further simplify your life, is to use single-point perspective. 


This makes your life easier, because there is only one vanishing point, and it is on the paper, rather than off the paper. It's surprising how far you can get with single point perspective.

You can jazz up a single point perspective a little bit by throwing in some vertical convergence. This is the kind of shot that would result if you pointed the camera mostly straight ahead, but then tilted it up slightly. Technically, it is a two-point perspective. There is one vanishing point directly in front of you, plus the zenith overhead. It's a perspective setup you almost never see, but I find it useful.

A similar scheme that Paul Heaston often uses, is a single-point scheme where the vertical convergence is downward, towards the nadir, instead of upward, toward the zenith. This is the kind of shot you would get if you put an extremely wide-angle lens on a camera, pointed it down at the ground, then cropped the resulting photo to get rid of most of the ground, leaving only the street level, up to the sky. It's an interesting effect because it's unusual, and runs contrary to the viewer's expectations.

Another modification to the basic single point perspective is the fisheye grid. This is useful for very wide angle shots. With a linear perspective setup, the farther you get from the vanishing point, the worse the distortion becomes. Fisheye perspective trades one kind of distortion for another, but the fisheye effect is often more pleasing for a wide angle shot, and mimics the distortion you would get if you were to put a wide-angle lens on a camera.

There is no drawing that can't be started by drawing boxes in perspective. If you're stumped about how to draw some complicated object, start by drawing the box around it. Imagine you were to order one from Amazon, and it came in a box. Start by drawing that box. If you can get the box correctly located in three dimensional space, you will have a good idea about how to freehand the object which it contains.

To be continued in part 5


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