Josh Fiddler
Montreal
Recovering mathematician, computer scientist, and pro chef. Professional Artist in Training.
GenAI is theft unless you've trained it on your own data
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Johannes Schiehsl
added comment inHow to Draw Cross Contour on 3D Forms
4mo
I drew some noodles.
Josh Fiddler
1mo
nope noodle and some earthworm Jims
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1mo
it took me ages to figure out what a role poly was: an isopod. like a pill bug or sometimes called a potato bug.
1mo
OH my gods, THIS IS MY JAM! Math discovery or invention? ooooh boy do I have opinions. lol
Key insight regardless: it's all just a PROJECTION of straight lines in the world onto a curved surface (retina!) and we want to put that on a flat plane!
As for multiple vanishing points: every single point on a page can be a vanishing point for some pair of parallel lines.
5mo
One day i will revisit the course and do the level 2
2mo
Why wait? Just try it now, and be okay with the fact it isn't right. You won't nail it, but you'll start thinking differently. Trust me. I'm really struggling with the cylinders in boxes for the next section and I'm still gonna post, and I'm an L2 student LOL. It's all for the love of learning and drawing.
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5mo
i found this so hard getting the angles and proprotion of boxes right
2mo
Don't be discouraged. It is not easy! Trying to simplify away from the obviously complex shapes is tough. These are some helpful things:
1. The single most helpful thing with proportion and angle was to first do a quick sketch to see if I understood at least the big idea, and overall shape.
2. Then do the gesture and/or envelope around the thing. Remember the portrait layins: big to small shapes. A big envelope or set of envelopes can be really helpful in narrowing down the options. I have a really hard time when I skip this part. I end up getting lost in contours and small shapes and everything is out of proportion and out of relation.
3. when using reference, it's easy to look once or twice and then try to draw from memory. In my experience, our memory is a liar.It takes a lot of experience to do this, if you don't have one of those magical photographic memories that is already connected to your drawing arm. Instead, while thinking BIG, MEDIUM, SMALL, what is the information on those scales that I need to transfer. Spend MOST of your time looking at the reference/model/subject(s), (eventually after lots of practice) even while we draw, so we tell the truth more often.
Does that make any sense?
2mo
The key thing for me was that the Minor Axis points at the horizontal VP. Which is the same as saying that the Minor Axis is perpendicular to the plane of the ellipse. It will also help you draw tetrahedra, cones, and pyramids.
2mo
About the comments @Stan Prokopenko makes at around 34 minutes about fatigue.
The Law of Diminishing Returns
You've done warmups.
You've been drawing for an hour and feel like each line gets better and better. Your problem solving is feeling strong: you're happy with choices.
Then suddenly... everything starts to feel off. Lines aren't as accurate, thinking is slower.
You notice you are tired and think maybe you should stop.
But you don't.
You keep going.
That drawing starts to fall apart.
You get frustrated and trash the whole thing.
You get mad at yourself and don't draw for a few days, saying you're not inspired.
When you start to feel that fall-off in energy and focus, when you start to doubt your previously unassailable growth, it's time to step away. Go have a snack, a drink of water, or go do something else.
At this point, your unlimited mental data plan is has reached the data cap for 5G speeds and you've been throttled to worse than 3G. Packets get dropped. Latency increases. There is nothing to do but do something else and let your brain recover.
At best, even the most incredibly productive people can do maximum output for 4 hours a day. After that, we retain less, are less productive, and we make more mistakes. So we shouldn't expect to be able to study, draw, paint, exercise effectively, without rest.
Rest is a requirement, not a reward. So take breaks, stay committed, but don't burn yourself out trying to fulfill your dreams, you'll just end up resenting the sleeping.
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Hi there! Thanks for the demo! It’s really informative and cleared up a lot of the questions I had after my first attempt at the exercise.
I am, however, a bit confused about a couple of boxes from hands 2 and 3. I marked them in the attached images.
I understand that the way it’s drawn is not necessarily wrong since we could have more of a trapezoid box that would look like that in perspective. However, I thought that in this case we should draw boxes that had only 90 degree angles.
With that in mind, even though it would look a bit strange when compared to the reference images, shouldn’t the marked lines from those boxes converge the other way? Even if only slightly?
I’m asking because this is what caused me the most trouble and frustration in my initial attempt. Seeing that the form of the finger “converges” towards the viewer but having to draw a box that has to converge in the opposite way.
2mo
Generally your intuition is correct. Stan didn't nail the perspective in those two fingers. In the set of lines on hand three, that segment should all converge "above" the horizon-line for that box, not below. Notice, I said generally above, because, in the hand two example, these are three separate segments. Each is a box with its own vanishing points and horizon-lines. So each box can converge separately but as long as each box for each segment is foreshortened in the same way, they will converge in that direction. But again, they don't have to: look at the index finger in hand three. We see the bottom of the first segment (longest), but we see the top of the second segment.
The take-aways when you notice things like this:
1. Ask questions like you did. Self-doubt needs answering. See 2.
2. Don't doubt yourself just because you're not the expert. Experts make errors like this when they are demonstrating because there are many things to coordinate, and that's when the little things like this sneak in because of the next one.
3. Per 2, The Brain and your eyes lie to your hand, and then your hand and your eyes lie to your brain. Other times, it/s the hand and the brain gaslighting your hand to draw obviously wrong lines. It's really quite a situation. Anyway, this even happens to experts, who have trained for this. In fact, it's the main problem of making anything: getting these guys to agree long enough to make a meaningful mark that is accurate.
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3mo
Question for anyone out there.
I have heard people say 2 point is the most commonly used perspective and three point is just for buildings and similar things.
I have also heard things like 2 point is likely the most you need.
As some one who is working towards character design should I still invest more time in 3 point over 2 point perspective?
2mo
Putting your characters into a scene for fun would sure be easier knowing more 3-point tricks for moving things around or making convincing lighting where it matters.
And you can pick all that up along the road so maybe don't dwell.
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