Draw Anything in Space: A Beginners Guide to Perspective

1. Introduction to Perspective Drawing: Why is it important to understand perspective? It's important because everything around you, your coffee cup, your phone, your laptop, the furniture around you, basically everything that humans have designed and made, they have straight angles, their boxes, their rectangles, cones, pyramids, cylinders, and because they are regular shapes, it's important to understand how to show them in space so that the illustrations that you're creating look realistic. And a lot of times if you don't understand how to draw things in proper perspective and properly in your illustration, things are going to look a little bit wonky. They're not going to quite look like they're put together right, your angles are going to be off and it just throws off your whole illustration. The great thing is that perspective, even though it might sound like it's difficult. There's 1.2 point perspective, three point perspective, it's honestly not that difficult. I'm going to break it down in this class for you in an easy way to understand and in an easy way for you to draw so that when you are creating illustrations, for your books or for other projects that you might be working on that you'll be able to create spaces for your characters to exist in that are believable. I'm Mirka Hokkanen and I'm a traditionally published picture book and freelance illustrator. Over the years, I've worked on books. I've worked on murals, I've worked on key chains, seed packet illustrations, multiple different things, and understanding how to draw things in perspective is an important skill for you to have in your toolbox as an illustrator. In this class, we're going to simplify perspective for you so that it's easy to understand and easy for you to apply for illustration jobs in the future. So if you're ready to jump into this class, I'll see you 2. About This Class: Welcome to the perspective drawing class. I wanted to be kind of a hands on class where you're going to be practicing, drawing things in perspective. And instead of it being super nitty gritty and very detail oriented, I wanted it to be more of a a practical class where you can immediately take the things that you're learning and then put them into practice and improve your illustration skills. And so we'll start the class with just working on what is 1.2 point and three point perspective, and then we'll work on figuring out how to draw pyramids and cylinders and different kind of kind of house structures or triangles on top of houses and also how to combine different shapes together. And then at the very end, I'll show you different ways that you can put those in practice, and we'll do a couple of different simple exercises. I have some reference photos that are part of this class that you are welcome to download if you don't want to find items around your house to draw, but I really do highly recommend it. But if you want to have some extra things to work from, you can download the photos and use them as drawing references for some exercises in this class. All right. And I'm sure you are ready to go. So without further ado, let's go look at One point perspective first. 3. 1 Point Perspective: So let's get started with the meat of the class. So we're going to be talking about three different kinds of perspective. We're going to be talking about one point perspective, two point perspective, and three point perspective. And so let's start with the easiest one first, the one point perspective. And so when we look at things in space, you can see, so I have two examples I have a little box that I have right here, and I have the cap. And I've taken photos of this cap against a light background just so it's a little bit easier to see. As you have a circle and it tilts away from you or towards you in space, you can see that it starts as a circle. And then as it tilts away, it keeps turning more and more into a skinnier oval until it becomes a straight line. The same thing very much happens with a box. And so if we have the box when it's straight up towards us, it's going to be square and then as it starts tilting you'll notice over here that so as it tilts further out, the front that kind of stays in the same spot will be the same, but as it's tilting away from us, the sides will shorten and the back will shorten. And so it will keep going further and further in the same way as the circle until at the very end, it's just a square or just a line. And then that way to our eye, to the camera on to the eye, it looks like it's turning away from us. And these are kind of the very basics of what we're going to be dealing with. And so when we have a one point perspective, that usually means that things wherever you are looking at the object, that object is square. So right now, so if my eyeball is over here, and then the box is kind of straight. So I'm not really seeing underneath the box and I'm not really seeing above the box. I'm just looking at the box straight up, you know, This would be kind of my eye level, the box is in the middle of my eye level. And so when we're looking at something where it's right at the eye level, So when we're looking, so let's say this is going to be our horizon line. The horizon line is always our eye level. So if we have a person standing over here, the person when they're looking when they're looking, their eyes would be on the horizon line. And so if we are trying to draw a box, let's say this box is going to be just a little bit below, I'm trying to make these horizontal and vertical. And so we have a box over here. And let's say with one point perspective, we just get one point on our horizon line. So if we want to go straight in, we would then draw straight lines. And you could do this so if you are working on a paper, you could just use a ruler and just draw straight lines. I'm just using With Procrey, it has this really great opportunity where it snaps. And so there would be where my vanishing point is, and then I could eyeballs, what would look to me to be about a square. And so everything is exactly horizontal and vertical like that. Then if I wanted to, I could erase all the extra lines that we drew and then there would be our square. I'll draw it a little bit darker so it's easier to see. When I'm drawing this in space, I'm really just eyeballing it. Let's say then there's another square that's a little bit further out, and so I'll draw that over here. We have another square that's over here and let's say that our vanishing point is right around here. I'll do it with a blue line. This box is not going to be the same angle as the one that we just drew. I'll draw my straight lines again. There we go. Then if you want to make it a square, you have to eyeball it. But as you draw more, you get better at figuring out what looks like a cube and what doesn't. Then we can just make this a little bit darker again. Hopefully that makes sense. We could draw a little dotted lines, dashed lines over here to show which line is behind. And there would be our second square. So it makes it fairly easy to figure out where things are going to be. And so if I wanted to, I could draw one up on the top and it would work just the same way no matter where I draw my vanishing point at. This is our one point perspective, pretty easy to figure out. The important thing to just think is that we have straight up and down lines and then everything get goes to our horizon line. And so our line, and we could also move this line up and down, depending if you wanted to move the camera and look up at things or if you wanted to move the camera low and move down. So you could also move your horizon line up and down depending what kind of a scene you wanted to draw. And now that we have a basic understanding of one point perspective, let's look at two point perspective in the next video. 4. 