Perspective 101: Complete Perspective Drawing

1. Introduction to the course: Hi, my name is Scott Harris and welcome to the course. I've worked really hard to make sure that this is the most efficient way to teach you. And for you to learn how to create epic environments, backgrounds and scenes, and create worlds using the foundations of perspective. And we'll work through the course in a logical way where we go from those foundations to advanced principles, helping you to create intricate and detailed and more importantly, believable and appealing perspective scenes for any kind of work you can imagine. Course has been filmed in Photoshop for ease of recording, but that there's no bearing on the tools that you can use to learn to draw these environments, scenes where they're using traditional tools like pencils and paper with digital tools like an iPad Pro or PC with a tablet, it makes no difference at all. Tools are tools that understanding the implementation of the fundamental theory is the most important part. Don't forget to post your work and your assignments in our online communities. Learning with others is a really fun experience and it also can help you to learn a lot faster because you have all this great feedback from everybody, including myself. When you're learning. That's it for me. Please do enjoy the course and I'll see you in the lessons. Let's get to it. 2. Module 1.1 The Big Picture: In this module, we will be learning the tools and the fundamentals of perspective. But before we jump in, I want to give you a teaser, a taster of what we can do with these tools in essentially a very fast time lapsed summary. Going to be taking a look at the rough stage and the refund stage of a completed environmental drawing. And this will give you a good holistic or a macro view of how we implement the theory and the workflow of the theory to achieve a finished environment drawing. When we start drawing perspective scenes, we work in two stages. The rough stage, which is our construction stage, and the refund standards is our clean-up stage. The rough stage is really a planning stage that we use by drawing an app perspective fundamentals, we stay loose, we stay a little messy. And really what we wanna do is define the perspective top, the camera angle. And then we draw in our tools such as the grid line and horizon lines, the vanishing points, and other elements of perspective that we will learn. Then we do a rough block out of the composition and the major forms using that grid that we've established. Then after that, we just rough out the scene. It's still keeping things loose, keeping things Macy, and kind of adding in very general details. We're not trying to be too pretty in the stage. We're trying to be more functional. Make sure things are placed correctly and placed in a way that is appealing for the same type that we're doing. Once we've drawn in all the elements we'd like in the rough stage. We then move on to the refinement stage. The refinement stage is our refined, clean upstage, where we add in additional details and we were very cognisant of line weights. We also strive to bring an air of professionalism in each line, neatness and clarity in each line in the stage, so that the piece looks the very best that it can. Now we still think about all the fundamentals that we've used to do the rough stage in this stage. But here we're really focusing on stylization, being creative, not necessarily having to stick exactly to the rough plan that we've done, but rather allowing ourselves to be loose, a little bit more expressive on top of the solid foundations that we built. Utilizing our perspective tools, the fundamental theories of perspective and a solid workflow allows us to generate a clear and readable environment drawing. I hope that this short overview has whet your appetite for wanting to learn about perspective and environment drawing. So let's get straight into the lessons. 3. Module 1.2 The Picture Plane: Before we can start rendering out our scenes and our environments, we need to start learning about the tools that we need to use in order to make these scenes and environments a reality. In the next few lessons, we're gonna be learning about a few of these tools. And what I want you guys to do is think about these tools as if there were stationary or equipment that you could buy off the shelf at an art store. So let's get into the first tool and it's a basic tool, but it's also simultaneously a very critical tool, and that is the picture plane. Now the picture plane really is the window into your created world that rests between the viewer and the world that you're drawing. Now may be the frame of a painting, the border of a page, or it may just be a block or a rectangle as I've drawn here on the page. The picture plane is pretty critical in helping us utilize it in conjunction with the other elements in the other tools of perspective in order to control the camera angle, the camera lens, the aspect ratio of the scene. Is it a wide scene? Is it a narrow scene? Is it a square scene? Is it a round seen, for example? The picture plane is quite critical. It's simple in premise, but it's very useful. It allows us to compose well and control many elements of our image. So that is the picture plane. Let's take a look at the next tool of perspective. 4. Module 1.3 Horizon Line: The next tool we're gonna be learning about is called the horizon line. And it's named does slightly alluded to it's purpose. Often seen as the line that defines the sky from the ground plane. It's absolutely critical and necessary in all of our scenes because essentially the horizon line allows us to control the eye level of the viewer. Is the view we're looking up at tall buildings, or are they looking down into the streets from those tall buildings? The horizon line is the tool that allows us to do that. We can do some fun things with the horizon line, which we'll get into when we talk about camera angles. For now know that the horizon line can exist inside or outside of our picture plane. And that is one of the main ways we do control. Those are very angles. It is simply a line that allows us to control the level of the viewer, and that is the horizon line. I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Module 1.4 Vanishing Points: The next tool that we're gonna be learning about is the vanishing point. And if you have more than one, we just call them vanishing points. Effectively. They are really just dots that mock out reference points. We will be receiving grid lines to the grid lines themselves are another perspective tool we will learn about a shortening. Vanishing points are commonly drawn on the horizon line, but they're not limited to being used there depending on what you're trying to achieve. Inosine vanishing points are also used off of the horizon line in and outside of the picture plane as needed. But essentially think of it vanishing points as reference points that help us build out the dynamic three-dimensional space of our scene. They can also be used for measuring purposes with inosine. Don't let this overly confused you for now. Just think of them as a reference point, dots and keep in mind that analogy of walking into that art store or that stationery store where you can go and buy a bunch of vanishing points. There are tools that are there for you to use as you need them in your scene. So those vanishing points, I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Module 1.5 Grid Lines: Let's now take a look at our next tool in our toolbox, which will be the grid lines. And the grid lines are effectively reference lines that radiate from the vanishing points across the picture plane and allow us to establish the 3D nature of the scene. I'm going to use orange here for the left vanishing point. And I'm going to use the line tool in Photoshop. Of course, you'll want to use a ruler for this if you're working traditionally. And the reason I'm using orange is that when we utilize different colors for our vanishing point, lines are grid lines that are receding to a vanishing points or a radiating from our vanishing points. This helps us more easily understand which plane we are working on when we are rendering the 3D objects in the scene. I'm just going to radiate these grid lines across the scene from that left vanishing point over there. And for the right vanishing point, I'm going to radiate using black. And this helps me easily understand what I'm going to put. 3d blocks are cubes or other elements in the scene where I'm receiving those elements to am I receiving them? So the left arm or seeing them to the right? Of course, if you're working traditionally, don't be shy to use colored pencils for this. So here we have these grid lines that have now been radiated from their various vanishing points. And they help us get a sense of the 3D space that we've created in this scene. And of course, with this particular horizon line, we have a very high level type of scene and very average on level view on the sky plane that we've created and the ground plane that we've created. So we get a sense of a world that we can place objects in. Those, in a nutshell or the grid lines. Let's move on. 7. Module 1.6 Verticals and Horizontals: Our next tool, or are vertical and horizontal lines, really the lines in our scene that run up and down and left and right. These also called a verticals and horizontals or verts and hordes for short. And what we do is we utilize it vertical and horizontal lines in conjunction with our grid lines to build out 3D block forms in the scene. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to define a two verticals. And two horizontals here. Utilizing that right vanishing point to define a plane. And then I'm going to do the same thing using the left vanishing point. To define a horizontal there. I'll bring it down to a vertical around here. And then I will pull that line using the grid line on the left hand vanishing point there, produce a, another horizontal. And so the reason we want to use this terminology is that based on the type of perspective that you are using, something different can happen to your vertical lines and horizontal lines based on the vanishing points in the scene. And we'll cover that more in depth when we get there. But for now, look at verts and hordes as another tool in your toolbox to define the very big 3D elements of a scene. I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Module 1.7 Reference Vanishing Points: We're now going to learn about our final basic tool. And that is the reference vanishing point, also called a diagonal vanishing point. Now, in the scene, I've gone and drawn in what is effectively a type of a floor tile over here in the turquoise. And the use of a reference vanishing point or a diagonal vanishing point, is that it provides a point of reference to allow us to do something with that point of reference. In this example, I'm going to use the point of reference to help us multiply the measurement of this floor tile across and back into the distance. You can use reference vanishing points for multiple things, and I'll give you a good few uses for it later on in the course. