Hi, Ian Roberts and Mastering Composition. A couple of weeks ago I added that demo video and it was seen by three times as
many people who saw the shorter videos so this week's video on perspective is a little
longer than normal because to do perspective justice, it really takes some considerations. One
of the things that was interesting there's a lot of comments from people saying, "Yeah, perspective
I'd really like that," and somebody joked about that idea of students having four or five books
on perspective because it's one of those things that when you open them and you look at them they
just seem sort of perplexing, kind of impenetrable, sort of you see diagrams like this and uh
if you were to look at last week's painting and analyze it in this in the manner that
you normally see perspective books it would look something like this. So using construction
you've got this kind of complexity you've got all these things moving out to a vanishing
point one out here, the other side of the chair to a vanishing point way out here number two, the
boxes moving back to vanishing point three, and all the lines in the hardwood back to vanishing point
four. I mean it's complicated to do it that way and completely impractical when you're just doing
a painting, but in representational painting... We need it! It's sort of a foundational skill. So
I'm going to simplify it down and give you two very practical techniques to practice, deliberate
practice, so that you can sort of get a handle on it and master it. And it's not for solving, what
I'm talking about today is not for solving complex problems like this I mean that's a different issue,
but one tip I could say is sometimes buildings are not so far off being flat on and you can just put
them flat on and simplify the perspective problem, but we can't do that all the time. So when we're
drawing and painting, we have three fundamental forms: cubes cylinders and spheres. And spheres we
don't need to worry about in terms of perspective, cylinders we have the ellipse at the top that's
in perspective but the thing is that circle or ellipse falls inside of a square that goes
back to the vanishing point on the horizon just like a cube, so in fact, by learning
the cube we can master perspective. Now ideally I'd go out and make one four by
four cut four inches long some white gesso but I have six photographs that you can use in
this video up until then. So here's the thing some learning something like perspective is a
part of deliberate practice. You need to slow down and embrace it and really spend some
time with it. If you're just trying to oh it'll maybe get better quickly, it's
just something he's got to slow down and enjoy it there's a lovely line by the poet
Mary Oliver attention is the beginning of devotion. So the most important part of it here when you're
doing these exercises these two exercises and that I'm going to give you is you get the feeling
that the sense of the lines you're drawing are carving three-dimensional, the cube is
becoming a three-dimensional form in space, that you're not just trying to craft some lines on
the two-dimensional surface that looks like maybe could be a cube. You're actually visualizing that
when you're doing both sets of exercises. You're visualizing this crafting of space now. The first
technique and many of you will have heard of this and even done it before I use it all the time, when
I'm plein air painting and whenever I'm working from life or even even from a photograph sometimes,
really, but here's the thing the main tool of the first two exercises is this... You lay the whatever
it is your brush or your pencil you lay it along the line of what you're looking at and then you
drop it so here's the thing you want the picture or your computer screen to be vertical and you
want your piece of paper to be just below you or what you're looking at out in the world and your
canvas right here. You want to find the angle and then drop it down and draw it in. Maybe
double check it. Or if you're working in a painting you maybe do this and then you
just keep your shoulders even and your head and you just come over to your canvas and you
get the angle. Now I've seen students doing this as they move from here to here and then obviously
if you're moving the angle it won't work. So that's but it's a very useful technique and you can
you'll see you can build up everything in terms of perspective with that technique so I'm going
to show that to you now. So here's the photograph again and I have it gridded because it actually
helps you to see some of the angles relative to things as opposed to just, you know, the whole image
but you can see that there's a line there, you can lay your pencil along it bring it down, there's
a line there, there's a line there, there's a line there, there's a line that runs across both those,
and all those, and they're all going back to the same vanishing point and you can just lay your
pencil along them or brush along them and figure out what that angle is and bring it down to
your paper or canvas. And then of course they're doing exactly the same on this side, right? All of
these you've got lots of reference points for it and then the same thing with all the lines here,
all going back to the same vanishing point just lay your pencil along it get an idea where
they are and then brush it in or draw it in. So I'm going to show you an exercise on how to
