I’m pretty new as an artist (just since Memorial Day), and I have a question. What’s up with perspective? Every art book I have suggests using either 1 point or 2 point perspective. Why would you choose one over the other? And where would one place the vanishing points in 2 point perspective? It seems pretty arbitrary to me.
Also, if I were drawing something like a city block, I might use 2 point. But this seems applicable only if the buildings are lined up in perfect rows. What if they aren’t? What if they are haphazardly placed? Would I then need many vanishing points?
I don’t understand the point those art books are making, either. We did that 1-pt, 2-pt, 3-pt exercise in school over & over, from grade school through undergrad, and I still don’t think it has anything to do with reality.
You might enjoy looking at some work by de Chirico, he had a lot of fun with perspective. And Sheeler, his work is interesting.
Personally, I think you’re better off concentrating on negative space, and practicing breaking your subject into flat shapes. I guess if you want to “prove” that they work together, those perspective exercises can help, but if you’re drawing the real world it won’t come into play.
Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is, IMHO, the best art book out there.
Perpsective is a way of getting depth in your drawings. It’s good to do some fooling around with it early in your career, although later on you’ll move past it to “artsier” considerations. But even then, a knowledge of perspective will help you spot errors in your drawings.
The vanishing points are placed where you, as an artist, want them. Place them low, the buildings loom over you; place them high, the buildings look far below you. Place them far apart, the picture looks flattened; place them close together, the picture looks dramatic.
If you’re drawing a city block, with two-point perspective, every line that’s parallel converges toward the same vanishing point. So every line that lies along 12th Avenue converges toward the same vanishing point at the right-hand side of the picture, and every line that lies along 114th Street converges toward a second vanishing point at the left-hand side.
Play with it. Pick up a pencil, put two points on a piece of blank paper, and draw a cube. Draw another cube next to it. Fiddle around; have fun.
In real life, parallel lines appear to converge in the distance, so when you’re drawing on a 2-D piece of paper, there are little tricks you can use convey depth.
(I suck at drawing perspective, though. For whatever reason, I have a terrible time internalizing the idea of depth and 3-D space. I used to have this inexplicable phobia of getting electricuted by power lines because the ones in the distance look like they’re at eye level.)
So what about the refridgerator box on the corner of 12th and 114th that Benny the Bum lives in? If it’s not perfectly squared with the buildings, does it get its own vanishing points?
Yes. As for 1 vs. 2 point perspective, you would use 1 point if the majority of objects are lined up in rows receding directly away into the distance (think of looking straight down a street), while you would use 2 point if instead you have 2 perpendicular rows in view (think of standing on a street corner and facing diagonally). 3 point is not very common, but you would use that if you were looking up at, say, tall skyscrapers from ground level, or down from an airplane over a cityscape.
There are actually an infinite number of vanishing points. Each object in the drawing has its own 2 or even 3 vanishing points. If some objects are oriented exactly the same way their vanishing points are identical. The 1 - and 2- point rules are used for drawing shapes (like buildings along a street) that are all oriented the same way. If there is a shape that is oriented differently from the other shapes, it will have different vanishing points. Where are the vanishing points located? They probably don’t teach you this in any art class, but in advanced drafting you learn that there is indeed a precise method for locating the proper vanishing points for all objects in the drawing. It’s impossible to describe the method verbally. I’ll see if I can find some good diagrams.
I drew this diagram to show how to locate vanishing points. Point A is where you are standing as the observer of the object. The vanishing point for each edge of the object is located by drawing a line from point A to the horizon line, parallel to the edge on the object. All edges that are parallel on the object will all have the same v.p. This particular object is just a box, therefore all of its edges will be parallel to either line AB or AC. If it had a more complicated shape, there would be as many vanishing points as there were non-parallel edges, each v.p. would be located by drawing a line from point A to the horizon.
Speaking as a professional artist and art director who has made a pretty good living at illustration and design over the past decade, I have to say that perspective drawing is one of the most overlooked and unfairly maligned skills. Perspective drawing was one of the courses I kind of blew off during my foundation year, and it was probably the #1 course I shouldn’t have blown off. I had to go back and relearn everything a few years later when I realized that all of my drawings looked just plain wrong whenever I tried to depict any kind of environment with depth. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about parallel buildings, or a crowd of people, or a jungle, or spaceships or zombies or whatever. The principles of perspective drawing are applicable to organic shapes as well as the idealized, perfectly parallel buildings.
As for discarding “proper” perspective in favor of “creative” perspective…well, I liken that to someone saying to a musician, “you know, you don’t need to learn scales or chords or anything like that, because eventually you can just do creative improvisation.” Sure, you might be able to make some interesting noise, but…
And a lack of understanding of any of the fundamental basics (2-d design, perspective, basic drawing, anatomy, color) will be evident in your artwork. If you want to be the best artist you can be, it is very worthwhile to master the fundamentals.
In order to be perfectly accurate, all art should use three-point perspective, because we live in a three-dimensional world.
Most realistic art is drawn this way, but not always with straightedges applied. Through lots of experience an innate sense is built up so that you naturally know how and where to apply perspective.
Any landscape painting of, for example, a river in foreground, forest in midground, and mountains in the background, is utilising perspective without it necessarily being obvious where the vanishing points may be. It gives the sense of distance any landscape image requires. Whereas in pictures of regular design examples like cities and buildings, the perspective is much more obvious.
Two-point perspective will be for slightly more stylised or technical art, such as a diagrammatic view of a building or vehicle, or as in a 2D animation.