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pull a line from corner to corner through this tile up to the horizon line. And I'm going to define a reference of vanishing point right here on the horizon line. And what I can do from there is utilize this line going to the corner of the next proposed block. And that helps me to then define the next line that I can pull from my left vanishing point. It gives me an exact, mathematically correct measurement for the next top. So I can keep doing this, pulling the diagonal vanishing point down into that corner and egg once again, it gives me the next location of the line at the top right corner of that top. For now, just know that reference vanishing points are diagonal vanishing points, also called D VPs are another type of vanishing point that are available to you for multiple reference or measurement purposes. We'll go more in-depth into this later on in the course. And those are essentially all your key tools that you need to create perspective scenes. Now when we start adding more vanishing points, playing around with the horizon line and doing different things without verticals and horizontals, we can start to really be quite dynamic in the types of scenes that were able to produce. Moving on from this, we're now going to take a look at the three main types of perspective that we're gonna be learning about in this course. And utilizing to create all kinds of environment and interior scenes. Whether you're up in the sky, down on the ground, in outer space or in a science laboratory. We can use perspective to draw out any kind of scene we can imagine. So let's get straight into it. 9. Module 1.8 Drawing 1 Point Perspective: We're now going to get really real with our perspective drawing. And we're going to use those fundamental tools that we've learned about to create our first type of perspective, which is called one-point perspective. And it's called that because we use one vanishing point when we're creating these rough one-point perspective scenes. Now we're going to just do the basics. We're going to just draw cubes and blocks and boxes. And that's going to give us a sense of how we can build out the rough fundamentals of a perspective scene. So let's get right into it. I'm gonna be using the line tool in Photoshop. If you're working on paper, definitely, you will want to use a ruler. Otherwise, if you've practiced at drawing straight lines, freehand very well, that can be even faster than a router. I'm drawing a typical picture plane shape. Yeah. This is just a widescreen type of shape. You could use a square or an elongated rectangle. What have you? Let's draw in a horizon line and instead of putting them Roslyn dead center, I'm going to bring the horizon line a little lower. Right? And what this typically means is we'll see more of the underside of 3D forms that we're drawing when they are above the horizon line, right? Okay, so we've got a horizon line in there and let's go in and do that one-point perspective with a red. And the thing with one-point perspective is that when this single vanishing point, we're going to place it right here in the middle of the horizon line when this single vanishing point moves too far to the right or to the left, you might as well create a 2 perspective scene. Remember an odd, we're always trying to get as much appeal and as much dynamism out of our work as possible. And particularly with 1-point scenes, when the single-point moves too far to the right, two parts to the left, you might as well go into a two-point perspective scene, and we will cover 2 perspective in the next video. And if you were really thinking about what was happening when we were covering the tools, you will realize that that was in fact a 2 perspective scene that we did in the tools lessons. So what I'm doing here is just a radiating out some lines from this 1. You can make these equidistant if you want to, or you can just be a little bit random with how you pull them out. The key here is that these grid lines are not a restricting factor for you in terms of what you draw. They'll simply a guideline to give you a sense of the space in the scene. No matter what shapes that you are drawing and what forms you're wanting to draw. You will always use the vanishing point itself as your reference. And the grid lines are there just to kinda help you establish this sense of 3D. So now what I'm going to do is utilizing these grid lines. I have my picture plane and my horizon line, a single vanishing point in the middle with its red radiating lines out of it. Take a blue here and we'll go into draw just a simple square shape. Just here are the top left sort of section of this picture plane. Now remember again, the picture plane might be the borders of your page, or it will be the picture plane that you've defined. Maybe it's in a comic book or you're just doing some perspective drawings on a big sheet of paper. Keep in mind, the picture plane itself defines the window that we're looking into the world from and where we're placing the viewer into. Okay, so now I've drawn this square shape here and it's front-facing. And something important to note that occurs with one-point perspective scenes is that your front-facing verticals and horizontals are parallel with the borders of the picture plane. So keep that in mind. You can see that they're pretty parallel to the borders of the picture plane. What we're gonna do is we're going to use the vanishing point and pull back some lines. Please don't be afraid to be rough and loose while you're doing these types of exercises if, especially if you're following along. The point here is that you're grasping how perspective works. And let me say this early on as well. Don't believe that you build complex scenes with measurements and doing crazy perspective techniques. I don't want you to think about perspective in that way. That's going to kill the desire you will have to build out scenes. Now suddenly, massive urban scenes will have a lot of structure to them in terms of the blocks. But just know that you want to have more of a Grossmann understanding of how perspective works. Rather than thinking gonna be using perspective alone to build that scenes that would be terribly boring and take an extremely long period of time and we will go through that full workflow. So with that in mind, let's carry on. I've drawn the square and I've pulled from some corners lines back to the vanishing point. And this has helped me define a side plane and a bottom plane. I'm simply going to add another vertical here and another horizontal here. And you can see that we have now defined a box in one-point perspective. And what I'm gonna do then is I'm just going to erase these lines that I don't need. Now if you're working on pencil and paper. You'll typically draw your construction lines very lightly. And then you'll draw on your main shape with a darker pencil. Or you might use a pen or an ink or something like that. And so here we have a floating box above the horizon line in the sky, if you will, in one-point perspective. So that is a single box there. Now, what we can do as well is we can imagine the other sides of this box by drawing a few lines from its corners, also back into that vanishing point. So I'm defining that top-left corner there. I'm bringing it down to a single vanishing point. And pretty much all the other corners or cupboard. And then what I can do is extend a horizontal to that line and then put a vertical down as well. And now we have the wireframe of a box. And we can actually just erase the line here that we don't need to give us a wireframe or a kind of a see-through version of this bucks. Right? Now, one-point perspective is a very limiting type of perspective. Don't see 1.2 and three-point as increasing in difficulty. That's not really the case. Rather you're just increasing the vanishing points to allow for more dynamism in a scene. One-point perspective is great for those scenes where someone's racing down the road and you're having them in a scene of a tunnel or you want to do something very symmetrical, like walking into the castle gates in 1 and things like that. But again, when you start moving this 1 too far to the right or too far to the left. In your typical type of scene, you really are better off using two-point perspective. So basically what I'm saying is you want to keep one single vanishing point in a one-point seen typically around the center of the horizon line. You don't really want to deviate too far from there. If you do, you might as well draw a 2 perspective scene. Alright, let's go ahead and draw in a few more of these blocks and see what happens when we move them above and below the horizon line. What I'm gonna do here is I'm going to draw a box that comes actually outside of the picture plane. Of course, we wouldn't then see the bottom half that's out of the picture plane in the final scene. Again, I'm going to pull these lines back to the vanishing point over here. And that's going to help me get a correct sense of 3D. And as, as the box recedes into the distance, and I pull up a vertical here, pull a horizontal across here. And then I'm going to erase the lines that I do not need. Again. Really, don't worry about neatness, worry about correctness. It's okay if it's loose and messy. And I'm going to read the reiterating this a lot through the course. The most important thing for drawing out environments, scenes, interiors, and even structures is that you fundamentally understand how the perspective works. Because if you understand that the perspective works, it doesn't matter what point perspective senior doing. You will understand whether you've drawn a particular site or a plane correctly or incorrectly. And that's where we want to get you to just grasping and fundamentally understanding perspective as a whole. Let's do a very thin box up here in the sky. So those planes are directly facing us. Those very parallel horizontals and verticals to the borders of the picture plane. You can see how I'm always pulling the corners back to that vanishing point. So you can see how critical the vanishing point is in defining the forms in one-point perspective here, I'm once again going to erase the lines that I don't need. And I have a thin floating box in the Scott. And so hopefully you're also noticing that as things go above the horizon line, your teams to see more of the bottom of the object. And as things go below the horizon and you sent to see more of the top of the object. And hopefully you can try and imagine if we move this horizon line, how it would change how we actually viewed these objects. So in essence, this is one-point perspective. We can begin to draw many, many different types of forms utilizing that single-point and creating those receding lines that draw out to that single point to help us establish the forms. Whether you're drawing wireframes such as this box on the left, or you're drawing full forms such as the box in the bottom right here. You might be asking yourself, well, what about cylinders and spheres and various other shaped objects? The thing I want you to fundamentally grasp is that we primarily use the box as our basis that we draw other elements into, right, for our purposes in designing scenes, you will quickly start to realize that perspective is only one piece of the pie when we're drawing out a scene for audit purposes. Nevertheless, this is one-point perspective and you'll have a bunch of exercises to essentially repeat what you've seen here using those fundamental tools that you've just learned about, that I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Module 1.9 Drawing 2 Point Perspective: We're now going to learn about 2 perspective. And once again, we're going to define a picture plane, which is our window into the world. Use a very similar picture plane type, which is a widescreen angle. And I'm going to put a horizon line down here. Then I'm going to define two vanishing points this time instead of one. Now, technically when you're using two