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 :)"