One point perspective would only appear in very rare circumstances, like with the typically used example of looking straight down a railroad track.
I think we’re describing two different approaches to art here.
In terms of illustration and design, where you’re not connecting with a subject matter in front of you but instead conjuring a reality out of your mind – sure, using perspective lines at the sides of your page (or off of it) makes sense.
And yes, it’s important to study the principles of art. Perhaps those drills do help to train the eye.
But in terms of translating 3D reality in front of you into a 2D work on paper, it’s not the way you really work. I’ve painted cityscapes many, many times without ever once drawing a horizon line and tracing the buildings to it. I can’t recall seeing any of my fellow students or teachers doing so, either. When it comes to painting the world in front of you, I’ve found other skills far more useful - negative space exercises have been much, much more fruitful for me.
Looking at how de Chirico twists the information provided by perspective lines is, IMHO, an interesting way of educating oneself on the matter.
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I’ve found other skills far more useful - negative space exercises have been much, much more fruitful for me.
Those are some great paintings. But some of them are quite clearly “wrong”, which is OK when it’s intentional. Picasso and Dali made quite a living out of being “wrong”, but I’d bet they knew basic techniques and theory. I haven’t been an artist long, but I’ve been a musician for over 30 years, and the analogy that Cuckoorex gives really speaks to me. I can’t tell you how many “musicians” I’ve met who couldn’t be bothered with the basics of harmony and ear training because “Theory ain’t music, man!” And it showed. Was it Dizzy Gillespie that said “Learn all your theory and scales and harmony, then forget all that shit and just play”? I’ve met too many people who just skipped the first part of that statement. And a fair number who skipped the second part, too.
At any rate, I’m not really in a position to neglect any part of the learning process right now.
Not to derail my own thread, but what sorts of exercises? I need work on that, too. One huge problem I have is doing negative space washes, both flat and gradated (I use watercolors) around positive images. A blue sky around a white building or a green ocean around a white sailboat, for instance. I get all sorts of streaks and backwashes. Looks like hell on cotton.
What you’ll discover as you continue to train your eye is that the “space around” a subject is just as important as the subject itself. Take a good look at Hopper’s landscapes, and check out the way everything locks together, like a puzzle. That’s the first mark of an amateur painting - you’ll see paintings of flowers in every art show where the “background” is treated as an afterthought. But it’s not. Every inch of your painting is the piece.
I work wet-on-dry in watercolor, without washes. But I have two suggestions - first, you could try using less pigment in your initial wash. You can always add more and build it up. Or, alternatively, wait longer before applying adjacent paint, so that the first area is completely dry.
To me the trick w/watercolor is treating the water as a medium all on its own. There’s a tendency to see it as just as vehicle for color, but if you learn to respect the water itself, I think you’ll get further.
You might also try working smaller, or if you’re happy with a large format, make sure you’re using big brushes. Change the speed of your application.
Also, beware those “artists” who do demonstrations on television - Bob Ross, Donna Dewberry, et al. They may well be having fun, and people who follow them are welcome to enjoy themselves, but they are most certainly not offering art instruction. Personally, I’m quite “old school” in regards to art training, despite my differing view on the usefulness of perspective exercises (drafting and fine art are two entirely different endeavors).
If I had a bit more time I’d recommend some artists; The Art Book is chock full of wonderful art. My memory for names is weak at the moment.
I was just thinking (the babies are watching Elmo) - since you mentioned wanting to start with the basics, the visual art equivalent of musical scales, you might consider learning to draw before you paint. Art education usually begins with contour drawings, for which students use charcoal on newsprint.
And, oil paint is usually easier to work with than watercolors. It’s far more forgiving.
That’s not to say you “shouldn’t” be doing your watercolors - do the creating that speaks to you, by all means! But give yourself time to learn. Use supplies you’re willing to discard. The old saying is that you can throw away your first 500 paintings. That seems a bit harsh, some of those early efforts will surely be worth your affection; but being overly cautious with supplies and “precious” towards the results kills a lot of beginners’ enthusiasm long before they’ve really had a chance to learn.
Another important “negative space” exercise to practice to draw the negative shapes around an object and between objects rather than the objects themselves. Oftentimes when drawing a complex scene or still life with overlapping objects or figures, the tendency is to draw each object kind of seperately; the points at which the objects intersect or overlap may be off by quite a bit, which is evidence that the artist is not properly interpreting the spatial relationships of the objects in the scene. Drawing the negative space in conjunction with the actual drawing can help the artist to recognize this and correct it. Try this: set up a fairly complex still life with overlapping objects, and do a countour drawing of it. Then take a sheet of Ad art or tracing paper and lay in on top of your initial drawing. Now pay attention to the negative spaces in the same scene and draw those.
So what is the real point of such an exercise? Well, for one thing it demonstrates how important negative space is in a piece, and hopefully it also trains the artist to “check” the negative space while drawing (mentally) to correct for possible errors in depicting the spatial relationships of the objects in a scene.
And to think that I chose watercolors because they were the easiest. Hey, they let kids use them, right? Hoo boy, was I wrong. But I do like them, and I’m slowly building a toolbox of techniques.
Anyway, some great advice in this thread, I hope it doesn’t die soon. Do y’all hang out on any good art message boards?
I’m headed off to the beach soon with my girlfriend. Normally we lug along prtable pallettes and cheap brushes, but today I think I’m just going to bring a pencil and sketch sketch sketch.