vanishing points, you want to be careful how close or how far you put them from each other. If they're too close to each other, you're going to end up having a very distorted scene where everything seems to be stretching out towards the viewer and very, very long. And if they are too far from each other, everything seems very, very flat and very, very two-dimensional or one-dimensional. Even. You want to have them in good at distance from each other. And this is kind of a high-level sort of shortcut trick or cheat if you will. But technically it is a great idea in two-point perspective to have one vanishing point quite close to the border of the picture plane and another vanishing point further away from that border, even multiple times further away, then the distance of the closest board and vanishing point. And the reason I call this a trick or a shortcut, is that you will find that vanishing points to have optimal placement. So just like we looked at the one-point perspective scene where we put the vanishing point in the middle of the picture plane. And I said that's a generally a good place to keep it. Two-point perspective is generally a good idea to have one of the vanishing points close to the border of the picture plane and another very far away from the border of the picture plane. Of course, you can mess around with that. You can switch it left to right. You can bring one of the vanishing points into the scene and just make sure that the distance of the other vanishing point is equally far away, etc, etc. And we'll go into that into more detail later on in the course. But nevertheless, for now, we have a picture plane, we have a horizon line and we have two vanishing points are red vanishing point left and our blue on the right. And I'm going to draw in the grid lines for this vanishing point. Now, two-point perspective is the most commonly used type of perspective in many, many environment and interior scenes. It's a very easy perspective to use. It doesn't have too many crazy things going on. And if you take a look at your favorite artists work in terms of their environment, drawings or paintings. You will notice that a lot of the pieces are in fact, 2, comic book backgrounds and various other types of scenes and interiors and exteriors are generally in two-point perspective. It's the most common type, and as such, it's the most important type of perspective that we want to learn in order to create our cool, dynamic environment scenes. You use a bright pink here to help us now start drawing in some forms where we're going to point out some key differences between one-point perspective and two-point perspective. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to just go create a vertical line, literally straight through the horizon line down to the ground plane. And we have now are defined vertical over here. Want to make the land waiting there a little bit thicker. Alright, so we have a vertical. But now, unlike one-point perspective, our horizontals are never parallel in two points, right? Unless they're literally on the horizon line. But generally speaking, they are never parallel. So what we're gonna do now is pull from the top of this vertical, I'm going to pull a receding land down to the right vanishing point from the bottom of the vertical pool also better that right vanishing point. Then we'll also pull some lands to the left vanishing point here. And I'm going to add in additional verticals. Right? Now, we have our box and we're kind of looking at it at its corner. Certain two-point perspective, you'll notice that you see a lot of corners in this type of perspective. And you get a nice dynamic view. So if you look at this particular box, you can see that we can really only see two sides of the box, but we can adjust the amount of signs we see if we draw the boxes higher or lower above the horizon line. And that is exactly what I'm going to do now. So let's get another box up here in the sky. Let's just place a vertical down there. And I'm going to pull lines from that vertical to the vanishing points. And I'm going to allow these lines to define the actual forms. So I'll put a line there and I'll put a line there. And now we can add in these verticals, but we're missing the base of this box. But the left hand side vertical yeah, has helped to define one of the lines for the bottom. So we'll pull that to its respective a vanishing point, and then we'll pull the line from the other vertical to its respective vanishing point. And this is something that might be a little confusing to you in the beginning. How do you know which vanishing point to pull to? What you really need to ask yourself is, what direction is the form receding to? Receding to the left or the right at a particular corner. But I'm pretty sure you'll get the hang of it quite quickly. So now we have a box in the sky. Let me just take out these construction lines just so we can have a nice clear view of that. And you can see we have a nice dynamic view of this box floating up there in the sky. Because it's 2, it feels great and it feels dynamic. It feels more 3D. One-point perspective because the front facing planes are parallel, they seem a bit dull. One of the fundamental rules of art and art fundamental, if you will, is that we want to strive to eliminate parallels. Now of course, in two-point, we're going to have parallel verticals, as you can see in this scene. And that can't be avoided because that is the top of perspective that it is. But we can eliminate our parallels are a lot of the parallels in the scene because we do not have parallel horizontals. And that gives us some nice asymmetry. And asymmetry and odd is fantastic. It's wonderful. It helps the viewer buy into the beauty of the scene. The brain finds asymmetrical shapes, very interesting, and symmetrical shapes, very boring. And as a teaser for what lies in the next lesson, you may be saying, well, what if I don't want parallel horizontals and verticals, right? So what if I don't want parallel verticals? And that is in fact what a three-point perspective is all about. It allows us to make sure that our horizontals and verticals are not parallel, creating a more dynamic scene and creating a particular type of feel or particularly have emotion to the way we've rendered those forms. But I digress. Going back to 2 perspective, you want to keep in mind that this is the most commonly used type of perspective. And it's the most normalized looking type of perspective where it's kind of mirroring how we see the world around us. Think about it. Very rarely do you look at an object directly front on. We're always kind of looking at objects from a slight angle. And so two-point helps us imitate this top of effect. And so just like one-point perspective, we can change the look of the forms by drawing them bigger or smaller inside our picture plane, by putting them above the horizon line or below the horizon line. Soon we will also touch on what happens when we move the horizon line within the picture plane and outside of the picture plane, as well as what happens when we tilt that horizon line. But for two-point perspective, we have two points. We want to keep them a good distance away from each other. Not too far because things will be flat, not too close because things will be extremely distorted. And we utilize these two vanishing points to draw in a normal last type of view, Viewport are normalized type of way, right? That is 2 perspective. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Module 1.10 Drawing 3 Point Perspective: We're now going to learn about the final type of perspective taught in this course. And that is a three-point perspective. And as its name implies, it refers to three vanishing points. Now, the scene I've already drawn in front of us is a two-point perspective scene. We have our picture plane, horizon line, or left vanishing point, right vanishing point, and their respective grid lines. If we just used this two-point perspective scene to draw in, we would get very parallel verticals and then converging horizontals. When we want to add drama to a scene, a sense of epic height or epic depth. That is when we will want to use a third. And so we're going to render out a third grid line here and a third vanishing point. And we're going to see what having three points can do to a scene. The important thing with three-point perspective is that we want to define the vanishing point, which I'm using in green here right at the top of the page. I want to define it pretty high above the picture plane, 2.5 to three times the height of the picture plane itself. We want to define it. And the reason for that is if we bring that vanishing point too close to the picture plane or too far away, we get a scene that is either very distorted when it's close or very, very flat and you barely even notice the third being there. It's too far away. And so now we have a scene with three vanishing points. And it's important to also note that that third vanishing point is not on the horizon line. It floats above the picture plane, can move left, it can rewrite. It can be in the center where I've placed it. The important thing is you want to keep it a good distance away from that top border of the picture plane. Let's now move into this scene and actually draw in a form and see what that third actually does for us. I'm just going to extend this page width here. Bring us scene into the middle of the screen here. And let's grab a pink color, bright pink, and we're going to draw a box here. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to use the green grid lines of the third vanishing point as a basis for my verticals. So I'm gonna draw a vertical here. Let's make that a little bit brighter. In fact, I'm going to make the background a little bit lighter. You can clearly see this form. So we've defined a vertical over here on one of the grid lines of the third vanishing point. And just like I would in two-point perspective, I'm going to bring receding lines down to the respective vanishing points to build out the sides of my box. Bringing lines to the left and the right vanishing points. And I'm going to define two more verticals. And so something here that is a key differentiating feature between three-point perspective and two-point perspective is that in two-point perspective, our verticals are parallel. But in three-point, our verticals converge. And of course, comparing that to one-point perspective, we have parallel verticals and horizontals lines in one-point perspective. So in two-point perspective, parallel verticals and three-point perspective converging verticals and horizontals. And it's really a great idea to check out people's art works and great environment pieces that you've seen and determine what the kind of perspective being used is. And that'll help you to get a good feel for why they chose to use a particular type of perspective. In the scene that I've drawn here. We are kind of looking up at the building. And the building seems to be getting slightly smaller as it moves towards the sky. And this is the feeling of drama. And the main reason we'd want to use three-point perspective in a particular scene. Conversely, if we took that third and put it at the bottom of the picture plane, a similar hideaway. It would be as if we were looking more down towards the street level or in a sense that things were getting smaller as they move to below us. And again, it's a sense of drama. So three-point perspective is adding the drama of height or the drama of depth to the forms that you were drawn. So let's rotate this scene here and you'll