Perspective Sandbox
4yr
TeResA Bolen
@Nanna Skytte and I have decided to take the plunge and start learning perspective, and if possible to play, and make it as much fun as we can. I’m feeling a bit nervous - the reframe for that is ‘excitement’, isn’t it 😅 - so setting this up to invite others to join us, beginners to take the emotional risk of diving in to something new, and those of you more experienced folks to play along and help out, if you feel so inspired. Hopefully the community and accountability will push us all to our next level of awesomeness 🦋.
You dont need to do warm ups, its repetitive exercises, theres a free resource on youtube from the drawing database called formal linear perspective, it should give you a good start. It is very professional even though it's free. I'm afraid if you try and do draw a box it will waste your time. If you need some help you can count on me if youd like. You can go on my profile and confirm my knowledge of perspective, I have posted a few exercises
Thank you for your take on this, @Ruth Salmun . My mentor got a bit peeved with me, feeling like I was spreading myself too thin, and since I didn’t really get the energy going and others attracted into this space, this has taken a back seat with me for the time being as I’ve been concentrating on things needing even more attention.
I just saw another resource on Marshall's site - it's probably been there all along and I'm just seeing it today. It seems it was an audition piece for entry to his webinar with limited enrollment. It has a recommended price of $3, but on the actual page there's a donation space so you can give more to support his work. Considering how much he gives us for free on the podcasts, this is a good opportunity to say a little thank you.
https://marshallart.com/SHOP/
It will be great when we have the Proko Production Perspective Course the Final Word here, but until then maybe this will bring us a little closer to our goals.
Happy drawing everyone!
Self-Homework for Marshall’s 1994 Perspective Course, Lesson 4, Right Angles Part 3
This week I need to take it a little easy, because I’m not quite radiantly healthy.
1. Get and read Ernest Watson’s book, CREATIVE PERSPECTIVE FOR ARTISTS AND ILLUSTRATORS, with special attention to chapter 2, “The Structural Approach.”
2. Do nice versions of the examples from the lecture like @Nanna Skytte did.
3. Draw interior corners with projections and recessions.
4. Using Marshall’s advice from that wonderful gift 🎁 he gave us in the Composition question area, choose one piece of artwork and follow his advice verbatim.
This time around was much better, and I'm drawing perspective in my sleep, always a good sign.
I didn’t do well with this this week, so I’m dusting myself off and giving it another go.
Asked for help
I’m having a problem with my self-homework, and I don’t understand what the problem is. At the beginning of the week, I thought it was my lack of accuracy with my lines, so I’ve been drawing these with a T-square all week (very unnatural for me 😅). I’ve been starting to feel more comfortable with my boxes and how to draw them, so I decided to try the transparent boxes again, because I had so much trouble with them the first day, and surely enough, the problem remains.
I don’t know where to place the back corner of the boxes. When I draw lines out to the vanishing points, the top and bottom of the back corner don’t line up to a vertical in boxes B, C, D, and E. When I looked for help online with drawing transparent boxes, I noticed other artists having exactly the same issue, and kind of fudging a straight vertical line 🤦♀️, as if we wouldn’t notice that the point they went through wasn’t where the x’s were. Mysteriously, my top and bottom of the back corner lined up nicely for box A 🤔🤷♀️.
Is this an indication that I did box A right, and all the other boxes have errors that cause the misalignment - or am I making some other kind of mistake?
@Liandro Roger , tagging you because you are awesome. I’m grateful for help from anyone who would like to chime in. Thank you in advance, any and all who come to help.
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4yr
Hahah, thanks, @Teresa Bolen! :D
Jim has already shared some great insights below. I agree with him - in perspective, something that looks like a big mistake can be made up of a sum of tiny slips (so tiny our eyes don’t even notice until we measure very carefully or use an instrument to check).
The good news is: as Jim said, there is really no need to get to this level of precision - at least for most artists. Unless your goal was to do industrial product design (but then you might prefer using AutoCAD for that rather than pencil). Or unless you really, REALLY like this brain-frying exercise of making all the lines fit together exactly :D
For artists, it is usually more importante to train the eye for the sense of visual depth and spatial consistency, and it's usually easier to learn this with a simpler interface - just you and the pencil. So what I'd say is, if your goal with learning perspective is to make art, maybe don’t use any instruments at all, just practice drawing perspective freehand. Or, at least, do a first pass freehand, than use the instruments (or digital tools) to draw on top of your freehand sketch - not to construct the perspective per se, but just to help you have greater agility over the development of the drawing or gain more control over the outcome when defining the lines.
