Pixelation

General => General Discussion => Topic started by: API-Beast on January 29, 2018, 04:23:11 pm

Title: Beast's Study Thread - Perspective and some other things.
Post by: API-Beast on January 29, 2018, 04:23:11 pm
Perspective seems to one of the most difficult topics in drawing, and at the same time also one of the defining factor of successful artists. Especially when it comes to drawing fictional concepts or illustrations.

There seems to be two approaches to perspective:You are all probably are all aware of 1-Point perspective and 2-Point perspective. 3-Point perspective is the logical continuation of those, allowing you to construct pretty much everything accurately.

But 3-Point perspective doesn't take distortion into account, to do that you need to take into account not 3 but 6 vanishing points and accurate construction becomes much harder. Nsio has a lengthy post explaining 6-point perspective. (https://nsio.deviantart.com/art/Nsio-Explains-Distortion-in-Perspective-568509612)

I made a few perspective drawing templates, I don't expect them to magically teach me perspective but they might be useful tool for studying one the one side and for making a habit out of thinking of the paper as 3D space rather than just 2D. I hope this is useful for others as well.

These all use 6-Point-Perspective and were created using Blender. To use them print them out and get sketching inside the 3D space.


perspectiveTemplates.pdf
(http://files.api-beast.com/Resources/preview.jpg)
 (http://files.api-beast.com/Resources/perspectiveTemplates.pdf)
Source Files, other formats (http://files.api-beast.com/Resources/)
Title: Re: Let’s Study Perspective
Post by: MysteryMeat on January 29, 2018, 10:43:02 pm
Perspective remains one of the things I struggle with, I like the results of good perspective usage in all aspects but I often find myself dying inside trying to force my way into truly understanding it, and I fall off immediately.

When I do I just wind up with kinda cruddy works and that gets pretty frustrating after a while, which makes me think I'm just approaching it wrong. Anyone know any particularly good instructional videos or concepts I should keep in mind trying to get my head in and around it?
Title: Re: Let’s Study Perspective
Post by: API-Beast on January 30, 2018, 01:20:09 am
I printed out the templates on 160g printer paper and made myself a little sketch book out of it. The idea is that I use it instead of my regular sketch book for all my studies and drawings to get into the habit of seeing the page as 3D canvas, regardless of whether I am carefully constructing or just making educated guesses. Right now I am studying perspective, so it doesn't make much difference. :crazy:

Here is a first sketch in the new sketchbook:
(http://files.api-beast.com/Sketchbook/0016.jpg)

@MysteryMeat
Nsio has a lot of in-depth information on perspective as I already mentioned.
Be sure also to read the descriptions as they contain additional information.


But I think in the end learning to draw in 3D comes down to completely changing the method you use while drawing. Beginner artists often get drilled to stop thinking in symbols and instead draw what they see. That's fine for fine art, but for concept art/illustration the perception based method is lacking and you need to start using drawings as a method of studying objects and phenomena, really getting down to understanding every little detail of what you are drawing rather than just focusing on the outer appearance.
Title: Re: Let’s Study Perspective
Post by: API-Beast on January 30, 2018, 11:46:13 pm
(http://files.api-beast.com/Sketchbook/0013.jpg)

New sketch, learned that I have no idea how to construct proper spheres, so that's what I am going to work on next.
Title: Re: Let’s Study Perspective
Post by: Ai on January 31, 2018, 10:12:26 am
IMO the way to study perspective (or any other artistic fundamental) is to live in the intuition-building framework, and take regular but relatively brief excursions into the strict-construction method. The point being to establish strict construction as a tool to aid intuitive construction and check your work,  moreso than vice versa. Keeping intent and concept -- what am I drawing? -- at the forefront, rather than method ('how am I drawing?'), to avoid the deadening of drawings you mention.

Arne's suggestion 'have some perspective-y lines, but they don't have to be ultra correct. Just use them as rough guides' hits the right balance IMO.

In regards to what essential operations in perspective it is good to train, I think Scott Robertson's book 'How to Draw' does an excellent job of paring down things to the most essential, combinable atomic operations.

Regarding spheres, Douglas Flynt has a step by step ellipse construction guide (https://douglasflynt.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/accurate-ellipses.html), using a quad-subdivision method.
If you want to construct spheres / ellipsoids out of rings (ie. the same manner in which Blender's UVSphere object is constructed), you can do it with just that (and perhaps a few slight nudges, given that in 6-point perspective, quads are often a bit curved)

Crits:

Most objects in your latest sketch look correct, but the lower face of the character's platform -- it isn't clear how it's oriented. The two smaller faces on the sides may contribute to this.

EDIT:
A drawing I made in between writing the above, using a freehand approximation of one of the grids you provided:
(https://s25.postimg.org/ku46f8qin/960_thought-029-castle.png)



Title: Re: Let’s Study Perspective
Post by: API-Beast on February 03, 2018, 01:21:09 am
What I figured for constructing spheres is that you basically need three ellipses, one for each primary axis plane, then you just need to draw a fourth ellipse that envelopes the other three.