2 Point Perspective: Last video, we talked about one point perspective. And in this video, we're going to talk about two point perspective. And so when we start talking about two point perspective, so if we look at this box, and for the one point perspective, this box was straight up and down, perpendicular to the viewers space, your face. But then now let's say this thing tilts. It tilts one way or another. And so now the only thing that is perpendicular to you is just the vertical lines. And so now the horizontal lines are both receding away from you. And so at that point, we can look at two point perspective. And so to draft a two point perspective, again, we need some sort of a horizon line Ops some sort of a horizon line where your eye is going to be. And so I'm going to draw a horizontal line over here. And so then to draw our rectangle, we just need to know how tall the rectangle is. And so I'll do a height over here. And then we so for one point perspective, we have one uh, vanishing point for two point perspective, we have two vanishing points. And usually the vanishing points, you want them to be kind of far away. And so I'll put them as far away. So usually if one is towards the middle, one is out of the picture. If this one is in the picture, then that one is out of the picture. But for the sake of this illustration, I'll make them both kind of far away over here. And so from here, I would draw one line this way. And so this is going to be one side of my box, and then I'm going to draw another one down this way. And so there's one line, and then in order to do the rest of my box, then I would kind of have to eyeball it. So everything that is horizontal is going to be horizontal, so I will draw another horror sketch. Well, that's not quite a square. So let's go, I think, to my eye, that looks about a squares. That looks like about a square. If I go right here. A little bit less, and you can always adjust it. It's always easier to adjust once you have something. And so this line and this line, these ones are all parallel to each other in two point perspective. And then everything else goes. And then from this point, I'm now going to draw a line this way. So all these lines, all the sides going this way, are going to go to this vanishing point, and then from this corner, I'm drawing a line to that vanishing point. And now that will give me where the top of my box is. And then from there, I would drop down. Another horizontal line, and then same thing from this point to here, draw a line. And that should line up right around there. And so then that would give me my cube. And so it looks like it's a little bit taller than a cube right now. So if I wanted it to be it looks like it's a little bit too high, so I could either adjust this part to make it a little bit lower or the other option would be just to move these lines out. But that's close enough for now, and then we can draw another one. So we'll make this one a little bit lighter. We'll draw. Let's draw another square here, we'll do the same thing. We'll draw one over here, and we can even move them. So let's make one over here and one closer. So let's move them a little bit. So this will give us a little bit more of an extreme angle. All right. And then I'm going to eyeball. That looks pretty good. All right. And because this is the eye level is in the middle of the shape, we actually will not see any of these guys. We technically don't see anything inside of the box, but also we can draw those two. So from this corner, I draw up here here. And then I'll draw two light lines from this corner. To this corner, and then we can make them straight. And so right now it looks like it's almost a square they're almost on top of each other. These back lines will be here. And so the same thing. So here would be my cube. And I can see that this side to me, looks a little bit more rectangular, so I could easily fix that by bringing my line, just a smidge. I could bring that over and then fix my lines. And so then I would just have to fix all my lines because then that changes everything. And so then I just redraw these. And so now it actually looks like the back line over here is just about exactly in line with my front line. And then we could do one more example. We could do a box that's really high. Let's do another one so we can move our horizon line down this way. And then let's put our vanishing points over here and we'll draw a box over here. Okay, so here's the height of our box. So we'll go from here. One, two, three, and four, and then I need to do my vertical lines. So that looks like it's about a square and once you practice this enough, it becomes easier to see things in space. And so I recommend that you just draw a lot of actually draw in person. So take some cardboard boxes and draw them. And so I'm just going from each corner that I've just created. So from these two corners over here, and then for the back lines, so I could draw this a little bit darker. And kind of the further out you go with your kind of field of vision, the more distorted items are going to look. So I need to figure out what my backline over here is. This back line over here. And then I also know, so I'm a little bit wonky right now. So I know that this probably needs to go a little bit further out that way for that to be horizontal or vertical. There we go. So this just needs to go over a little bit. And so if you're doing this with the pencil, then it's always easier to draw a little bit lighter. These little Um, there we go. All right, so there would be my box in space. And so as I was saying, depending where your horizon line is and where your vanishing points are, you kind of want to stay in a fairly small range. And as I said, the further you go out to any of these areas over here, you can see how much this corner is distorted. In reality, they probably wouldn't be that distorted. And so that's why it's always a good idea to kind of whatever you are drawing to kind of then just keep everything over here. But it's nice to have kind of your drawing or your sketching area smaller and then make sure that you have your reference points. So then everything that you draw. So if there's multiple, so let's say I'm drawing multiple buildings over there and they're all receding down this line, then I'll be able to make everything. Um make everything look like they're receding nicely in space. But as I said, the further they go out, if I had one over here, it would be at a very incredibly extreme angle, which would just look awful. So I wouldn't want to be doing anything over here. Now that we have a basic handle on two point perspective, let's look at three point perspective. 5. 3 Point Perspective: The last video, we looked at two point perspective, and in this video, let's look at how three point perspective works. And so over here, I have a picture of a box taken with kind of a close up lens with my camera. And so it's a little bit blurry. But as you can see, in the previous instances where we've looked at, we've either had one line that's kind of perpendicular to what we're doing or we've had maybe two lines that were perpendicular to what we were doing. But when we are what we're drawing, but when we have three point perspective, that means we have none of the lines are actually going straight perpendicular to our picture plane or, like, the plane that we're viewing. And so if we look at this picture over here, we can see that, you know, obviously it's pointing kind of this way. And so we can draw our lines and see where they actually match up. And so I'm just going to be moving these lines, and then this should probably match up right here. And so that would be one. And then let's see where these lines match up. There we go. And then this line. There. And so now I've gotten all these lines kind of drawn through, and then I can tell that my horizon line runs through these points over here. And so for my three point perspective, here is one point, here is two point. And so just finding them from the photo and here's my third point. And so then if I was drawing anything else into this scene, let's say it was a city or I want to do more boxes, then whatever I was drawing if I wanted them, I can kind of draw supporting lines from these points already in your picture plane or the farther you get closer to these points, the more distorted things are going to be. So a lot of times it would be better to kind of stick much closer to this area so that things don't get too warped inside of whatever you're trying to draw. And so let's just I'm just drawing a bunch of lines over here just so I have some references. And then we can make them a