Hope this helps!
I think this is caused by an accumulation of tiny errors. This stuff's hard enough to get completely accurate even with a full technical drawing set-up, so well done for managing this with just a T-square.
Even the width of a thick pencil line or the height of a pencil blob to mark a point on a perspective line is enough to move it quite a distance along the other perspective line going to the other vanishing point, and I think that's what's happening here.
The only solution is to measure and re-measure. But I wouldn't get too involved with exact accuracy at this stage, unless some kind of technical drawing is your goal.
Instead, this drawing shows something interesting about perspective: the vanishing points in your drawing are close together, so the boxes quickly become distorted as they move away from the centre of the page. They loom above the viewer, like the Alice in Wonderland drawing in Marshall's third lecture (Perspective03_RightAngles2).
Self-Homework for Marshall’s 1994 Perspective Course, Lesson 3, Right Angles, Part 2
1. Draw 5-10 boxes in two point perspective daily, remembering the equilateral triangle, using this week’s BIG SECRET.
2. Read the remainder of D’Amelio’s book.
3. Do camera lens investigation and analysis. What Marshall said in 1994 about popular lenses for portraits being 80-200 mm (50-130 on my APS-C) doesn’t match what John Greengo taught in his photography course about the 38 mm lens being closest to the 50 degree field of view of the central retina, 35-50 mm lens being his recommendation to come closest to vision with our eyes (24-35 mm crop frame). So two trusted sources with differing opinions. That’s interesting. What’s going to work best for me?
A. Analyze my own photos from before I understood how to use my camera.
B. Review my lens comparison analysis from John Greengo’s class.
C. Find out what lenses my favorite portrait photographers are using - see how that impacts their work.
D. Consult with photographer friends.
What are you up to with your perspective studies? Thank you for your ongoing support! 🤗
Despite initially driving myself crazy 😝 with the drawing part until I got help from @Jim A and @Liandro Roger (after which things went great ☺️ - thanks again fellas!), The rest of my homework went beautifully and was much more fruitful that I had expected. The biggest surprise was new improvements in my ability to see distortions in old photos of models from before I knew how to use my camera at all 😅, and being able to guess what lens I had used that created the looks I had gotten.
I’ve watched the next lecture and taken my notes. Will sleep on it this evening and post the next self-homework in the morning.
I bet this study plan will get you very far. Thats so nice. :D
Sorry i have been so silent all these days.
Im afraid that I can't bee quite so ambitious as you, but I have a plan that I hope can help to improve my skill level if i study real hard. xD
This is my perfect study day:
A. 1,5 hour drawing training from (the naturel way to draw, by Nicolaides)
B. 1 hour drawing from the "Proko anatomy course" of the bones (I'm trying to incorporate the perspective, when I simplify the shapes of the bones)
C. 1 hour practice from Marshall Vandruff's perspective course
D. and at last - 1 hour "365 days challenge".
The purpose is to push myself to draw faster and more consistent.
Therefore I'll try to do many reference studies and speed paintings, or personal, fun colorfull stuff as a treat for my practice.
Self-Homework for Marshall’s 1994 Perspective Course, Lesson 2, Right Angles Part 1
1. Daily warmup doing line control practice.
2. Draw 5-10 boxes everyday in one point perspective, above, at, and below the horizon, noting P.O.V. (I’ll be adding 2 point and 3 point with the next two lessons)
*Look forward to future Bridgman studies!
3. After getting some familiarity with drawing boxes in one point perspective, do some perfect cubes using the formula in the video I found earlier.
4. Remember the BIG SECRET!
5. Review Marshall’s recommendations on how to get good - don’t freak out over the word “cube”! Breathe. Breathe some more...
In the Perspective Podcast, there was something about 1.) practice control of lines (on it since last Nov.), and 2.) spinning a “cube” freehand - letting it be good enough is what I wrote in my notes. I have a paper model I’ve made for practice that may help.
Baby steps. I will be doing this everyday this week, but I’m not planning to post here unless I get stuck - and I’m holding off on project ideas with this for now, because a little knowledge is dangerous ⚡️🔥 and I’m almost guaranteed to bite off more than I can chew 😜. Also July is very busy and I have the rest of my daily art training work. I have already done this for today, and I’m happily surprised at how much I’m enjoying drawing boxes so far.
@Monica Ung has generously gifted us with some excellent homework ideas she created for herself when doing his course, for the more adventurous among us. You can see those below.