see that perspective. There's no right way up or way down. Now it's as if we are in perhaps the middle floor of a very tall building looking down at this building here on street-level. And the building is so huge that it feels like it gets really small as it gets to the bottom. Again, this is to emphasize a sense of drama. So that effectively is why we'd use three-point. And it is a great tool for adding drama and dynamism to a scene, but you don't want to use this effect all that much. And you also don't want to really do it in every single piece that you do. Sticking to 2, as I've said previously, is a much more normalized feeling when you're creating your scenes. Now, if we move the third too close to the picture plane top border, what happens is our verticals become extremely extreme. So you can imagine that if that third was over here, we'd have some very, very extreme verticals that would look a little bit strange. It would look a little bit crazy to have all these very extreme verticals on, uh, Bolding and that we will call distortion. It's going to distort just in the same way that if we move to the left and right vanishing points together, we'd also get a lot of distortion and too much of an extreme convergence happening on the sides of our objects. Conversely, if we moved our third VP very, very far away, it would barely be noticeable. So definitely keep that in mind. You want to have at, at an optimum position above your picture plane or below your picture plane. Usually that is about 2.5 to three times the height of the picture plane itself, where you'd like to place that third vanishing point. So in summary, this is 3 perspective which we use when we want to add more drama to a scene and get a sense of scale or ********* to a scene. It's not really always a realistic way to portray a scene. Two-point is more of a normalized view point, but definitely considered three-point perspective to be a tool in your toolbox that you can use when you need to, to create that sense of epic and drama in a scene. That's the end of this lesson, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Module 1.11 Stacking Perspective Types: One of the coolest things about perspective is the ability for us to stack perspective tops on top of each other as much as we need to achieve the desired outcomes that we're looking for in our perspective scenes. In front of you, I've drawn a standard two-point perspective scene. We have a left and a right vanishing point. I picture plane, our horizon line and our grid lines. So what I'm gonna do is just go ahead and draw in a simple form on the left-hand side here, using the grid lines as we would in two-point perspective. So I'm making sure that my vertical there is perpendicular to the horizon line. So in two-point perspective, I verticals are parallel to one another. And I'm going to just draw a blocked form over here. And let's erase those construction lines. And this shouldn't be any major surprise to you. You've done two points and I'm pretty sure that you get it. So there we have a two-point block. Right? Now. What happens if we decide to go and add an additional grid at a different angle with its own horizon line in its own vanishing points, which is also 2. To take away the first grid line, I'm going to add in a second set of vanishing points in a horizon line and on grid lines. And now I'm able to come into the scene and actually draw in new forms, keeping the vertical perpendicular to the horizon line and adding in a vertical there and doing the exact same thing. But now I'm getting a very dramatic in a very dynamic form in the scene that is completely different. And it's as if this is another block flying into the scene from the top right. Now, as I do this, you might ask the question, why would I want to stack perspectives? Perspective seems crazy enough as it is. Just keeping things 12 or three points. Well, if you can imagine a scene of a space shuttle or some rocks flying into the scene from somewhere where you want to have more drama, you want to have more dynamism, more sides being seen of different objects. This is exactly what stacking the perspectives of four. Think of stacking perspective as just another tool in that stationary bulks of your prospective tools that allows you to achieve the look that you want in your work. You're going to have a vision and this is another tool to help you meet your vision. Yeah, we've stacked to two-point perspective scenes on top of each other. And it allows us to bring in this block in a very dramatic and dynamic angle. Let's take that grid away and see what that looks like. Still totally normal looking, which is great. And one of the reasons it's normal looking is because we're using the same optimal vanishing point placement that we would typically use for 2.1 of the VPs should meet far away from the picture planes border and one of the other VPs should be close to the picture pains broader. And it can be, once again, it can be within the picture plane. Just keep the distances quite similar as you move the one in, make sure that the further one out moves an equal distance out. Alright, but we've stacked 22 perspectives. Let's add a one-point perspective into the scene now as well. I'm going to take that sick and two-point perspective grid away. And now we have a one-point perspective grid in the scene. And I'm gonna go and draw a one-point perspective form in the scene here. So let's draw a one-point perspective, rectangular box that is facing us as the viewer. Just like I would, I keep the verticals and horizontals parallel to each other. I bring my lines back to the vanishing point. And then I'll build out the rest of the form with additional verticals and horizontals. And I'm going to erase those construction lines. And I now have a one-point perspective form in our two-point perspective scene. Now something that's important to remember when you're doing this as you want to establish that baseline perspective, seeing the baseline area where you are placing the viewer, the viewer is quite clear on where they are and their relationship to the scene. And in this instance it would be our 2 perspective scene. And of course this could be 2 perspective or 3 perspective or one-point perspective. But just make sure that you're being very clear to the viewer where they are standing in relation to the 3D dynamics of the scene. And let's take things one step further. And let's now bring in a three-point perspective grid. So it looks like a disk go. I know it will take that 1 perspective grid layout. We've brought in a three-point perspective grid. And every time we stack this, we have new vanishing points and new horizon lines, which can be arranged as you see fit to achieve the goals that you want to the scene. And in this instance, let's use this grid here, this three-point grid to bring in a giant shape that is so huge that it's verticals are going to recede to its third vanishing point. I'm going to draw in a vertical here, and I'm going to bring it back. Let's just zoom out here. I'm going to bring it back to the third vanishing point. So it's bringing a vertical here. I'm going to have this block going right off the page. You want to see the top of this block. And I'm going to bring a line from that vertical and horizontal down to the right vanishing 0.1 to the left vanishing point to establish our form there. And I'll bring a line up here from this point here up to that vanishing points, that third vanishing points. Now the vertical there. Let's bring in another vertical here. Gain up to our third vanishing point. And we can now also pull from that corner to the left vanishing point here. And from that corner to the right vanishing point. Now we've got some overlapping happening here. So what I'm gonna do is first I'm going to take the grid lines away. And I'm just going to erase the lines that I don't need to see, including mine, my construction lines. So that we can get a clear idea of the third vanishing points in the three-point perspective that we've used to build this giant object so huge that it has convergence on its verticals. All right, so take this s. And so what we effectively have done here is we have stacked our types of perspective on top of each other. That is the core point of this lesson is that this is a possibility. Now, I know that perspective may seem very complex, especially at this stage for you. Don't freak out about this, just know that stacking perspective is possible and it is doable and it is useful. So it is another tool for you you can use in your toolbox to create amazing, in-depth and appealing, three-dimensional environments, as well as interiors and other scenes. Utilizing this technique, you can stack the perspective types. That's the bottom line, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. Module 1.12 Distortion in Perspective: If you're new to perspective, distortion is going to be your worst enemy. You're going to look at your scenes and wonder why they look a little bit strange. In front of us. We have a 2 perspective scene, but the vanishing points are quite close together. They're not following optimal VP placement. Not only that, because they're so close together, we have narrowed the cone of vision, something critical that we will be learning in module two. But before we get there, What I just want to make you aware of is that the most common reason for distortion is because VPs are placed too close together. So you'll want to try and avoid bringing your VPs too close together in 23 perspective, if we look at these forms as well, if these tile shapes, we can see that there's lack of flow in their look and feel kind of have really stretching sides to them. And you can see in this block in the frontier hearts bottom corner really stretches in a strange way towards us. This top luck, yeah, it seems like something we may never actually perceive in the real-world, at least in terms of how we as human beings see, it's just a little bit strange and there's some strange stretch too. It's top-right corner suddenly to the form on the left, the rear planes are just bending and it's kind of a strange angle, doesn't look normal. Again, we have this stretch happening in its front-facing corners here on the left. So distortion introduces a feeling of weirdness or awkwardness. It can certainly be used as a creative tool if that's what you want to introduce into a particular scene. But more often than not, the viewer of the scene might feel that there is something wrong or weird or messed up with the perspective. And so typically, we'll want to try and avoid the distortion. And the number one way to do that is to ensure your vanishing points are placed optimally, or at least are placed at sufficiently further distance from each other. Don't forget those recommended optimum placements as we've learned about the types of perspective. Now there is a more technical reason as to why we have those optimal placements. And really that comes turn to something called the cone of vision. And we will deep dive the cone of vision in module two. For now, especially as you engage in your assignments, just be aware that if you do place your VPs too close together, your scenes will look a little bit distorted. So keep that in mind as you move forward. That's the end of this lesson, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 14. Module 1.13 Isometric Perspective: In order for you to have a well-rounded view of perspective, drawing fundamentals, I wanted to briefly cover isometric perspective. And effectively, isometric perspective uses axes instead of a vanishing points in