little bit less light. And so. So now let's say we wanted to draw another box in front of this one. So then we can have, let's say, we'll do a box over here, and they're kind of next to each other. And I'm just kind of trying to I'm looking at these lines that I've already drawn, and I'm just trying to stay kind of at the same angles with those lines. And so I'm thinking that this is going to end up hitting over here. And so there could be one, and then we can make a really skinny one, I guess. And this line actually needs to come back this way. And then I would follow this line over here and go up a little bit further if I need to. And then this would be hitting right around there. Let's see. How are we going right over here? No, this ops. We've got too many lines. This needs to go that way. There we go. And so, like I said, these things don't look super square anymore, just for the fact that they are so far off from where our main our points are. And so here we could just remove that, and, you know, they're all going. And so now it's in three point perspective. But because our perspective points are kind of very close to each other, it's looking kind of wonky. And so when you're working with three point perspective, really, like I said, this photo, I took it with kind of the close up lens, so it's pretty distorted. And even in the photo, it kind of doesn't look like it's three dimensional. It looks it looks pretty wonky, even though it's just this box right here. And so the tip for working with any kind of three point perspective is just having your perspective points really far away. And so let me just start a new so let's say our horizon line is over here, and then let's say we'll have one over here. Let's say this is going to be where our items are going to our picture plane is we're going to be drawing inside over here. So, let's say we have one perspective point is over here, and then let's say one is just really, we need to move everything up. One of the usually the top or the bottom, one should be almost pretty much like it should even actually probably be way further than that. Um, because otherwise, things just look kind of wonky. So if you really want to have one, we could have one, something like this, for example. And then from here, you could start drawing your building. So let's say I wanted to draw Oops, a box. So let's start. Let's put our corner right here. And so draw some lines. I'm kind of sketching it in my head as I'm going. So I'm thinking I want it to be something. Let's say I want it to be kind of a cube over here. So I want it to be something similar to this. And so now I want to I want it to be kind of in the middle. So from here, we'll go down here. So it looks like it's kind of straight up and down. So this is where the center of everything's going to be. Go from here. There we go. How tall do I want this to be? So maybe it'll be this tall, so it'll be close to the height. There we go. Kind of original drawing over here. Go. So the top of it, we can't see the top because it's above our horizon line. We can't see the bottom of it because it's below the horizon line. And then if we wanted to put the points in there, we could grab points. And you could just as well, as I said, do this on a piece of paper. I would probably actually get more accurate results and then draw our lines over here. So this one's going to be almost the same. I could technically pull it all the way down here. Oh. And so there would be our little square drawn in three point perspective. We could erase all the lines. And then if you're working on multiple rectangles or buildings over here, then you could keep, you know, don't erase your points. And so everything that's aligned with this square or rectangular box would then align with those points, but then so this thing is kind of sitting like this, or I guess it's more like this, so you can't see the top or the bottom with the horizon line. But then if it's a box that's sitting on the ground, then everything else would kind of be but you might have things that are if it's turning in space this way, then these two points would move. And then if it's turning in point this way, then you could move your third third line. And so just depending how it's oriented in space, um, not everything in your illustration. It might not line up to these points, but everything that is kind of perpendicular or everything that is squared up with this box would use the same points. And so hopefully that makes sense. And now that we've talked about one, two, and three point perspective, let's do a quick mini recap in the next video. 6. Review: Then I just wanted to do a little bit of a recap just to nail these principles home. And so for one point perspective, both if we think about a cube, it's got an X and a Y and a Z axis. And so if we're looking at one point perspective, the X and the Y axis are they stay square to the viewer. So they're horizontals and verticals. And the only thing that's changing is the Y axis depending on where you're doing your vanishing point. Then when we get to two point perspective, only the vertical lines will stay square, and both the X or both the Y and the Z axis are going to go to your vanishing point. And then when you get to the three point perspective, then all the angles or all the edges are going to be on an angle to the viewer. And so that's just kind of a recap of the three different kinds of perspectives and the differences between them. And you can have one illustration, maybe that combines both one point perspective and two point perspective. I usually I don't know if I would put the third point perspective in there. I guess, you know, if you have the one point perspective, you could have something that's kind of square to the viewer, and then the two point perspective is once we start getting it kind of on an angle like this. And then when you have the three point perspective, is that when you really want to have kind of emotional you know, you're looking at something from really high or you're looking up at something like buildings or a person or something like that, then you're turning it on, you know, on the axis going up and down. And so, like I said, it depends. You can use all the different perspectives in one illustration, but they all kind of need to be used cohesively so that everything makes sense. And so then in the next video, let's look at some practical applications on how to put the knowledge of what we just learned into practice. 7. How to Measure in Perspective: In the last video, we talked about three point perspective, and we did a little bit of a recap on the three different kinds of perspective. And in this video, let's look a little bit more about practical applications and division of space. And so I have kind of two examples over here. And so let's look at this one first. So usually when we're drawing illustrations, we're not just drawing blank boxes. We're drawing buildings or you might be drawing farmland or you might be drawing cars or whatever or trees and things like that. And so we need to know how to divide our space up. And what I mean by that? For example, over here, I've divided this up, and it's very easy if I'm illustrating something straight up and down, and let's say I have four boxes that need to be evenly spaced over here, it's pretty easy for me to just draw four squares and have everything evenly spaced. But what happens when we tilt and we tilt the other way? Because now this is not straight towards the viewer and very, very quickly drawn, let's say we have a road that's going away from you and let's say we have light posts or something over there, and so they're going to be a little bit further apart. But then the farther you get, we have the phenomenon where things will get closer together the further away from you that they get. And so how do measure something like that when we're drawing things in perspective. The easiest thing is if you are drawing something that's evenly spaced, we'll talk about that first. And so if we're drawing something that's evenly spaced, let's say our horizon lines over here. Let's say we have a tall building over here and it's going to recede into this point over here. And so let's say this is our building right here. So if we're trying