Thank you for your help and support! Looking forward to seeing what the rest of you are doing with your perspective training. 💖
The “perfect cube” in one point perspective turned out to be no fun at all 😵. I found out I’m every bit as inept with a ruler, T-square, and triangle (oh my! 🦁🐯🐻) as I had thought 😅. Teeny things magnify very quickly.
As for the results, a couple things are bothering me.
1. The top back end of the middle cube is higher than the ones on the sides. Why? Is that an artifact of my little errors, or is that mathematically where it should be? I suspect the latter since it happened on both sides. 🤔
2. These don’t look like perfect cubes to me. 🤨
3. The ones on the sides feel somehow “bigger” to me - maybe it’s the visual weight of the silhouette? 🤔
I suspect that is why I think I heard Stan say something in a lesson about how one point perspective doesn’t really exist unless you’re looking at something head on...
Perhaps those of you who know much more about this can shed some light 💡 for me. 🙂 Thanks!
Unless I get some new information, I’m planning to abandon my earlier plan to continue with “perfect cubes” in the 2 and 3 point perspective practice for the time being. I heard Marshall say something, I think in the crit for that same lesson, that in his 1994 perspective class he shows students how to rotate a cube in space - so hopefully that will be coming in one of the lessons I haven’t seen yet, and I just need to be patient.
I’ll post my HW for the next bit tomorrow. What are the rest of you up to with perspective? Anyone doing Marshall’s Bridgman class?
The week of one point perspective boxes! Pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed doing this, and that it was just the right amount of practice without going overboard 💦 (especially on week 3 of fever, though thankfully doc says I’m fine). I’m working on a new pencil hold, and you’ll see that in the lack of line quality, but it’s early days and I’m already seeing improvement. I think most of what happened this week from this practice was more in my mind than what’s on paper, and how I’m seeing. Pics are in order from bottom to top, right to left. Still have the perfect cubes to go.
Asked for help
Help, please 🙏. I’m working on my project for my self-homework to Marshall’s 1994 Perspective course, Introduction. I’m trying to do a dramatic piece using only boxes. The emotion I decided on is “menacing”. I wanted to have a box that is a towering figure, that extends from the ground way up, and then curves back down in such a way that it looks almost like an angular gaping mouth about to devour the second box (absent from this example, but will be very small at ground level), and the viewer.
This is as close as I have been able to get so far 🤦♀️.
@Liandro Roger , this isn’t in a lesson section, but I hope you don’t mind that I’m tagging you anyway, just in case. You did such a brilliant job helping me with the wacky angle of the pelvis that had been driving me crazy.
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4yr
Haha, no problem, @Teresa Bolen! But hey, I think this sounds way too complicated for an introduction exercise. I’d suggest letting go of the inventive part of the assignment and just draw a bunch of regular boxes in various angles - no need to be dramatic or menacing for now! I’d even recommend not distorting/twisting the boxes yet. At most, you could experiment varying the proportions, height and width. I know this sounds much more boring than the idea you had in mind, but since this is a perspective study, eliminating he distractions could help you keep your focus on the perspective stuff. Hope this helps!
Thanks for creating this thread Teresa! I'm learning perspective too so I'm glad that there's a space here to talk about it.
I just finished watching Marshall's 1994 perspective series and I really like it. I took down notes while watching the lessons, I find that really helps since there's a lot of new information to absorb. I didn't know anything about perspectives before watching his lessons, so now I feel super excited to be able to draw things that look technically correct. I still need to practice though (a lot!), so I thought up of some homework based on Marshall's lessons: https://gist.github.com/monicau/11334a6bf13095a65f06eb954e005463
I tried pasting the exercises here but all the indentation and bullet formatting got lost! Anyways I hope this will be useful for others also following Marshall's lessons, and if anyone has ideas of more exercises, please share! :)
This is some great exercises Monica! i think i'll try to do them, when I've watched the lessons to the end and done with my notes. :D
@Monica Ung , what a wonderful gift 💝! Thank you so much!!!
Yes, I found the same thing about the formatting when I tried to post my homework idea from the intro lesson, and started a topic about it in the beta area. I imagine the team is crazy busy right now. Sure is impressive what they’ve built so far!
I’m so glad you’re here, Monica! And very much looking forward to seeing the practices and pieces you share, and talking about perspective together.
Self-Homework for Marshall’s 1994 Course, Introduction.