order to create a pseudo type of 3D. Isometric perspective is great for industrial design and creating objects, and also doing pseudo top-down views of scenes. But it doesn't have receding. So it's really not that useful for us in terms of wanting to draw environments that appear to be in a realistic world setting. Let's take a look at how isometric perspective works. In front of us. We have an isometric perspective grid. And if you look carefully, it would seem like there are a lot of cubes stacked on top of one another. In this grid, we have three axes. We have an x-axis, a y-axis, and then we have a vertical z axes. And utilizing this X, Y, or Z type of system, we are able to draw out 3D base forms, which we can then shape into the objects that we want them to be. You may know the system is an XYZ system of drawing may have seen in mathematics or technical drawing types of classes. And it is very useful, especially for product design and architectural types of design. Let's go ahead and utilize the grid and this XYZ system to draw out some 3D forms. I'm going to use the line tool here. You can also use a ruler if you're working on paper, you can print this out. I have provided these grids for you. I'm just going to draw out some forms. So I'll create a nice long rectangular form here. And it's almost like having instant 3D. Now, as I said, a key thing to remember is because it's based on axes, we don't have vanishing points. And so when we draw something further away or into the distance, we won't have that recession. We won't have things getting smaller as they move away into the distance. And that's why isometric perspective has pretty much limited use for us in terms of drawing and environments that are supposed to be in a realistic type of world where we have realistic types of perspective. You can see that the scale doesn't really change. And effectively It's like an eternal plane. It just goes on and on forever. Once again, grateful, kind of top-down planning views where you want to plan a town view or something like that, are great to use if you wanted to pre-plan particular piece of architecture and audio pieces, but ultimately not overly useful. That said, I really wanted you to know about isometric perspective. I know that it was quite fundamentally different from the other perspective, Tubbs we've learned, but still a tool in your toolbox if you want to use it. Let's move on. 15. Module 1.14 Three Point Perspective Lines Shortcut: As you may have noticed, in the optimum VP placement, God, you need a lot of vertical page space in order to accurately placed that third vanishing point. And sometimes it's really just impractical, layering three or four pages high when you're working on paper or creating a very tall document, if you're working digitally, it's just not really practical. And so a great shortcut is to really just wing in those verticals in a logical way. And so I'm gonna give an example here of how you can do that. And what I'm gonna do really is around the middle of my scene, I'm just going to put a really straight line. And I'm going to create a subtle convergence of these lines as we move further out towards the edge of the picture plane. And really this is an adult or a winged in three-point perspective. And it's not obviously 100% accurate, but at the same time, it's also not going to be very noticeable in terms of its accuracy. So this is a quick way to get in three-point perspective without having to actually explicitly define that third. Now when we're doing this type of art, where we're drawing imaginative scenes and interiors and things like that where accuracy is not a huge deal, we can do this. However, if you need measurements specific accuracy, then you'll really need to go ahead and put in that exact in specific third vanishing point. That's in this lesson. I'll see you in the next module. 16. Module 1.15 Lets Talk Perspective!: As we approach the end of module one, Let's just take a minute to talk about perspective a little bit more and just elaborate on a few extra touch points. So the first thing is the extent that we use perspective as artist's perspective has a myriad of tools and can be used for a lot of things that can be used for architecture, for example, it can be used for industrial engineering to create complex components for machinery. But we, as artists, we're not going to necessarily use it to that extent. It's not saying that you couldn't, you certainly could. But when you're doing environments and backgrounds, we don't need to do extremely complex things with perspective. We aim to really use it to create the 3D space and the big 3D blocked objects that we need so that we can create and in throwing in an appealing environmental background piece. So think carefully about the extent that we use perspective and don't allow the depth and the complexity that you can achieve with perspective to put you off learning the core fundamentals, it's a very useful tool. It's just really memorize those core fundamentals and you'll be good to go for drawing environments and backgrounds. The second thing that I want to touch on is that the type of perspective that you use does not necessarily imply the dynamism or complexity of a scene. So what this is, it's not to say that one-point perspective is a worst kind of perspective than for example, three-point perspective. Three-point perspective, it can achieve a certain effect and a certain feeling. 1 can achieve a certain effect and sudden feeding and adhere to as its uses. And similarly for two-point perspective, it has its uses. So basically, you use the point perspective that you feel is going to work best for the scene that you're trying to portray. Now, nine out of ten times 2 perspective can do it all. A very versatile public perspective. But when you need those angled verticals because you want to increase height or depth in something, then you'd use three-point. And if you really want to create a symmetrical right tunnel type of scene than 1 is your go-to. But keep in mind that the types of perspective points you use does not imply greater levels of complexity in the scene necessarily. It's really just there to help you reach your vision for the scene. And then regarding your assignments, your primary job really is to fully understand each type of perspective and the perspective tools. So once you get it down, once you say, Well, I really understand 1.2.3, there is no need to continue doing these exercises. You don't have to draw 10 thousand perspective grids and 10 thousand blocks just to try and force for meaningless reasons, drawing more of these things. It's not going to help you do your assignments until you are confident you fully understand the types of perspective and the tools. And then last but not least, before we can move into our awesome and creative environments drawing process, there are a few more things we need to learn in terms of camera control, as well as a few great perspective techniques that will help you draw AD perspective scenes faster. So let's get right to it and I'll see you guys in the next module. 17. Module 2.1 Controlling the Camera Angle: Welcome to module two. We will be taking a look at how to control the camera in perspective. In this lesson, we're gonna be taking a look at how we control the camera angles, specifically in perspective. And the primary way we do this is by moving the horizon line up or down inside and outside of picture plane. Let's take a deep dive at what the potential camera angles are. When we move the horizon line. On the left-hand side, we have a side view of the scene. It's a very flat iconographic view. And on the right-hand side we have the perspective scenes that have been drawn out for these viewpoints. So let's start with our mid angle view here. And essentially what we have is we have the camera looking directly straight on into the scene. And this is our typical viewpoint. We're looking straight into the scene. It's a very normalized viewpoint. You can see that the horizon line here, it's kind of inside the scene a little bit lower than center, and that's our mid angle. But when we start moving this horizon line, we can then create some very dramatic effects. We can really control how the viewer is perceiving the world through the window of the picture plane or through the camera lens. And so we have the high angle here. The horizon line has now moved up, and this causes the camera to look down. And so this gives us a high angle. We're flying above the world in a sense, we can see here that the camera angle is up, the camera is up in the sky and it's looking down into the scene. And then conversely, when we move the horizon line down into the scene, then we get the effect of the viewer looking up into the world. They're looking up into the world and we're placing the camera low on the ground and tilting it up. And this gives us our low angle. And quite simply, that is how we can control the camera angle in a scene by manipulating the horizon line. Now you definitely want to go ahead and give this a try. Move the horizon line up, down inside, outside, far out of the picture plane or near to the borders of the picture plane. And really give it a shot and get a feel for controlling the camera angle. The camera angle is quite important, especially when it comes to composition, because the camera angle you use can change the way the scene feels to the viewer. Is it a scary scene? Is it a terrifying scene where they're diving down into buildings as Spider-Man, for example, flying over the buildings or something. Are we looking up to a mighty skyscraper? These types of angles can really have an effect and an impact on how the scene feels. Something you want to keep in mind is that when the horizon line moves up, the camera looks down. And when the horizon line moves down, the camera looks up. This can seem a little tricky and confusing, particularly semantically like when you're saying it. But basically, this is in a nutshell, how you control the camera angle. That's it for this lesson, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 18. Module 2.2 Spacial Zones of Environment Scenes: Creating our environment scenes means we need to learn how to control the amount of space that we're creating when we're drawing out our perspective. And what we do is we simplify these spatial areas utilizing a system for spacial zones, which we call the foreground, the middle ground, the background. And in instances where you need to use it, the extreme foreground, we're going to utilize some photos to help us get an idea of how this would work. And then we're going to replicate this theory when we get to drawing our actual perspective. Scenes are imaginative scenes. In this scene, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to mark out the various spatial zones as I see them. And so here in the foreground, we have a bunch of sand. And I'm going to use F, G just to simplify foreground. And in the middle ground, we have the Min and the structures of the trees. And this would take up our entire middle ground is spatial area. Then of course we have the sky in the background. Now, of course this is a big simplification, but the key thing to remember here is to not see them as a foreground plane, a middle ground plane in a background plane, but to rather see them as three-dimensional spatial areas. That there is depth in the foreground, in depth in the middle ground, and of course, depth in the background. We've got these three spacial zones. Let's take a look at another image. Here we have a portrait of a girl portrait photo. And what we have