to divide this up evenly, what I want to do is I want to figure out where the middle of my building is so that way we can measure half. And let's say we have a building over here and I have some windows. My whatever I draw onto my building, everything is going to be going to the vanishing point. Let's say there's a row of windows over there and there's a second row of windows over here. And so I'm drawing vanishing points for those and let's say this is the size of my window right here. Then all the horizontals are going to be horizontal. These ones are going to match right here. Now, how do I measure even intervals and add more windows over here? The way that I would do that is I find what the middle part of this is. I could either eyeball that or if you are using pen and paper, you could use a measuring stick, so I could even almost measure over here. I could put it in between and now I know 1.5. Then otherwise, if you are using Procreate, you can also use the drawing guides over here and it will give you different kinds of squares. You can adjust your square. You can edit your drawing guide, you can adjust your squares so I could make the squares bigger. I could move this to the point over here. Now I could make this I could do thirds, if I do quarters, that would be halves, however you want to do it, but now I figured out where half of that is. We'll turn that back off now that we know where half is, we'll draw that with the blue and then to figure out now, all I have to do to figure out another section where my windows goes is go from the corner, go from the middle point, and up. And so wherever this hits, this is where my next segment is going to be. And then I can keep going. So now this would be where the next set of windows would be, and then I'm going to I don't have to do the middle anymore. I know that the middle is over here and then do square line then you can see how I'm drawing all my horizontals are going horizontal and then all my angled lines are going through my middle Xing right there or crossing right at the middle line. That's how I can figure where all the middle lines go. Now I could eyeball where all my windows would go on those lines that I just drew. And they would just recede, so on and so forth all the way until I got to the end of the line. That's how you divide up things evenly. Then let's say in another case where we have something like this where things are not even, what happens when you tilt this way? How do you figure out where the different differences in lines are? For something like this, what I would do is let's figure out our horizontal line. All right let's say this is something that I want to figure out how to draw on an angle. Let's say here's my horizon line, we'll draw it so that we're looking at it from above. There we go. And so a little bit too big. Let's say we're drawing it right here. Here's the face of our house and we need to figure out where on earth do these go? Then let's do our other vanishing point over here. I'm just drawing my building ready over here. And so here's my building. Now I want to move this over here. How do I figure that out? Let's say if I'm doing it digitally, if I was doing it on paper, I would measure what my different measurements were. If I'm doing it digitally, I can move things around a little bit easier. But if you think about this line and bringing it, you can bring these lines all the way down. They're not quite square here. Basically, I want to bring this all the way down. Then I want to make another horizontal line. Now this line over here would be this line on an angle. Because I'm working digitally, I'm going to bring this guy and mark it over here. Let's make it bring it down a little bit. Then we can use a different color again just to help us a little bit. Now I can mark all my lines. So these are my starting points. It's almost non existent over here, that's going to be very skinny. Now I know that this line right here is going to be here. I know that my door is going to be here. Then there's this slightly thicker piece right here. Then the same for figuring out the sides, that I can work those down here. Just move it out of the way for just a second. There we go. I know that this is pretty far out there. But now I can bring this all the way over here even though it looks like it's huge over here. I probably in most cases would eyeball this. But now this is going to be in the proper and then we could draw on top of everything. Then we can start one more and now actually draw this was top. We made it a little bit smaller. So we had these lines that went all the way up. We had our thick lines that went like this and then we had the door, and then we had this over here. That's how I would figure out how to get the different lines for both horizontal and vertical lines and dividing them up. So it's a little bit more cumbersome and it might take a little bit more time. A lot of times what I would do is just eyeball it. If it's just taking a space, so let's say this goes down this way and let's say that the space needs to be divided up into thirds. A lot of times if I can do it, I would just eyeball it and try to see that here's thirds over here, and then let's say I need to do thirds, go on the other way, there's already this line over here that's actually pretty good. And then you could eyeball it. So there's nothing wrong with eyeballing things either. But if there are things that you need to be a little bit more mindful about where placement goes, this little hack of just bringing your lines all the way down to a horizontal level, that's a way that you can figure out how things are proportioned. In the next video, let's work on a little exercise and draw a house. 8. Exercise: House & Pyramid: Last video, we looked at how to divide space up as it's receding into a perspective point. And in this one, let's do a little exercise on drawing triangles and pyramids. And that's getting us ready to draw houses. And so let's draw a simple house. And so to begin with, let's just start with our horizon line over here. And then I like to kind of sketch what I'm doing first. And so I'm going to imagine that our house is going to be here. So it's going to be something similar to that. All right. And so let's work our vanishing points in over here somewhere. And so we'll start with one over here to a straight up and down line over here. Let's do this guy down this way. There you go. Our second vanishing point is over there, and then divide it up a little bit smaller. And so now we have the base of our house. And so we've got a cube over here. You can imagine there's windows, whatever we have over here, but now we need to build a roof for it. So how do we get the roof? And so to start, we want to draw a triangle on top of it here. And so I'm going to draw an X and figure out where everything goes straight. So we'll move that over there. And wherever this line goes, I just continue that up. And then depending how you want your roof to look, I'm going to bring this down just a little bit. So do I want a really squat roof? So our roof could be pitched like this, or we could have more of an A frame and have our roof pitched really high. And so it just depends on the look that you want for your house. So I think somewhere in between those two is probably going to be fine. So let's go right here. Just like that. And out. And then we're going to do the same thing for the back over here. And so I can take this and I can run a line. And then I'll know that this is my roof over there. Can run a straight line from there and then run colline from there, and now I know where to draw my roof over here. So we'll do one, and then, technically, it'll go back behind over here. And then the roof usually goes a little bit past. So the roof usually doesn't end right where the edge of the house is. It usually kind of extends beyond. And you have kind of eaves, I guess, or whatever it's called. And so to just extend our roof, one thing you could do is just move this V or A A frame over or you can continue all of your points And then just move these lines down. And then wherever the edge, it goes a little bit beyond passed over there. So let's do another layer a little bit darker and draw everything in. So now we have everything