Warmup doing freehand lines that are parallel, make right angles, and make oblique angles, noting as I do which are obtuse and which are acute. I often do this kind of warmup, but the difference will be the focus on the vocabulary as I’m doing it. I don’t plan to post this.
Make a simple drawing to illustrate each of the five ways to create the illusion of depth. Try to be forgiving of myself if I end up demonstrating multiple aspects at a time.
Project: Make a piece using only a box or boxes, and make it as dramatic as I can.
Review my notes on Marshall’s recommendations on how to get good. Create a tentative action plan.
I’m putting this here to hold myself accountable and make sure I do the work. Thank you in advance for your support!
Okay, not a sexy project, or a complicated project - but it is a finished project, and I think it’s enough, especially considering day 8 of fever. With the new parameters I tried to include:
atmospheric perspective, overlap, diminution, convergence, and I think 🤔 foreshortening is there because of the convergence? Is it possible to have foreshortening without convergence? Oh dear...hopefully some of this will clear up as I go.
Thank you for your support! Stay safe everyone!
Day six of fever 🤒 , and still struggling with a bit of brain fog - but the hand is much better 😊 - I think Marshall is really onto something with the suggestion to stretch and strengthen the opposing muscle group, because that seems to be working - and I’m grateful I don’t have any other symptoms.
I tried to redo my diminution drawing to incorporate what I learned from @Jim A , but then I started freaking out about proportions, and given that my gesture drawings are still so precarious anyway, I decided to remember that I have this great info, and apply it when I have more experience with perspective, and a normal temperature 😇.
Next, I tried to draw my fifth item on the list of how to create the illusion of depth, foreshortening. I wanted to keep it simple, and I wanted an extreme angle, but one that actually occurs in my field of vision, as opposed to a wide angle lens distortion in a photo. As it turns out, when I got the pencil ✏️ close enough to create the angle and illusion I wanted, I couldn’t actually see that close, even with my closest glasses 👓. You’ll see that confusion in my drawing. Hopefully this will become very simple once I start using perspective and vanishing points.
Feeling deeply appreciative of the other members here who have been generously sharing their knowledge and experience in perspective ☺️.
Fever is still happening. Today’s examples for creating the illusion of depth are Diminution and Convergence. I’m pleased that I figured out a way to separate these two in my mind, because I was afraid they were inextricably linked in my mind. The one with the gestures was an experiment to see if it would work. The gestures themselves leave a lot to be desired - I know - I’m a newbie at it and struggling a great deal; but I think despite the shortcomings it still does what I was hoping it would.
I’ve re-watched Marshall’s 1994 Perspective Series classes 1 and 2 again, this time actually taking notes, and thinking about what and how I want to practice. I have some ideas, that I’ll post here soon. Tonight I’m trying to find information on how to create a true cube in at least two point perspective. So far I’ve seen a number of videos claiming cubes, but that are just boxes, not true cubes. I did see one video that initially looked promising, but I didn’t completely follow the explanation the first time through 🤔. Time to give it another go! Bit of a fever today, so may take a while before something clicks...
What are you working on to improve your ability to effectively use perspective?
Marshall's perspective lectures are great, I've learnt so much from them and recommend them to anyone.
Beware of getting too caught up in the weeds with the exercises you're choosing (such as making perfect cubes) before the basic concepts of perspective feel intuitive. Making a perfect cube involves following a formula ('draw this line here, then draw that line there') without needing to understand why you're drawing those lines.
Reproducing the examples Marshall gives in each lesson could be a good starting point for exercises. Then come up with slightly different examples to check you've really grasped the concept.
I think Marshall hinted in one of the Draftsmen episodes that his new course would have assignments, but I'm not sure when it will be released.
Wow, I haven't watch Marshall's perspective lessons yet (I'm waiting for the new classes he's promising ^^) but this stuff looks really technical.
I'm far from being a pro at perspective but here are a few very useful ressources I've found :
This site : https://drawabox.com
And this book : https://www.amazon.fr/How-Draw-Sketching-Environments-Imagination/dp/1933492732
Aside from that I often a 3D program for "blocking" a scene, working on framing and composition. Sometimes I "retro-engineer" a scene I've made with basic 3D volumes into 2D to check vanishing points and horizon lines. As far as I'm concerned, I find going back and forth from from 2D and 3D really helps me understand volumes in space :)
Found the Candy Brush tutorial of perfect cubes in 1 point perspective this morning, and this looks even better for me as a place to start with my cube practice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYJ4oeCltjo