is we have the girl very solidly in the foreground. So she is the foreground element. And then in the background, very blurry, but it's still visible, sorry, the middle ground, the trees and the fence. Whatever. This may be a wall and the floor here, and this would be our middle ground. And then we see some sky in the distance, and that would be our background. Right? Let's take a look at this scene. Once again, we have our three main spacial zones are foreground, which really helps the viewer to know where they're standing. In a sense, our middle ground, which is somewhere around here. And then our background where things really start to go far off into the distance over here. And typically most of the action in the scene or the focal points will typically be in the middle ground. You can have focal points. The main thing that's happening in the scene, happening, a leading one in the foreground that then jumps to the background, but then the main one is in the middle ground. The middle ground is typically where the action happens. And our background really tells the story of the greatest story of the world. What the rest of the world or the rest of the scene is like. The foregrounds purpose really places are viewer, whereas our viewer, the foreground, is utilized to give us that idea of whether viewer has been placed in the scene or to help them to feel like their role is in this particular image. Let's take a look at another scene over here. Once again, we have these breakdowns. Once again, I'm going to start with a background in this time. So first off, we have our background here, the distant world. And then we have our middle ground, which is around here. And most of the actions taking place in this middle ground area. Well, let me extend that into the water a little bit more here. This is around the middle ground. You can see here this is really the focal point of this image. And then we have our foreground areas, kind of placing the viewer. But what we also have in this image is an extreme foreground element, right? We'll just call that E, F, G extreme foreground. And this is, these leaves that will almost right on top of the camera. It's an extreme foreground element. This could be many things in these types of scenes. This could be a middle ball coming right in front of the camera, for example, or some chains hanging down from a roof, right? Those are extreme foreground elements. We will go more in depth about these spatial zones when we move onto our composing of environments. But at this early stage of the course, I want to make you aware of how we treat and look at spatial zones, environments. So that when you're thinking about your fundamentals, you will really have the theory of foreground background, middle ground, and of course, the extreme foreground elements. The end of the lesson, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 19. Module 2.3 Camera Perspective Shot Types: Now that we've learned how to control our camera angle utilizing our horizon line, I'm going to take a look at some cameras shot types that really help us to imply the story, communicate the feeling and emotion that we want to have that scene described to the viewer through the camera angle. I'm going to take a look at nine types of shots. And really this is not an exhaustive list and it doesn't exactly mirror the top of shortlist you might see when you're studying for mammography and things like that. However, we're looking at this through the perspective of through the lens, if you will, of environment drawing. We're going to take a look at these shortstops and also know that they can share shot types. A single type of shock can share some of these shortstops that we're going to look at. The first shots that we're going to take a look at is the close-up shot where we need to utilize perspective to draw in the scene. But the perspective and the environment is not really the key focus where we have a subject or an object that is really close up in the scene, usually in the foreground plane. And the perspective is being used to draw out the background scenes, the background areas. So this is a close-up shot. And usually we will have that focal points taking up a large amount of space or significant amount of space of the entire picture plane. And here we can see these rocks in the foreground here and a expensive environment in the background. But clearly environment is secondary in terms of the focus of these rocks. And also when we have portraiture type of scenes, characters or animals in the scene, We want to be able to create that 3D space in the background, even though the prospective itself is actually quite minimal, you take a look at this portrait seen really, we're only really getting perspective from the Amarice that her arm is resting on with the little puppy, that middle bar and perhaps the ground a little bit. But then of course, something more industrial looking like this kid, all these kettles on the stove, we'd need perspective to correctly get those kettles in and to get that stove top in. Nevertheless, these are close-up shots are typical type of shot that we tend to use for environment. Paintings, environment drawings is the medium shot. And usually a medium shot is describing a shot where you can typically see a full human body or the full extent of a thing in the shot. But it's not from a very far distances from a normal viewing distance. And also your medium shots have the view at typically looking at the scene from a standard eye level. And here you can see we have just kind of it's standard eye level. We're standing on the beach and we're looking at this city down here. And it built on the mountain and what have you, but it's from a very normalized angle. Similarly, an interior medium shot here of a house got a little bit of distortion from the camera lens that took this. You can see the piece of wooden door on the right. It's kind of bending a little bit. And that's because it doesn't have the VPs are a little bit too close together, if you will, in the camera lens per se. But anyway, this is a medium shot of an interior and it's just your normal viewpoint. Now, something I want to say about medium shots is they're great, they're versatile, but they're also overused. So I would encourage you to add a little bit of a tilt, add a little bit of a camera angle to your medium shots, make them slightly high angle or slightly low angle. Because they can get boring very quickly because they're the easiest to do. And then the most common, commonly done top of shot. Right? Moving on, we have our long or wide shots. And really the purpose of the lung or the wide shot is to show vastness, Epicurus, to show scale, to show distance, to show depth, and far into the distance. And so here we have a few examples of long or wide shots. The focal point is usually small in the scenes and seems distant. It's usually in the middle ground plane, but it seems some distance away. And you also get an opportunity to showcase a scale when you're doing long or wide shots. In this instance, we can see the town on the right. It's scale compared to these epic mountains and all the tiny little trees on the mountains. So these are our long or wide shots. Few more examples here, showcasing that mountain peak bottom left, and then the boats the top. So these are some examples or along and iWatch just think big, vast, epic in scale. And of course, a lot of fantasy art tends to be long or wide shots. But again, it can also be a cliche if you don't implement it. Well, because we're used to seeing these vast fantasy landscape paintings and drawings and so on. Then we have our ultra wide shots here you can see the picture plane has been significantly extended in its width. And really the ultra-wide is just an exaggeration or even further dramatization of your typical long or wide shot. We were showing scale and fastness and just a lot of space. Here we move on to the high angle shot. We've talked about in terms of how we control and get these types of shots. And as we move through these examples, ask yourself, hey, where is the horizon line in the scene that I can use to draw out my own high angle, a low angle shots. So here you can see the horizon line is very close to the top border of this picture plane. And we're looking down into this river and into this crazy looking mountain type of structure here. Similarly, a low angle shot of a city. The horizon line in this instance is outside of the scene. And that's helping us to get this low angle view. Obviously these are photos. The camera was just pointed down. But if you were drawing this type of scene, you have to ask yourself, hey, where is the horizon line to achieve this effect? It has an interior angle shot with a person in it. Of course, a lot of perspective will be needed here to achieve this effect. Here's some more examples of high angle shots. We're looking down into the city, down onto the road, down into this leg. And ask yourself, what kind of feeling is evoked by a high angle shot? What does it tell the viewer? What does it make the viewer feel like where we're placing them in the scene? What are we communicating with? A high angle shot. And then we have aerial shots, which are effectively a high angle shots. But we're usually trying to make sure that elements do not pass the horizon, or very few elements past the horizon. The horizon line specifically, when we keep things under the horizon, it gives a view with a feeling that they are above the clouds, that they are in the sky. They're flying over structures different from high angle. High angle gives you a, I'm looking down on something, point of view. Aerial shots gives you the feeling of flying over something. And so really, you can see in this instance as well, we only have one or two skyscrapers poking above the horizon line, but typically everything else is below it. So it makes him feel like, makes the viewer feel like they're in the sky is a few more examples of aerial shots. Here we have a low angle city shot. We're looking up. And we want to think about what is the feeling that is evoked when we look up at something, perhaps it makes the viewer feel small. And it shows the scale of structures in a very grand or very epic kind of way. You want to ask yourself as well, where is the horizon line? In this instance? You may have a more natural low angle shot seen. We've got the camera very low to the ground here, looking up at these very strange rock structures, where is the horizon line in this type of scene? Here's a low angle interior scene, very futuristic looking structure. Over here. A few more examples of low angle shots in different environments. And ask yourself, what can this do for MSG? What kind of story implications are there? When I choose to draw seen utilizing a low angle. Then we have our top down shots. These can give you good map views of things. Give you, gave your view with the opportunity to look down at a table of food, for example. Typically these are drawn in one-point perspective. So you have a lot of flatus shapes coming towards the viewer and receding down to that one-point perspective. Great for these types of shots. Then we have what is known as a Dutch tilt with the horizon line itself is not parallel to the top and the bottom borders of the picture plane. The horizon line is tilted, either left or tilted right. And it can give a certain feeling or a certain effect to an environment scene where they're making it seem like we're flying into the scene or making it seem like there is some level of chaos or something awkward or different about the scene. These are Dutch tilts. You can see here that the horizon line physically has to be tilted in order to still draw the correct perspective, but with the picture plane or a camera lens ready looking at the world, at it tilted angle. There's a few more examples of Dutch tilt scenes. Once again, these are the primary sharp tops, and I want you guys to understand these in terms of their tools. And there are box that needs to be checked when you're thinking about drawing a scene. Don't just be like, Oh, well, I want to draw castle in the mountains. Now sell yourself. Alright, What feeling and mood to do I want to evoke in what shutter type is going to be the best for the type of scene that I wanted to communicate. So think of these shortstops and choose a sharp top that you feel best fits your vision for the scene. Try to avoid using just the medium or long shots for everything. Definitely strive for some high angles, some areas, some low angles and so on. And mix it up, mix and match these types of shots to get some unique types of angles and perspectives on the world so that you are drawing those in a nutshell, RR camera shot types. Once again, keep in mind that they can be utilized together. And also that really they're not an exhaustive list, but there really are fundamentalist. And we're looking at these cameras, shots through the lens of environment drawing. That's it for this lesson and I'll see you in the next lesson. 