over here, so let's start drawing a little bit darker. We could also extend it just a midge past the edge back behind over here. And so I'm just drawing a line to match the line back behind over there. And then if we want our roof to have a little bit of thickness, I could just add a little bit of an extra line like that and then continuing to our house. And then keep tracing all my lines. And so now we have a house that's pretty convincing. And our angle over here is pretty severe, and so I probably would have been remember when we talked about that we depending where our depending where our points are, it's usually a good idea to kind of draw close. And so this point is pretty extreme to me. So I really probably should have moved this point down so that I would have been able to make this a little bit less severe of a point. And then, so just by moving, well, then I need to adjust everything else over here, but just very quickly. Go. And so now when we look at our house, it's got a little bit less of a severe angle. And then if we wanted to add a chimney, we would just want to make sure. So I'm trying to match. Actually, these don't look like they match at this point. There we go. But just trying to match. So if I'm trying to do a chimney, I can draw the base for the chimney over here. And then I would just go straight up. Let's say this is how tall our chimney is going to be. Yes. Thanks. Then we're just about at where the horizon level is, so it'll be pretty much just flat over there. And so then we have a chimney for our house, too. And so that's how you draw a simple house with a roof on it, and then let's look at just a simple pyramid next. And so if we're drawing a pyramid, we can do that with a two point perspective. So let's see where let's say, we're going to be drawing it here. And so let's go right here. W's the other sides. I want to look fairly squarish, I guess, you could say, and then I'm going to do same thing. I'm going to go corner to corner, bind out the middle. And with the pyramid, all the sides come up together. So then I would just draw straight vertical line. And then depending how tall the same thing is with the roof, if you want to really squat pyramid, I could draw my lines over here. If I wanted a really tall pyramid, I could draw my lines over here. So let's just we'll just go right here. And so that could be one, two. And so here would be the front of our pyramid, and then our back is almost kind of the same. There we go. And so then this would be our pyramid. So understanding how to figure out where the middle is and extending your lines and adding roofs or building pyramids will help you not only in obviously drawing buildings, but it will also help you in drawing characters, too, for example, drawing a canopy for a tree or drawing different types of hats and things like that. And so it's just a useful skill to have and to understand. And then in the next video, we'll do a little exercise just to practice drawing shapes in the different perspectives. 9. Additions and Cutouts from Shapes: Mmm. So let's take some time and put our skills to practice right now. That didn't. And so what I want you to do is just you can grab a piece of paper or I'm working, again, digitally. But you can if you're working on paper, you just need some sort of a ruler and a piece of paper and probably an eraser. And then if you wanted to have a pencil and a marker to be able to make kind of darker and lighter lines, that might be useful, too. Alright. So what I want you to do is I want you to draw a horizon line for yourself. And so that's just going to be a line that's going to go horizontal. And then I want you to practice drawing boxes over here. And they can be different kinds of rectangles. They can be cubes or they can be rectangles, just kind of whatever you want. And so that's kind of the simplest thing to start with. And so you can watch me draw a couple and then go off on your own, or you can listen to my voice as I'm drawing and draw yours at the same time. And so you can work some that are going to be in one point perspective. So let's say this one is going to be straight towards me. And so as I said, they can be kind of sketchy. So I'm going to do my one point perspective over there. And so that's obviously not super square, so I'll have to kind of fudge and make things as square as I can. So obviously, this line needs to go up a little bit over here. Alright. And then if you're working with pencil and a marker, you could then bring a second. You could then kind of erase your lines, or then over here, I'm drawing on a separate layer. There we go. And then from there, I can just do very light lines or I can do dotted lines. So it's kind of up to you, however you want to do that. I taught at two. And so there's one. I can draw, then draw another one. And so there's another rectangle. If I wanted to draw another Shoot, just keep my points over here. So if I wanted to draw another rectangle or square on top, if I wanted to continue this, I could draw, keep continuing these lines to go straight up. And then that way you continue them straight up, I could keep padding. These don't quite line up, but we're close enough. So in these kinds of situations, you just do your best and you might need to fudge it a little bit since I need well, actually, this looks like it's actually not going very straight. Where we go. And as I said before, if I wanted to add windows or anything else over here, they would all line up with my points over here. So say I wanted to do two lines of windows, I would just draw lines up here, and then I would divide them evenly like this, and then that would get me my where my windows would go. And so Procreate makes it pretty fast to draw these lines over here. And then, let's say we want to draw a different house somewhere else. So I figure out how I want things to go first. And then from there, and so, like, over here, now my things are way too there my vanishing points are way too close. And so, as you can tell, as I'm moving away from this picture, there's no way that a regular thing would have this crazy of an angle. And so it might be a good idea to move my points out a little bit. So let's move this coyote here. There we go. Right? Let's see. And so you can draw many things over here, and you can keep drawing and you can keep adding. And so, now let's say I want to draw another box next to this guy. And the boxes are going to be aligned. And so I'm just drawing where I'm like. Where do I want the box? I'll try to make it kind of centered. So there. And go. I'll go straight up and down. No. Alright, so there we have another box. Then so we can just drop the opacity down and now come in here and draw this on the top. And so there's our box and in the same way, let's say I wanted to do a cutout of something. So let's say I wanted to do a cutout inside over here. Tim wanted to, um And so let's do a little bit of a cutout. So I'm going to draw them to figure out where my vanishing point for this guy was. I think it might have been somewhere around here. Hopefully, that guy was somewhere over there. And so now I'm going to imagine this line being erased. Alright. So now I want there to be a cutout over here. And so I'm just going to keep adding. So it's really great when you have the so let's make the cutout. We'll make it this big. There we go. And so brings up pass it deep down, and then we can actually draw here. So we have lines going straight up and down. And so now we have a cutout out of our box. And so knowing where your vanishing points are just makes it easy to draw different kinds of architectural architectural elements. And then it's easy to add to them and move things around from them. So I want you to just practice drawing different kinds of boxes, adding to the boxes, add boxes next to them, add them on top of each other, cut areas out, add things in. And now that we practice drawing cubes and rectangles and cutting things out and adding things to them, in the next video, we're going to practice drawing some pyramids and some cylinder shapes and how we can apply those in different perspectives. 