(http://files.api-beast.com/Sketchbook/0015.jpg)

Not quite sure what to study next, I probably should try to define a more complex shape.

@AI: your Z axis looks off, it might help to draw a second grid layer 1 unit underneath the first to figure out how the space behaves when drawing at different levels of depth
Title: Re: Let’s Study Perspective
Post by: API-Beast on February 04, 2018, 08:11:04 pm
(http://files.api-beast.com/Sketchbook/0014.jpg)

I name this sketch "I've no idea what I am doing".  :ouch:
Title: Re: Let’s Study Perspective
Post by: API-Beast on February 27, 2018, 08:17:48 pm
Didn't make much progress in the meantime. I feel like I am still missing something very basic so my plan for the next month is just drills:

... after which I can hopefully go back to either anatomy studies or perspective studies.
Title: Re: Let’s Study Perspective
Post by: API-Beast on March 05, 2018, 10:59:04 pm
Just stumbled upon this blog of some Japanese dude (http://kazushi.hamazo.tv/) who uploads a lot of step-by-step constructions, while not particularly advanced they might be a bit helpful.

>> Imgur Album <<
(https://i.imgur.com/lpvjBDk.png)
 (https://imgur.com/a/yCFBp)
Title: Re: Let’s Study Perspective
Post by: API-Beast on March 06, 2018, 02:01:47 am
It's probably not quite clear why I am doing these "Cube Drills" and what they are so here is a little 2AM insomnia-fueled rant.

Basically there is two approaches to art: "Top-Down", which is perception based, and "Bottom-Up", which is based on construction.

All my experience in art comes from the top-down approach, I would either have a reference or would first visualize the final end product in my head, then perceptually try to replicate that end result on the canvas. There is no construction, it just goes from rough blobs of color to less rough blobs of color, fixing mistakes over time. This can be a extremely effective method in the hand of a seasoned art veterans, but for your average Joe artist the results will be very inconsistent.

So I completely lack any experience in the bottom-up approach of drawing which makes learning perspective a extremely daunting task where I can't even wrap my head around the simplest concepts.

This is where the "Cube Drill" comes into play. These are not to be confused with the "Draw-A-Box" exercises, which I still think are completely pointless.

The "Cube Drill" is just a practice to break established thought patterns about drawing and get yourself accustomed to bottom-up drawing by focusing on the simplest three dimensional thing you can draw: cubes. You start out with just filling out a page with cubes, it doesn't matter how they look like or how they are organized. Then you let your creativity flow free and do more things with those cubes, you start stacking them on top of each other, taper them at the end, draw them with holes, start constructing spherical connections, going wherever your mind goes. The only restriction is that the end product should be three dimensional in some way. In the past 8 days I have filled about 19 pages with very loose sketches in this manner and I will probably do another 21 pages at which point I think I am sufficiently prepared to study the mechanics of the different joints and do a similar "Bone-Drill", slowly raising the difficulty.





Title: Re: Let’s Study Perspective
Post by: CritiqueMyWork on March 13, 2018, 10:52:23 pm
That blog is great, i wish i could understand a thing. But i cannot study pixel art and japanese at the same time!
Title: Re: Let’s Study Perspective
Post by: API-Beast on March 20, 2018, 04:04:16 am
I don't know Japanese either, I just go after the pictures. ;D Probably not doing floor plan drawings anytime soon, but might be a good practice to get used to creating scenes in 3D in the future.

I have finished my box drill, now the difficulty is jumping from constructing abstract forms to constructing real life forms. This requires not a pure bottom up approach but more a mix of both.

I am not yet at a level where I can construct arbitrary real life objects yet so for now I focus on constructing one thing I already familiarized myself before: the head. I follow moderndayjames approach to construction here, who is probably the number one source on perspective drawing right now.

"STRUCTURAL ANATOMY: Drawing the Head" Video by moderndayjames (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT9HQBWdcCQ)

I use a pressure sensitive ball point pen for the construction lines and a quite heavy gel pen for the final lines. That way the construction lines are there but aren't as visible. As I become more accustomed to the construction I should get away with only imagining most construction lines rather than drawing them out.

(http://files.api-beast.com/Sketchbook/0017.jpg)
Title: Re: Let’s Study Perspective
Post by: API-Beast on April 06, 2018, 02:47:37 pm
The construction practice didn't really get me anywhere so I shifted my focus to textures and rendering, getting a bit more mileage. This medium is so different that I can't really apply anything I learned from pixel art, but I hope to master it in a similar fashion to be a bit more flexible.

(http://files.api-beast.com/Sketchbook/0018.jpg)

I use material showcases like these as reference. They work very nicely for this purpose as they only show the parts relevant to the rendering, no less no more. It's very difficult to figure the intricacies of a material from photos.

(https://i.imgur.com/IKvykZzm.jpg)
[/url]