20. Module 2.4 Picture Plane Aspect Ratios: We're now going to take a quick look at picture plane aspect ratios, which refers to the width and height relationship of a picture plane to give us a differing size of an image area. And this is important because Games, films, mobile games, and animation, may have specific requirements. And so you want to tailor your picture plane to where you're going to be displaying this particular type of environment. So the first aspect ratio we're going to look at is the one to one aspect ratio, the one width to one hot aspect ratio, which produces a square. This is great for social media such as Twitter, instagram, Facebook, where you can make the maximum usage of the space available to you in those feeds. Square aspect ratio is not really commonly used for other things outside of that, of course, you could use it in print as well, but really, it's great for social media and online related things. The next aspect ratio we're looking at is the old-school TV. Now I've put this in here really just as a point of reference, where we have a ratio of four by three, really didn't provide the breadth of the wind screen effect that could allow directors and filmmakers to really showcase broadest scenes. And so it has been abandoned in favor of today's most common standard, which is the HDTV widescreen, a ratio of 169. This is by far the most common aspect ratio. You'll see a lot of environmental drawings taking up this aspect ratio and also the vertical version of it. So there are a lot of HDTVs that are 16 by nine, a lot of computer monitors and even a lot of mobile phones. And so this aspect ratios great to adopt, to base, to showcase your content on those devices. If you're drawing for those types of devices, of course, if you're drawing more footprint, you don't really worry about aspect ratio that much because it's primarily a bad display. Displays and screen ratios and allowing the content to display correctly on those screens. Now the widescreen litter box aspect ratio of 1.8521 is a common cinema standard. This is the one that often results in a black bar at the top and the bottom of your movie that you're usually watching on your TV because it's slightly wider than 16 by nine. Then we have the 2.3521 aspect ratio, which is known as cinema scope or ultra widescreen. A lot of movies are adopting a V cinema scope aspect ratio. It feels a very engaging, it's very wide. It allows the directors to get a very broad amount of information into the scene. It looks very appealing. But nevertheless, these are some aspect ratios that are applied to different devices in different media formats. Specifically if you're wanting to draw scenes that are going to be in the film industry, in the game industry, aspect ratios or something you want to be aware of. And I wanted to include it in the course just so that you felt more equipped when it came to aspect ratios. And when they're mentioned to you, you know what they're talking about. So keep in mind picture plane, aspect ratios and the width and height relationship and how it relates to the Media tab you may need to be drawing for. See you in the next lesson. 21. Module 2.5 The Cone of Vision: Avoiding Distortion: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at something called the cone of vision. And you may remember me mentioning this in module one when we looked at distortion and avoiding distortion in our perspective work, right? Now, we want the viewer to feel like they're looking into a world in a normal sense, right? Things aren't warped or weird or look a little bit unusual. We wanted to present our world abnormal or understandable 3D space, and so we want to avoid distortion. Usually, the way we do this is by utilizing something called the cone of vision. Now, this can be a very technical thing, but it's also very simplistic. Yet I want to add that I'm going to show you and give you tools that you don't even necessarily even have to think about this really very much when you're drawing out your scenes. Nevertheless, for you to be well-equipped and to have a hardcore understanding of how this works. I'm going to be teaching you about the cone of vision. And then I'm going to show you how you can easily calculate this for yourself. So first off, we have seen here and we've got a bunch of blocks. And it's very similar to the scene in module one, where we can see that sort of stuff in the middle of the scene here, this block and this block, they look very normal and easily understood. But we start having weird stretching and distortion happening as the blocks move away from the center. So we have our VPs, yeah, let's call this VP left and this one VP rights. And we have a horizon line over here. So it's just a typical scene, but we don't necessarily have a picture plane here. And of course, you may have heard me mentioning optimal VP placement, which is in relation to the picture plane that you're utilizing, right? Anyway, moving forward, what we want to do is understand how can we avoid this kind of distortion? How can we avoid this? We want to draw our entire scene in the safe zone, but how do we know what zone is actually safe to draw in? Especially if we don't have optimal VP placement, right? So this magical zone here, which I've marked out in pink, is in fact the right safe zone. And it is in fact 60 per cent of the space between VP left and VP right, right. So this distance here is roughly 60% of the space of the, 100% of the space of the entire horizon line, right? So really it's just 60% of the space and we've drawn a perfect circle there. And anywhere that we have 60% of this space on this horizon line in this circle will be normal looking, right? It will be our cone of vision. This is one way of looking at it. We will do a more simplified version of calculating this just now. Let's take a look at a technical view of it, right? Don't be panicked if you still don't get it. We're gonna go through it. All right, so what we have here is a more technical view of how to calculate the current of vision. And really the cone of vision again is that zone within a created perspective grid that gives us a normal view that will allow things to be drawn in a normal looking when normal type of 3D that the viewer would see. What we have here is we have vp left, vanishing point, left, vanishing point, right? And we have our horizon line over here. I'm going to call it H L. And then we have this special zone down here, this pink dot, alright? And this pink dot has different names. Some people call it the magic spot. But its technical name is actually the station point. You'd like to think about it in the way that it's the point almost where the viewer is standing in relation to the scene that you've produced with your vanishing points, your horizon line, and your grid lines. So it's almost with a vision of the viewer is in relation to the scene that you've created. And what the station point really is is it's a position down the center of space between the vanishing points where each VPs receiving line to each VP meets at a 90 degree angle. Alright? So you can see this is a 90-degree angle over here. And normal human vision, more or less an approximation, you can call it a thumb rule, is around 60 degrees. Alright? And so what we then do is we calculate 30 degrees on each side of our halfway point over here. So 30 degrees on the left and 30 degrees on the right giving us 60 degrees. And from this station point, we then draw out two lines up to our horizon line, and that gives us two locations. And what we can do is if you were working traditionally or, or digitally, you can utilize a protractor and draw a perfect circle around your horizon line. Utilizing those marks that you've made from the 30 degree point. And you now have the cone of vision region, the space between vanishing point left and vanishing point right, where anything you draw. In this zone right here is going to look normal and anything outside the zone is going to look distorted and stretched and weird. Right? Now you might be thinking yourself, my gosh, this is terrifying. Am I going to have to do this for every perspective scene ever draw? This seems like mathematics or some crazy level of science. I'm not interested in drawing environment anymore. Please hold on a moment. All right. You don't need to do this. I'm going to show you an easy way to do it. First of all, if you do want to do it. But then in the very next lesson, I'm going to show you optimal VP placement so that you don't even have to worry about this, right? Butt. Again, I want to say, I don't want to teach you some basic color by numbers information. I don't want to give you a color by numbers education, I want you to be well equipped and that's why I'm going through this with you. So bear with me so we can get you to a pro level in IT, pro level of understanding, right? Let's take a look at the easy way. The easy way really is whenever you have a horizon line, okay? It's just drawn a horizon line here in blue. Actually, let's just keep it red because we've been using rid horizon line is this whole time. And I'm going to put a left vanishing point, right vanishing point, left vanishing point. This is our right vanishing point. We now have some space in between here. Let's use green to indicate that we've got some space in-between. Yeah. So let's say all of this space is equal to 100% of the space. So all you need to do is divide this into getting 60 per cent of the space. So let's go along our line here, and let's just, let's just eyeball it and you can totally eyeball it because I promise no one's going to notice. And let's say this is 50 per cent of the space, or at, that's halfway. So that's 50% of the space in the scene. Cool. Let's add a little bit extra and just get a thumbs 60% of the space. Great. Now what I can do is say, All right, this area here from the left VP to towards the right BP is 60% of the space. And I can then go in, grab a circle. I'm going to use the Ellipse Tool here. And I'm going to draw a circle in that is that size. So let's see if we can get roughly right here. I'm moving my circle in cats a little bit big, but it's okay. I will resize it shortly. Going