Perspective

Project 5 – Interior Perspective With Value

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My living room, in charcoal.

I wanted to give charcoal drawing a try. Here are some takeaways:

  1. It’s difficult to control value. I often had to erase large portions of my work because I darkened it too much. A lot of objects had to be rendered. The lamp shade is a prime example of this.
  2. Precision when shading is hard to maintain. I think a lot of this had to do with my blending technique, though. For most of the project, I used a tissue wrapped around my finger. Maybe using a blending stump would have made this process a lot easier.

Project 4 – Interior Perspective

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My drawing for Project 4 is of my apartment bedroom. I probably spend most of my time sitting here, either working at my computer or practicing piano, a hobby of mine. I sat in a small camp chair while drawing this, so my viewpoint is only slightly above the desk surface, which, in reality, doesn’t come up to my waist. Because of my low vantage point, the view outside my window is exclusively sky.

One point of trouble I encountered when drawing was that my vanishing points where in suboptimal positions.

Ultimately, I had to tape four pages together to capture them. This forced me to use the two pages joined lengthwise shown in the setup picture above to correctly align edges to the vanishing points. It proved to be a hassle, but I’m satisfied with the image it produced.

Homework 6 – Perspective Readings and Videos

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What follows is a short list of takeaways from the readings and videos on perspective:

There are many more types of perspective than originally discussed in class.

Four point perspective exists when a scene that typically would be drawn in three-point perspective has components both above and below the horizon line, requiring an extra vertical vanishing point to accurately draw.

Photo perspective accounts for warp created by camera lenses.

Perceptive perspective reduces scene distortion by using bent lines, although I’m not entirely sure of the need for this method.

Arial perspective is different than the previously mentioned forms of perspective. Rather than using geometry to imply depth, arial perspective employs color shifts. For example, as an object moves further away, its tone tends to shift towards blue, it loses contrast and resolution, and it generally seems to become hazier. Think rows of mountains receding into the distance. Air molecules distort more light from further away peaks, allowing the human eye to perceive depth.

One video mentioned that reverse perspective, in which the vanishing points come towards the viewer rather than away, is truer to how people actually see. I did not understand this point; it seems to me that traditional perspective is more inline with how I process depth. This may be interesting to explore further.

The way fine arts masters draw in perspective is inconsistent. One well-defined, consistent set of rules cannot capture the myriad ways to view perspective. Artists use many tricks, including curved vanishing lines and multiple vanishing points, even in one-point perspective. Learning to draw well in perspective is no mean feat!

Exercise 4 – Perspective Drawing

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Perspective drawing is the method by which a three dimensional scene can be rendered on a two dimensional sheet of paper. This exercise served as an introduction to perspective technique. Perspective art can be categorized by its number of vanishing points. The following three pictures are examples of that.

One Point Perspective

Two Point Perspective

Three Point Perspective

Perspective technique is not limited to straight lines. Circles viewed at an angle are rendered below to explore the technique. On the paper, they are drawn as ellipses.

The trick is to mark the diagonals of a square 2/3 of the way towards the edges, then draw the ellipse through those points.