Perspective Feedback
3yr
Kevin Rigby
These are watercolor mixed medium. Looking for critique on perspective as a fundamental.
I'm a beginner so take my opinions with great filter :) If your goal was to be 100% accurate then for me it seems that you're bit off. If not, looks close enough to work. My main "problem" is that you're using grids that give a lot of distortion. Again it's not bad if you planned to. If not planned, check out some article(s) about POV in perspective to have more realistic look :)
Hey there! Nice job! I love your colors, but I think you should try a bit less messy approach, maybe try to use a bigger brush while applying colors. Also, don't be scared of mixing your values, it helps a lot if you start the whole painting with a light blue, or orange wash (depending on the sky color), because it will help unify your colors later, also you won't have random white spots next to your lines.
Lastly, on your second image, there is a corner and it's full of tangents. Even though those things exist in real life, design-wise it's terrible, because it flattens entire planes. To avoid these tangents, you can afford to break the rules a tiny bit and just move the lines away from each other.
Hope I could help! Keep up the good work! :)
Thanks for the graphic. That made it so easy to see. It's so clear now.
I have learned to lay down a ground since those days (these were some of my early ones, i.e. 2018) on oils and acrylics, but didn't consider it for WC. So basically mask any areas that will be white and put down a ground on the rest?
I also tend to overwork them. I get the colors laid down, and then shore it up with colored pencil, and then work it to death. I do it every single time. Any tips for not working it do death?
The perspective look correct, but you seems to lose it when you start drawing organic forms, like the trees.
Think as them as geometrical forms too, construct them as any other part in your draw, then just add details to make them more organic.
Ah! Thank you. I'm seeing it now. I think it's back to boxes cones and spheres for me for a while.
I would practice arches more. Make sure you're centering it and making them symmetrical. Scott Robertson's "How to Draw" has a section on this if you need a how-to guide. Also make sure you're wrapping your ellipses all the way around the forms (spheres and cylinders), instead of having them end abruptly (creating a football shape). And make sure to use reference or draw from life in case you're making up stuff from imagination. And finally, more overlaps in the image with the house. All the big forms are separate. It'd reinforce depth to show the house overlapping the tree and balloon.
Hi Kevin. The points look a bit too close together. It's causing distortion near the edges of the images, more so on the image of the house. I teach perspective at an animation school and nearly all beginner artists put the vanishing points too close together in 2-point perspective. Doing this creates an effect similar to a very wide angle lens or fish-eye lens. If you put the points farther apart on the horizon line it will look more like how we would see this with our eyes. In effect, the camera is too close to the subject to keep everything in the image in frame without a wide-angle lens. In the example of the house, if the camera were at this distance and used a lens with less distortion, the top of the house and most of the fence area to the side of the house would be out of frame. Moving the vanishing points farther apart effectively recreates what would happen by moving the camera farther from the subject so that a less distorted lens would capture the entire subject in frame.
Thank you so much! This is so insightful. I never even considered the illusion. I kept looking at the oil rig and thinking "somethings just not right. Something's weird." Well, as I've heard so many times, "if it looks off, then it's off."
Looks okay, although the carriage looks huge in comparison to the house.
oh! excellent point. Thank you! The wheels would be as big as the living room if you where to fit it inside the house.
I think you're doing really well as far as 2-point perspective goes!
The tree in the image with a street and a house I would start by constructing as a cone, that way it's easier to apply perspective to it :))
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're not doing 3-point, right? You can get some really nice effects with 3-point perspective if you use it moderately
If you use 3-point perspective in this shot you will cause distortion. 3-point perspective simulates the effect of tilting the camera up or down. That means the horizon line, which stays at the vertical level of the camera, will be out of frame. You can use 3-point distortion as a stylistic choice, but it's important to understand that you are distorting the image in a way that we would not see it with our eyes.
Thanks. Yeah, two point. I started a 3-point WC last week. That's trip to work with but definitely makes a far more interesting drawing.
Ah, see, the idea of using a cone! click! Thanks Oliver. I think I have to really start thinking of things more and more in terms of those basic shapes.
