Break out your pocket watch and your
paintbrushes! It's time for episode 9 of 10 minutes to better painting!
I am your incorrigible host, Marco Bucci. Let's dig right in. The teacher from
Starship Troopers said: "Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom
anyone really has." This episode is about perspective, which falls under the
category of: depth. You there! Gaze upon the visit of gods!
Well...artists, actually. And they, back in the Renaissance era, developed something
called 'linear perspective.' The basics of which involve a viewer, whose eye line
gets projected infinitely far into the horizon: this makes a horizon line - onto
which we can plot a vanishing point. And from that point comes a linear
perspective grid which you then reference to ensure your scene has
cohesive depth. A single vanishing point is called one-point perspective. You can
have two vanishing points on a horizon line. Usually these points are located
quite a bit out of frame... and you get a different angle to the scene. Changing
the distance between the two vanishing points simulates various focal lengths
of a camera's lens. If you want to look up at something, add a separate grid
entirely and have that grid recede to a third vanishing point, independent of the
horizon line. This is of course three point perspective, and putting that third
point below the horizon line will simulate looking down. This is knowledge
we owe to artists who lived, like, six hundred years ago - which is pretty cool
if you ask me! ...and I bet they're rolling in their graves.
Geez, minute and a half into this thing ... where's my unpaid intern?? ...Thanks. Hey! Get back in your car drive
away and then come back again. Jus--just do it! When he drives away from camera
the car gets smaller, and when he comes back toward camera, the car gets bigger.
This leads us to a hidden relationship between size/distance/and the eye line.
This checkered floor will reveal the eye line (or horizon line). Now, pay special
attention to where the car crosses that line. The eye line tells us that
everything above that line is above our eyes and everything below the line is
below our eyes. *psst, do the driving again*. So, as the intern travels through depth
the size of the car changes but its relationship to the eye line does not.
This relationship tells you how to resize your objects, too. The ratio of the
object space above the horizon to the object space below the horizon should
also remain consistent. And of course that ratio will change depending on
where your eye line sits. I'll move the camera here to show you
how some of those changes might look. In this illustration by Juanjo Guarnido,
these two figures are at different depths in the scene. Our eye line is
nicely positioned at ... well... crotch level. I know this because all the perspective
lines traced back to a vanishing point right at his ... Man, come on, really? *sigh* Let's
take stock of the measurement above and below the woman's crotch. When we
translate that scale to our main figure, who is the same size give or take a few
inches, the relationship holds true. Of course his feet are off-screen. But
because the woman has given us the eyeline reference, the hidden information
here can still be resolved! I see a lot of people trip up here, by simply placing
large objects close to camera in hopes to give depth to the scene. But there's
no reference for these objects. I don't know their relation to the eye line; I
don't know how big they are; so it's basically like they're floating. In the
last example I had the information to complete the picture
whereas this time I do not. Speaking of missing information: when working with
depth, objects will inevitably overlap and therefore conceal other parts of the
picture. Guarnido has designed his picture to give us contiguous slices of
the perspective grid, and we then fill in the areas that are overlapped by other
stuff. We can do this on much less - Dean
Cornwell here shows us a few areas where objects are providing some perspective
information. From there we can roughly extrapolate back to the vanishing points,
from there the horizon line, and from there the viewer can approximate the
perspective grid for the entire scene! Things that touch the ground are very
good depth cues because even if an object gets rotated, creating a custom
vanishing point, that point will still indicate where the horizon line is.
Getting back to overlaps: be careful with silhouettes. This tree overlaps the
temple, while still preserving a healthy chunk of the temple silhouette. Too many
overlaps can compromise the silhouette. This temple now almost reads like a ... *Spooky music plays*. Here's
another tricky little thing! I'll call up some perspective lines, and the unpaid
intern. The intern will drive from this point close to camera to this point a
little further away. *rusty engine sound* I ... think that car needs a tune-up, but let's plot the line
he took. It looked like this. Now let's pull out and have him drive that same
path. This time the line looks like this! Here are those two lines side-by-side.