10. Cylinders: In the last exercise, we were practicing drawing our cubes and rectangles in space above and below the horizon line. And in this one, let's look at cylinders a little bit. I just brought this series of photos over here to show Illustrate once again so that when we have something a circle or a round object that's facing straight towards us, it's going to be obviously the shape of the object round. And then as it tilts away from us, it keeps getting skinnier and skinnier until it becomes line. And so with that in mind, we'll use that to illustrate our cylinders. And so we'll start with cylinders first. And so, again, we'll start with drawing our horizon line. And then a lot of times when I'm working with cylinders, and so a cylinder would be basically when we have two of the same, and then they're connected. And so this would be our average cylinder over here. And a lot of times what I will do is I'll use whatever kind of square objects that I am. So let's say if I have a table and my table is drawn like this and so here's my table. If I have something on top of it, then a lot of times I'll kind of draw it try to draw it at about the same angle as what I drew the table at. If you want it to be a little bit more if you don't have a lot of other things to reference, then what I would start by doing is drawing a cube around it first. And so here's what I mean. All right. So here would be if we were to draw. So you could always start with the box, and then what you could do is you could estimate where the middle for each one is. And usually I just eyeball this. But you could do your measurements if you really, really wanted to. And to do the measurements for the halfway point, you could go from one corner to another corner and then go from your vanishing point. And so you can see this dot was actually a little bit off, and then I'll go from this vanishing point here. I'm gonna do the same thing over here. So we can start a new layer just to keep this a little bit straighter. And so now I have a box over here. I have the middle parts all figured out, and now I need to draw an oval inside where the oval hits all these parts over here. Alright, so I'm going to draw just pluck my canvas over a little bit to make it easier. Alright. And then I need to grain down from there. Cleaning that just a smitch there we go. And so now I know because the lines of this would be straight up and down just like my box. And so that way, I want to just make sure everything is square over there. And so now I draw another ball inside over here. And so there would be a cylinder that would be in a good perspective. And so then you can practice this and draw a couple that you could draw one. So let's draw one that's over here. I'm using the same points over there. So I could use these two over here. And then? Well, this should be probably horizontal. And then I could figure out my owls over there. And so those would give me a little bit of guiding points on how to draw my cylinder. And so then we can combine some shapes again. So we'll do a box group here. Maybe it's kind of skinnier on this side, and then let's say we wanted to do We'll do a circle over here, so we'll figure if we wanted to do a proper circle, then I could to straight and straight pull in. And that doesn't quite look as square to me. So I'm going to take that. And now let's say I wanted to do a hose or something coming out over here. And so then I would figure out. So here's my middle quints. And so here would be my oval. And then I would just connect. If it's a straight if it's a tube that's twisting and turning, then you'd have to twist and turn it. And then if I really wanted to get the size right, I could even continue this square that I had. Where the opening was in the same way we did the cylinder. And so I continued lines through each one of these squares, and now I'll connect. So let's say this opening is this big handle handle here. And that should connect over there. Kind of close, not quite, so I'm gonna move it just out just to smdge since I know not my. Not everything's actually, you know, hitting over there perfectly. And then I'll figure out my middle lines. So here, here, and then draw. And then we would have this kind of drawn in perspective. So hopefully that's useful for you. And in the next video, we'll just look at some ways to apply the skills a little bit more. 11. Exercise: Items Around the House: You notice we changed locations a little bit. What I want you to do for the next exercise is just go about in your house and try to find items that are regular shapes to draw. You can get various collection, and so I'll show you what I have over here on the table. So so I have a random collection of items on the table over here. We've got some playing cards, ink bottle, thread, and you can see they are squares, there's cubes, toys. If you have kids, you might have legos, there's a candle, different sizes of boxes, toilet paper rolls would be great. Just anything that you can think of that's got kind of straight sides. And what I want you to practice next is just taking these shapes and you can just take them individually. And you can look at them from different angle, you can place it. I could place it higher, I could place it lower, and I could draw it from different angles. If it is hard for you to draw items in practice, what you could do is you could take photos. You could hold it with one hand and take photos of items in different directions. And so just practice drawing different looking items from different angles and figure out how they look in space. And then once you've drawn a couple of different kinds of items, you don't have to worry about shading or anything like that. Once you've drawn a couple of different items in different poses, then you could combine and add multiple items, you could stack them. You could, put them in front of each other and then just practice drawing little still lives like that. If it's hard to draw just straight up live, still lives. Then what I'll show next is what you can do if you take photos. We have a guest appearance from our cat Rex over here. So I'll take a couple of photos, and I'll show you what you can do if you are having a hard time figuring out how to draw these things in space. So when you're working on your drawing, a good idea is to have I have a little whiteboard that I taped a piece of printer paper on, so it's not precious in any way. I have just a regular old pencil, I have an eraser, and then I have a ruler. And when you're drawing, it's a good idea to have your drawing surface at an angle so that it's kind of square in alignment with your face instead of it being flat and then you're looking at things at an angle. So everything at this end is going to be closer and then everything at this angle at the far end of my paper is farther, tilting it up and drawing on an angle is really helpful. I've set up a little still life over here and I'm going to start sketching it. The big thing with working on a sketch is just making sure that you get the big things in first. You don't want to work on details or anything like that. You just want to make sure that you're getting the main shapes in there and then you can worry about making things square and lined up afterwards. Then I'm also measuring, so I'm thinking, this is about this tall. That's about twice. The height, so I need to make that a little bit taller and then I can measure. I'm just holding my pencil up and I'm measuring things with my pencil and with my finger and figuring out how things are. That's about that. They're almost the same. Then I can measure that the same on my paper too. I've gotten my main shapes down over here instead of drawing the lid, I'm just going to draw a cylinder. I'm going to erase just a little bit so I can draw things a little bit nicer. But we'll just go from here. That looks pretty good. And then it's got little knobs on the top, but I'm not really worried worried about that. And so there is kind of my what do you call it, my thing. And so if I really wanted to, I could try to see how I could see if my lines are going anywhere close or if I need to fix them up a little bit. So hopefully, you look at all these lines, you can see that they're all kind of headed in the same direction. The only ones that are not headed in this general direction are these two are going to a different direction. I really should