Perspective - 10 Minutes To Better Painting - Episode 9

1. Perspective 10 Minutes To Better Painting Episode 9: break out your pocket watch and your paintbrushes. It's time for Episode nine of 10 minutes to better painting. I Am your incorrigible host, Marco ButI. 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 their gaze upon the visage of God's well artists, actually, and they back in the Renaissance era developed something called linear perspective, the basics of which involve the viewer Who's I line gets projected infinitely far into the horizon. This makes ah 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 the 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 the camera's lens. If you want to look up, it's something. Add a separate grade entirely and have acrid recede to 1/3 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 Oto artists who lived like 600 years ago, which is pretty cool, if you ask me. And I bet they're rolling in their graves. Jeez, minute and 1/2 into this thing. Where's my unpaid intern? Thanks. Hey, get back in your car, drive away and then come back again. Just 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 I line tells us that everything above that line is above our eyes and everything below the line is below. Our eyes 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 to 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 one ho corn EDO. These two figures are at different depths in the scene. Our eye line is nicely positioned, adds, well, crotch level. I know this because all the perspective lines traced back to a vanishing point right at his man. Come on, Really? 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 eye line 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. Gorn Edo has designed his picture to give us continuous 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. Two. Dean Cornwell here shows us a few areas where objects air, providing some perspective information. From there, we can roughly extrapolated 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 temples silhouette Too many overlaps can compromise the silhouette. This temple now almost reads like 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. 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 riverbanks make from close up too far away, we see a gradual progression towards horizontal lines. It's like a cipher 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 air colors across all objects in the painting, and I'll identify the foreground mid ground in 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 science side of the blue family on the color wheel. All right, 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 received much further into the distance. This is all super powerful stuff that will exploring. 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. All right, 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 seen 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 there, 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 toe. 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 your 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 this 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, huh? Oh, the intern wants me to tell you that I have longer art lessons featuring real time paintings and instruction available at Mark Obuchi art store dot com. I'd like to get back to this opening quotation if figuring things out for yourself is freedom than our 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 rial 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. Hey, buddy, it's Marco. Are you having a good Christmas? You know, I know that I don't always give you the easiest time I yelled at you for the coffee thing, got you drunk on the air and I had you kidnapped at 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 one with a few zeros 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 by 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 mawr episodes with you.