Foreshortening | Techniques and Tricks!

foreshortening is a really extreme version of perspective and foreshortening does tend to be really really tough for a lot of people foreshortening is a type of extreme perspective most frequently done with people you'll see a lot with people you can see with everything when limbs appear compressed because of the avid perspective when i say compressed it looks like they've been kind of squashed so far shortening is considered one of if not the most difficult thing to draw in terms of anatomy so there's a lot of things you need to think about when we do foreshortening number one is proportion when you're drawing your stuff for shortened you have to remember to keep all of your limbs proportionate you can't just draw the arm the exact same way if the arm is coming towards you the arm will no longer be the exact same length that you would normally draw it one of the tricks that i love to teach my students is when you draw an arm if you have a shoulder you have a wrist right if you draw dots in the center of them connect them perpendicular connect them where that line is is your elbow and you have your hand and that's like a perfectly proportioned arm this trick no longer works if you're working on for shortening so what ends up having to happen is you have to learn how to draw the arm when it's coming forwards right so if you have the elbow like this it's bent then the arm is facing towards you like this right learning to draw that arm for shortened this section here is foreshortened you need to think about anatomical accuracy as people we have anatomy we've got different parts of the body we've got different geometry we've got different forms when we think of those forms we need to make sure that we are keeping them in mind when we draw our foreshortening and the perspective accuracy you need to think of your geometry when you draw a bunch of cubes and cylinders in perspective it's going to operate the exact same way in foreshortening it's just going to be a little bit more extreme so this one right here do not force limb visibility i see that a lot with artists who are just starting out as artists we are so used to you know our arms having a certain anatomy attached to it we're very used to them being a certain length we're very used to them being a certain size we're very used to them being at a certain viewpoint but when we work with foreshortening we can no longer think in that way we have to remind ourselves that these parts of the body are being crunched they're being shortened so what ends up happening is that our brains and our hands don't really connect and they're like uh but this arm looks wrong because it's not the correct length so what ends up happening a lot that i see is like say if you have somebody like sitting on the ground and their legs are supposed to be like facing directly forwards towards you you'll see them kind of like go like this and then like the foot will be angled up like this this makes the person look like they're sitting downwards right you need to remind yourself that the length of the legs should no longer be visible if the person is sitting and their legs are facing directly towards you you're not gonna be able to see that like the top of the thigh might be visible you might see a bit of the knee but like most of the leg is gonna be covered up i'm gonna go over a couple of different techniques that i tend to use the number one thing that you've probably seen before is the coil or ring method think of the body as if it's wrapped in springs or rings imagine your arm like you know if you put a slinky on it and you have a bunch of coils around it kind of that deal imagine those curves that go around the form coils are the way that a lot of artists do it rings are a little bit cleaner this allows for you to keep the curve and the 3dness of the form coil outwards from the initial starting point or draw gradual rings that get larger so let's say that we started from this one section the base of the arm which is right there if we want to do the first limb we can coil it out and it slowly gets larger notice what this does creating a cylinder in perspective and then if we had the next part of the arm we'd start from there change the angle a bit and just get larger once again we need to make sure that we are consistently growing a bit larger the ring method is exactly the same it's literally just using rings instead of coils the coil helps you keep your consistency of your shape rings just help it keep it a little bit neater and easier to follow with the eyes that's literally it there's like no difference between the two though the exact same method so the pros of this method is that it really helps keep form consistency and it helps with accurate and smooth perspective especially with these coils what you're doing is you're creating a really nice looking tube a really nice looking cylinder and what that does is it really helps get your brain in that foreshortening mindset the cons is that you're not done when you do the coils you start with the coils they're there they're beautiful fantastic you're not done when you do the coils you have to put the anatomy back on the coils you're just creating a cylinder and it's working but this method only does the perspective now you have to add in the rest of the muscles and the rest of the anatomy of whatever linear drawing the coils can't do that for you you need to know what that is but coils are a nice and simple method next one is a geometry method so the geometry method is more for people who think in a more mathematical sense some people think better when they think of basic blocks building blocks working straight from basic geometry which is prisms or cylinders right prisms i recommend more squares and rectangles those tend to work a little bit better because you give yourself more anchors every time that you give yourself a corner think of like anything that you draw in perspective so instead of thinking in cylinders and coils you're thinking more in you're putting a box in perspective it's simple visualization and easy to relate back to a simple perspective so in this case if i was to