move these guys over down this way if I wanted it to be more of a perspective this way. If I wanted everything to be more parallel, then there would be my two options. I could either make a vanishing point right here and then make sure that these lines also match that vanishing point. But looking at where I'm looking at these items, I feel like my horizon line is somewhere way further further out way further up over here, up here. And then my other option could be to maybe it's over here, and then, um if these guys go here, then I could move everything else and match that. It's up to you how you want to do it. Since most of these lines are matching this one, right now, the easiest might be for me to just change these ones, that would be there. But I feel like that really messes with the way that I'm seeing these rectangles over here. And so now they would all kind of match up this way. But if I'm looking at it from the way I'm looking at it, I feel like this is going more up this way. So to fix that, this is going at a little bit, actually. Maybe like that. It's not quite that severe of an angle. There we go. Then I could also move. These guys would then need to be a similar angle. So if I'm going this is my angle, then these guys could go on a similar angle over here. So this way. That's why it's okay since my lines are a little bit loose, I can still fudge these kinds of things. They have a very, very far away vanishing point over there. There we go. Now that we've gotten everything sketchy, we can take I said earlier that if you wanted to use a marker, then you could use a marker to really highlight and it makes it a little bit easier to see. I said, these don't have to be perfect. We're looking for just understanding how things lie in space, understanding how to draw three objects in space so that they look believable, that they look three dimensional, and so that we can then use these skills when we are drawing characters, buildings, and just objects around the house. As said before, we're not worried about shading or anything like that right now. And so that's my little still over here. So there's one more thing that I wanted to talk about really quickly. Sometimes it might seem like your eyes or your camera is playing tricks on you. I just wanted you to be aware that things will always look different from a picture than what they look like in real life. And one of the reasons is because we have stereovision. So right now you are looking at this block from the lens of the camera. You're looking at it from direct, you have one direct line of sight. When you are looking with your eyes, you basically have two eyes and you have one eye that sees this from a slightly different angle and another eye that sees this block from a slightly different angle. Then your brain makes the image of what this thing looks like in three dimensions. So I just want you to be aware of that as you're drawing, you will always see a little bit more and a little bit more comprehensively and understand things a little bit more three dimensionally than what a camera angle will see your drawings over here will be a little bit different than the picture that you take of your item. Or you're still life, but it'll still be good practice to do both. If you're having a very hard time looking at items and drawing them in space, then I do recommend that you take a picture and then work from photo. Once you get comfortable with that, then do try to work off of real life too. In the next video, we'll just look quickly at some different techniques to understand relationships in photos from photos or still lives that you've taken. 12. Using Photo References: So in the last video, we were out and about in our house drawing different objects. And if you are having a hard time figuring things out, as I mentioned, you can take photographs of objects, and you could print them out similarly, you could print out small on a piece of paper in the middle so that that way you have room to draw around it or you can put it digitally on a canvas and then you can move it around as you need to over here. I wanted to show you a couple of ways on how to work from photos to try to figure these things out. For over here, what I've done is I've posted one of the photos that I've taken and what you can do is now it's very easy to see if we add a grid over here, so Procreate has a drawing guide and you can see it over here. And so if I add grid, now, it's easy for me to see in relationship to horizontal and vertical lines how things are angling up. And so it makes it a little bit easier to see which way the perspective. So eventually, these things will all um I I overdo it, we could see that all those lines go over there and these lines would end up meeting around over here and then we would have a third point perspective down there. Adding a grid layer on top of it helps you figure out what the angles are, how things are moving away from you. Then also, I wanted to just show. You can also then practice drawing the perspective points and figure out where things are receding. Over here, I've just drawn straight lines. You could do this with the ruler, but just make sure that whatever object that you print, you have it small enough on your page that you have room to draw all the different points. I make that a little bit, lower opacity, you can see my structure underneath and then I just drew all the lines receding from it. That's one example. Then I have this guy over here and I did the same for that. Over here, this picture over here, you can see this picture, we can see the tops of images. The horizon line is going to be somewhere above over there, and then we can see that things are coming in this way. And then I started drawing my lines and you can see that I couldn't even get to my vanishing point over here. But you can see my other points lined up about over there. You'll notice in this photo that not everything is always lined up perfectly straight with your canvas. And so there might be an instance where your horizon line might be completely different and then you're drawing your item over here, and then you have and then we have a cube that's tumbling in space and it's not square. Well, except for the face, I guess, but um, your horizon line doesn't always or your vanishing line doesn't always need to be straight up and down. That's the point I was trying to make in a very long way. All right. Then lastly, I wanted to pull up the picture of the items that I was drawing earlier in our living room. I took this photo and we've got many items and it might be a little bit hard to see the different angles. So if you are drawing on a piece of paper, what you could actually do is you could just divide everything up by inches and draw a grid with inches on the top and then on the bottom with Procrit, again, you can get a drawing guide and you can make the drawing guide lighter and darker. Then I've actually drawn a grid just to make it a little bit easier to see. Then again, now you have a grid structure on top and I made it a little bit darker so it's easier for you to see on the camera. Now you can look, we have a straight up and down line over here. How is this in relation? How are these things? You can see that try a new layer on the top. The distance over here is less than over here. So I know that this line is coming in on a little bit of an angle, and this distance is even bigger over here. I know that my vanishing point, everything is kind of coming in at an angle, and you can really see it. This is really close over here. So that just gives me ideas. And so then I could use those as just references if I'm trying to draw then things over here, so I could start just drawing my biggest uh, my biggest try to get my big shapes first. And then I can see what kind of an angle, then I would look, all right, what kind of an angle is this coming off of here? What kind of an angle is this coming off over here? If I imagine a horizontal line over here, this one's coming off at an angle like that, and that one's coming off at about an angle like that. It just makes me actually a little bit less. It makes it easier for me to draw my shapes because I have something to compare it to. And then I can see that, okay, this point, this point right