do that now. So I lay the pencil along the edge and then I just bring it straight down not
turning it so let's say this is the angle then I double check it, seems about
right we're going to need a vertical these things always want to stay vertical
and then we're going to do the second angle here, I'm just going to double check it, and
then let's say this is the bottom there, put in that angle, just double check it, and then this one's
important because the actual dimension of what creates a cube is pretty specific, you know,
if it's out here it's no longer a cube right, and then the one on the bottom here so you see it's just I mean, here's the thing that
I would say is... I'm going to give you six of these and I would say, just do them slowly, slowly
with a lot of attention. See that's a little squeezed right? Feels a little squeezed for
a cube, and you just have to kind of feel where that point is that's looking a little
better and then we lay the line along the back, and then just double check
it, and then lay the line here and we get our cube. So here's the thing
that I want you to do as you're doing this. I want you to be thinking not about am I getting
these lines right on the two-dimensional surface to sort of look like a cube. I want you to think
as you're drawing this that you're carving this into the paper you're manufacturing
a three-dimensional illusion and the most important part to be thinking about that in
two point perspective is that these three lines are always working in concert back to
one vanishing point and these three lines always working together as one back to
a vanishing point and when you start to feel the sense of those lines working together
and I'm going to give you six cubes to do that and start getting the feel for that
then you'll start to be carving it on the picture plane and not just thinking
about lines on a two-dimensional surface. So I have six photographs of the cube you can
make your own of course but if you don't have one six photographs that you can practice
on. I would just stop the video at each one, and then just slowly craft it angle by angle and
feel yourself crafting the three-dimensional space of that cube and it will shift your perspective,
on perspective, you'll start to own it. This cube is about the same as the chair in the
photograph in terms of the angles we're seeing. This one we have a much higher view. Here we
come down much lower and two of the planes are very narrow. Now we're coming down
below we can't see the top of the cube and here again, we've moved over to the side
this might be looking at a building perhaps and this just a little sliver of the top edge. Now
in exercise two, what I want you to do is without the cube itself, I want you to draw this, I just
want you to keep doing this, just do it as like an a doodling exercise where you're trying
to get this sense of carving the shape, the rectangular shape and then say
well that's not really a rectangle. This is either too long or this is too
short. So if we just extend that a little bit and pull this line over to here
I'll just erase it so it's clear. We get something we say, oh yeah okay that's more
like a cube, and then you might try it down low as if you're down low looking at a let's say it would
be like looking at a building right so a building might look like this... from down below and this one here is again maybe
perhaps a little bit long here and so I want you just to be thinking both in terms of manufacturing
that three-dimensional, three-dimensionality and also to get the sense of the cubeness
of that this face is the same as this face is the same as this face then you could try
one where you've got a very small top plane right, and you're seeing that this these are all
working together back to a one vanishing point, these are all working together back
to a vanishing point you know perhaps outside of the picture plane uh
and then you might just try one uh you know just keep working sort of
thinking about different ways that you might draw a cube. See this one would have a very small
face there I might almost go out of the paper these are going back to here so this would be
coming see you can kind of go back like this, like this visually and then say, oh okay, and then
that line would come in like that more over there now I've made a complete mess
of it but you get the idea just keep doing that until you kind
of build into your thinking process how these things function, these three angles
of one, two and three, one, two and three, how they're functioning together on all these
different angles until... Here let's do one that's you know disappearing really radically back to
a vanishing point here, just keep thinking about that thing so that when you're confronted with
something you can either lay a pencil along it and find the angle or you'll just be having a better
sense of how all those three angles work together. And once you've got a good sense of structuring
that cube on the paper then adding the things like windows and doors and so on all just fall
into line with exactly that same principle. So that's it for this week. I do hope you found
it helpful, perspective was a complex problem to try to do in six minutes, and next week we're
going to be looking at greens and how to mix green. So until then I hope you have a great
week. I'll see you next Tuesday. Bye, for now.