draw the full body this person's looking up and start with the neck i draw a cylinder first then based on where that cylinder is i will draw a prism for the first part of the body notice that everything is going downwards and then if i continued i had a sphere here and what i could do so i could also attach on a prism for the arm right again following the shape that the body is doing right now all right you notice all of the different shapes and stuff center of the body is still here if i was to add anatomy back on the pros of the geometry method is that it is the most accurate in terms of general anatomy and form you will not get more accurate than these building blocks right if you think of them as lego duplos it's very easy to get this proportionally correct because you're thinking in boxes it's easy to get this one incorrect it helps you with form consistency it helps you keep that consistency helps you keep that curve and the roundness but it has the ability to mess up you can definitely do the coils wrong but in this case you just have a really clean looking nice box and that tends to be a bit easier to visualize so the cons of this method are that it is stiff it is rigid and there's no gesture when you are working with these rectangular forms you need to kind of have the gesture in the back of your brain generally the evolution of your working method tends to start with the gesture and then it's the form on top of it and you must have a good handle on perspective if your brain doesn't work well with perspective yet this method will not work for you so you must have a good handle on your perspective before you work on it so because we were doing foreshortening i set up a few different poses for us to illustrate this is gonna be four shortened so it's just gonna be a full body the order of things that are on the pole is like what i want to do the most someone tripping and falling that's a really fun one so usually i start with the head a lot of the times because the head is usually what'll help you keep it in proportion because the body is measured in heads but sometimes like if i'm working with gesture like if i'm gesture drawing i work from the body first because i do have my proportions memorized so i can work without this method but usually if i am just drawing any old character i start with the head just because the head's like the most fun part for me to draw so remember that when i am drawing i have a problem with forcing things to be in view when i'm doing full body for shortening because i really want the torso bits to show but they really won't be this is a very very exaggerated form of foreshortening this you will not see as often but i always find that exaggerated foreshortening is a lot easier than like just normal foreshortening the best way to accentuate any kind of foreshortening is with clothing you need something to look rounder draw a sleeve on give them bracelets if you'd like to support the channel in the creation of free arts education become a member on patreon so what i'm doing right now is i'm establishing a background if i'm not going to put another person it's a bit empty so i think i should probably just do some kind of background okay now i can work on the lining portion let's go again i'm really only planning on doing the lines for this one so i'm trying to make them a little bit more fun a little bit more stylized because i don't have to worry about color seeping through any of them at any point because there's a lot of big gaps between my lines right now so i'm not really worried about the gaps because it's not like anything's going to go inside of it regardless i'm also not worrying about cleaning my lines up too much because i want to give them a bit of extra fun pizzazz in terms of just them moving and whatnot i've been doing a lot of traditional lining so i'm kind of taking my techniques from that back into my digital that's why it's good to do both traditional and digital i find it helps you with your versatility when you work digitally it'll teach you how to work traditionally when you work traditionally it'll teach you how to work digitally it works both ways so it's usually nice to work with both because then you can have interchangeable techniques when i foreshorten when the portion of the body comes closer i thicken up the line work this is just to help enhance the foreshortening usually if you change your line weighting up when the thing gets closer it helps enhance the perspective a little bit more especially with foreshortening because for shortening you really need a lot of help with really pushing that it's like when the stuff gets farther away it's easier to work with much thinner line work it makes it look a lot better if you work with thinner line work because when you do that it creates this nice really light as if it's fading into the background look you know what i'm actually going to change the angle of this book because that makes it more interesting a tiled floor or just having a grid will change everything it really will it makes everything just look like 20 times nicer it really assists with perspective it really helps push your your scene [Music] if you liked what you saw be sure to hit that like button and subscribe so you never miss an upload join our art community with the links down below if you'd like to support the channel in the creation of free arts education become a member on patreon for working files behind the scenes posts and discounts on our class offerings if you enjoyed this video here's a couple other videos you can check out next

Channel: Winged Canvas

Views: 922,479

Keywords: foreshortening, foreshortened, how to foreshorten, how to foreshorten in drawing, foreshortening techniques, foreshortening methods, how to draw foreshortening, how to draw foreshortening with the coil technique, foreshortening tips, foreshortening in art, line art, perspective drawing, perspective art, speedpaint, draw anatomy, anatomy art, art tutorial, how to draw, digital art, digital art tutorial, time lapse, art school, art education, character speedpaint, art lesson

Id: 2jPt2BENhRA

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2022