here is actually on this side, this corner and when I've been drawing it, my brain has been thinking it's on this side, so I got to make sure when I draw this that this point stays over there. These things, your brain your eyes tend to think that you're seeing it one way, but it's really going the other way. That's just good idea. Then because it's also receding a little bit, this is smaller and this is bigger. And so, like I said, I don't need to draw everything perfectly yet, so we'll draw main. And then, same thing. This one's kind of receding or going in a little bit, and then let's see, we've got our lid, and it goes let's see, it's about in the halfway point right around there between here and here. And then it goes down. Here's our candle and then we've got this item that starts right around where this is right below where the thickest part of that is. If my lid is coming up over here, then I'll do my point right below that. Then again, looking at what angle this is coming down. It's somewhere around there. And so that's how I would start. That's how I would use the grid to move things around over here. And now we'll speed up and you can watch how I put together the rest of the still life, or then you can choose to jump to the next video already. And so hopefully that is helpful if you are having a hard time with drawing things in perspective. And in the next video, we'll look at how drawing shapes in space is really helpful in drawing environments for your characters and then actually drawing characters themselves. 13. Application & Examples in Illustration: That we've kind of gone through a bunch of exercises and learned how to draw things in perspective, I just wanted to show a few examples of how to put that in practice when you're illustrating books. And so here I just have a couple examples. This is the man who didn't like animals, illustrated by Lewin Fam. And so over here, we have a living room, and you can see how all the items are drawn nicely and they look like they belong into that space. And I just thought it was a fun contrast to then the chaotic scene later in the same book where we have the same living room, but we have all the animals. In it. And so knowing how to draw things in perspective will enable you to draw great illustrations like this. And then this is Pig town Party by Leon Cho, and it's another fun example of a little town scene. We're looking at it from above. We see multiple different streets. And so it's just really fun, a really fun scene into Pig town. And then this is an interior scene, another interior scene by Scalou from the book Boo KouNeeds You. And so these ones are not too extreme or anything. And then I wanted to just show a couple of examples of just more extreme viewpoints and how that can heighten the emotions in the illustration. And so this is an illustration that's one of my illustrations, and it's showing we're looking down. We're in a city with big tall buildings, and we're looking at this little red house that's highlighted in the middle. That's kind of showing out of the shadows and we're getting this sense of how lonely and kind of tiny she is in the city. Then we have sorry, these are just pictures from books. And so over here we have an illustration. We're looking down again. This is from the Grotin with Benji Davies and we're having this moment at the end of the book, where the monkey is kind of leaving and it's built this little hot air balloon. And so it's kind of the kind of the turning point or the ending of the book. Then we have this illustration over here where we have this great piece. This is kind of before this big crash. So we have this heightened emotion that something is about to happen. So we have this train that's headed into the chimney. We're looking at things from above, and just this great kind of S curve is taking us into the into the chimney. And so it's just a really fun as our eye follows it, we are feeling like we are traveling into the chimney with the train. And so I thought this was a really fun illustration. And then we've got we're kind of looking at straight above, a lot of I found a lot of books that had examples of looking at characters straight up on the bed, and then the bed is kind of shown in a very foreshortened perspective. And so this is from We don't eat our classmates with Ryan Higgins. And so over here, Penelope is thinking, and usually it's either some sort of resolution or somebody's afraid or something like that. And then this is from down, also from U Looking at down. And this is from Dan Santa after the fall, and I have another illustration, we'll look on the next page where we're doing the opposite where we're looking from down going up. Two. And so then we have some low points of view. So this is also from Dan Santa after the fall. And here we have the character and you can just see some of the buildings and things that give us an idea of where we are in space. So we are looking at things up. And this is also by Dan Santa. It's from the book, Ono How My Science Project destroyed the world. And you can see over here, we also have kind of it's not as extreme as we have on the top illustration, but we still have this great and all the action lines kind of give us an extra heightened awareness in the way her arms and legs are, and we're looking at things up above that gives us just great emotional impact in this illustration. Then this is from Peter Brown's creepy pair of underwear and we have Jap it and we're looking up and we have this kind of a cliff hanger on this page. He opened the drawer and dot dot dot, and then we see what happens on the next page. And then this is fun. So this is just part of the pay half the spread, there's a little bit more over here, an illustration by Ben Mantle on Bunny's on the Bus. And we can see that we're above or kind of very close to the eye level on the street. But then we have this bus that's been drawn from, you know, so that it looks like it's high above, and it's given us this great sense of movement and the craziness that's going on over here as the buses you know, usually buses don't fly. And so as this bus is flying through the town, and so it's just given us this great excitement and movement through the piece. And then kind of quickly, I just wanted to show how then knowing how to draw shapes in three dimensions will help you with your character design, too, and also with helping draw your characters more consistently as you're drawing them in the book. So once you know how to draw different shapes and you know how to turn them in space, then it's easy to take your character and then move them through space. And so this illustration is from cartoon animation by Preston Blair, and there's another illustration that I wanted to show you from the book. In this illustration, you can see how you can build the characters from basic shapes. So there's triangles, there's ovals, there's circles, squares, and just understanding how to draw things in three dimensions will then help you draw them in different poses. If you've enjoyed this class and if you found it useful, I hope that you take just a couple of seconds and leave a nice review. It doesn't take more than maybe two clicks and a couple of seconds. You can either just leave five stars and if you feel up for it, you can write a short note on what you liked best about the class. If you've done the exercises in the class, then you should also have something to post in the project section. It's very easy to post. You just click down below in the projects and resources and there's an upload button over there. And if you have any questions, feel free to put those in the discussion section. So this is a very basic class, and there's a second class that's going to be uploaded soon after this one where we're really going to dive deep into designing interior and exterior environments for picture books. I already have a class posted that's all about forests and woodlands and nature environments. But this next class will center on man made structures. And so if we have a city scene, or if you have an interior scene like in a kitchen or a living room, different ways that you can compose those illustrations. So thank you for taking my class, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.