They show us that distance forces horizontal lines. Take a look at the
river that travels through depth in this Scott Christensen painting. When I analyze
the lines that those river banks make from close up to far away we see a
gradual progression towards horizontal lines. It's like a cypher for a
perspective grid that we the viewer can solve! But a perspective grid is not an
absolute requirement. Color and value alone can deliver depth through
something called 'atmospheric' or 'aerial perspective.'
...painting goes over there and over here I'll draw up a quick chart. I'll plot the
colors of the lights on the left and shadows on the right. Starting with the
shadow category, these are colors across all objects in the painting. And I'll
identify the foreground midground and background sections. There are two things
to notice here. One: there's more variety of shadow colors and values in the
foreground progressively less variety toward the background. And second: with
depth, the color is pulled toward the cyan side of the blue family on the
color wheel. Alright let's examine the light category
now. Again, corralling colors across all objects.
The first thing to notice is the overall cooling of the color still happens ...
though the light family preserves its color more than the shadow family. Also,
yellows get filtered out by the atmosphere.
This causes distant colors to appear a touch redder. When we don't observe these
trends and when we don't have a perspective grid, we can only achieve
limited amounts of depth. But just by implementing some atmospheric
perspective, we can make even large objects in the background recede much
further into the distance! This is all super powerful stuff that we'll explore in part tw--
yeah yeah I was just getting to that. Hey how did you buy that car?! I don't
even pay you. ...Ah, the choices we make. Alright let's sketch
something! I'll start by plotting the horizon line, vanishing point and
perspective grid based on the story I want to tell. I'm imagining myself high
above the ground - like on the second floor of a building or something. Right
around roof level. So when I block my scene in all the rooftops will be just
above the horizon. I'm also picturing this city kind of elevated off the
ground, so that means the ground plane needs to be put way below the horizon
line, which you can see is this kind of waterway I'm developing here. So right
away my choice of viewpoint dictated quite a bit about how I block in this
scene. I'm also thinking about the simple concept of having things overlap other
things: like the foreground building overlaps the mid-ground building; the
foreground people overlap the platform they're walking; on those little boats
overlap the walls. I know that seems like an obvious point, but I have noticed
there seems to be a common reluctance to have shapes overlap other shapes, which
of course just robs the scene of depth. But remember when you do overlap shapes,
consider the silhouette you're losing and the silhouette you're retaining. Oh, I
should say I'm not trying to make this like the coolest concept art piece
you've ever seen ... what I want to show you is how these simple concepts will allow
you to start sketching a place that has a sense of believability to it. At this
point in the painting I feel like I know the space well enough to populate it. You
know, at the beginning I was worried about the placement of big things but
now it's like ... put a boat here ... put a person there ... with the basics in place it
becomes just fun to explore the space you're creating. But be careful! I'm
finding myself drifting from my own perspective grid in some key areas! So
here I'm just kind of auditing that. Tweaking a
few of the important lines that really have to recede to that vanishing point.
And I guess I'll leave the sketch unfinished because at this point it's
just noodling out the rest of the scene, which is not really the focus of this
lesson. *Squeaky voice* Huh? Oh the intern wants me to tell you that I have longer art lessons
featuring real time paintings and instruction available at www.marcobucciartstore.com I'd like to get back to this opening quotation. If figuring things out
for yourself is freedom ... then are my videos somehow removing freedom?? Well,
teaching art, to me, is like helping someone navigate. And there are two
overall lands you can wind up in. My goal with these lessons is to encourage you
to move in this direction. And trust me, you'll still have to navigate countless
twists and turns by yourself. And that, in my opinion, is where the real discovery,
learning, and freedom happens. So I'm really happy you're watching my videos!
But I hope you're also spending the time to sort out the information on your own. *Christmas bells jingle* "Hey buddy, its Marco. Are you having a
good Christmas? Yunno, I know that I don't always give you the easiest time ... I
yelled at you for the coffee thing ... and got you drunk on the air ... and I had you
kidnap that one guy ... but I want you to know you make this show better than I
could make it alone. So, in this envelope is a check! There's a '1' with a few
zeroes after it, which I hope you can use to pay off that car of yours. Maybe a few
months' rent? Or, I don't know, just go buy a lot of coffee. You deserve it and I
want you to know that! Well, I hope you have a great holiday, and I can't wait to
come back in the new year and make more episodes with you :)"