to put some lines on there. We can make it blue, It's fine. Okay. And I'm going to resize it so it fits nicely into my 60% zone. And this circle represents our cone of vision and anything we draw that in this circle, regardless of its position on this horizon line, will be not distorted or won't be distorted. It'll look normal. So you can in fact move this circle along any way you'd like on the horizon line. And everything in this zone is going to look great because you have to keep the circle at a particular position and then draw your scene. You can keep moving the circulation drawing you've seen, then you're going to get distortion. Alright? But now you might say, hey, what about the picture plane? So if I've worked out this cone of vision, of normal viewing, where would I put the picture plane? Quite simply, your picture plane would be drawn within or around, roughly around this zone. So for example here I can put a picture plane over here. And you can see that we've got some areas poking out, right? So this zone here and here and here and here, poke out of our current vision. And that is true that yes, those areas would experience some slight distortion if you were drawing blocks and things in the corners. But as you're going to learn in terms of environment at drawing composition, we don't put anything in the corners anyway, Alright, so it doesn't really matter what's happening in the corners, even if there is a slight amount of distortion. And on that note, obviously, as things move away from the cone of vision, you experienced more and more and more distortion until things don't really look 3D anymore. So there we have the basic way to figure out the cone of vision in a scene. We've also looked at the technical way of how you calculate this. And please, if it is confusing, you go through the list again and take a look at the mathematics of it. But I want to end by saying, I want you to confidently move forward knowing that just knowing this is enough. Because I'm going to show you optimal VB placements so that you don't have to worry about where your vision is. Because when you learn it, the optimal VB placements and there's really only a few of them. They're very easy. There's only 33 rules to this, which we'll learn in the next lesson. That you really don't have to think about this anymore. But knowing this does make you a more well educated environment, drawing person and environment painting person as well. Alright, so that's the end of this lesson. I'm very excited to show you the very easy way to do this in the next lesson. So I'll see you guys there. 22. Moduel 2.6 Quick Optimum Vanishing Point Placement: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at optimal vanishing point placement in the three types of perspective we've learned. One-point, two-point, and three-point perspective. And what these optimal vanishing point locations are going to do is they're going to allow us to have a relatively good current division, making sure that our viewer sees the world normally without too much distortion. So let's get straight into looking at our one-point perspective, optimal vanishing point placement. So of course in one-point, we have one vanishing point. And typically, you will want this to appear somewhere in the middle of the scene. These dots that I'm drawing represents possible one-point perspective locations. You might say, well, why can't we move the vanishing point far to the left or far to the right or what have you. And the reason is when we do that, we might as well in fact be drawing a to point C because we're cutting off a section of the viewable image range if you can imagine it. And similarly, we don't want to have our points far, too far to the top or too far to the bottom of a picture plane. So the rule with one-point perspective really for optimal vanishing point placement, its place that single vanishing point in the middle of the scene. If you wants to have a passageway on the right-hand side where characters, for example, looking to the right-hand side, there's a passage into the left-hand side. There's another passage or it's just a wall. Two points is still better for that. So strive to always keep your vanishing points in 1 in the middle of the scene. And of course, if the vanishing points are in the middle of the scene, then your horizon lines will be relatively in the middle of the scene as well. So you can go ahead and really keep your horizon lines relatively in the middle of the scene while we're doing this because we want to avoid distortion. So really these other zones where you want to place those vanishing points in one-point perspective. Let's take a look at two-point perspective now. And in two-point perspective, the general rule that we want to have is that we want to have one vanishing point close to the border of the picture plane and another vanishing point far regardless of where you place the horizon line. So for example, in this instance, we will place the left vanishing point here close to the border and the right vanishing 0.45 or six times the distance away. And relatively speaking, this will give us a great cone of vision when we're talking about are 16 by nine aspect ratio over here. You can see that when we look at the space that it takes up, it's roughly that 60 per cent that we have previously discussed. Alright? But things change a little bit when we go to our vertical picture plane over here and nine by 16. And the reason they changes in order to keep this entire picture plane space in the vision, we actually need to introduce a much longer horizon line. So let's place a really long horizon line in here. And we need to keep the same rule, one vanishing point closer to the border and another vanishing point further away. So let's do that. One closer and let's put the other one very far away. But Bye. Doing that. We're not going as close as we would overhear. You can see we're really close, but here we're somewhat further away. And the reason for that is we simply want to make sure that whatever the 60 per cent spaces, Let's say it's around here. 60% design, which would be something like that. That we're encompassing the entirety of this picture plane. And it's okay if a little bit of the corners poke out in terms of vision, we don't really use the corners much for composing, but you want to make sure your horizon line over here is a little bit longer and that your spacing, your vanishing points left and right a little bit further away to make sure that we're getting the entire picture plane in that 60 degrees, 60% spatial area of a cone of vision. So that is our two-point perspective, optimal vanishing point placement, right? Let's move on to our three-point. Now, you can see we've made the picture plane is really tiny over here. That's because we need to place that third vanishing point really far above the pitcher plant. And so the same rules apply for the horizon line length in terms of the vertical here and the placement of those VPs, the same rules apply. We will have one VP close and another far. So for example, 16 by nine aspect ratio, one here will have the right VP close and the left VP, vp far. And that's the very same rule as two-point perspective, optimal vanishing point placement, right? And then similarly, we want a nice long horizon line here for our vertical ones. So we'll say this is the close one. And let's place this one far. And that's the same as our 2. However, where the difference comes in is that we need to make sure that we place our third vanishing point. Well, the place we want to put this is relatively three times the height of the picture plane, alright? Three times the height of the picture plane in our 16 by nine aspect ratio here, let's just say it's relatively 123, it's relatively somewhere up here. These are vanishing points that we can place and literally will float up here in the sky above the horizon line. And of course you can flip it around. So this third vanishing point up here can be also be low, the picture plane, right? So you're looking down or you're looking up or what have you or things are bending down, your verticals are bending down, or your verticals are bending up. So you want to have that three times the height of the picture plane so that you don't have too much of an extreme degree of bend on your verticals when you're pulling down from that vanishing point. Right? Now, exactly the same thing applies when we're looking at an unbiased 16 or a portrait view here, we're going to go up one to around three in terms of the height here. And we can place those vanishing points up in the sky, could be anywhere there. And you can see that I've picked this middle vanishing point on our 16 by nine aspect ratio here. And typically you want your third VP to be somewhere in the middle of the picture plane, just so that, for example, if a building was going up or down, it was moving in a logical fashion, right? That the angles are kind of pointing to the middle. But there's no hard and fast rule here. You could use one on the left or one on the right, whatever the case may be. The main rule, this three times the height of your picture plane. You want to place that third vanishing point really, really high above the picture plane. It's the same rule as the 2.1 close one for one VB, close one v before, but we're adding that third because it's three-point perspective, we want some nice Bending verticals. And so we're going to place it really high above the picture plane. And in a nutshell, those are the optimal vanishing point placement guidelines. Now, I hope that this hasn't been overly confusing, overly complex. Just think about the optimal place to put the vanishing points in 123 perspective. I strongly urge you to memorize this off by heart. It will save you a ton of trouble when you're drawing your perspective scenes and integer. Addition to that, I have made an optical VP point placement guide to using just a 16 by nine picture plane for you. This is a resource for you and it's just really describes in brief exactly what I've discussed. And each of these dots, as you can see, the gradient of color changes from blue to red just shows you the distance away things would move from each other. For example, the blue dot on the left over here. Let's say this one over here. Let's just change the color. This blue dot over here, if this one is close, and then of course, this blue dot here would be far away. And so that is how it works throughout this documentation, right? In this three-point perspective one, it's just including a horizon line icon as well. It's right if this horizon line here is closer than this vanishing point here is far away, or if this horizon line here, if we're flipping it around, is close, and then this vanishing point here is far away. Of course, it's a bit more compressed in this so that you could print this out. But you know that we want three times the height of the picture plane in order to place that third vanishing point. Or at that is the end of this lesson. Go forward and draw scenes that have no distortion and look awesome. And guys, it's time to get hardcore. I'll see you in the next module. 23. Module 2.7 Vanishing Point Shortcut: As you may have noticed, in the optimum VP placement, God, you need a lot of vertical page space in order to accurately placed that third vanishing point. And sometimes it's really just impractical, layering three or four pages high when you're working on paper or creating a very tall document, if you're working digitally, it's just not really practical. And so a great shortcut is to really just wing in those verticals in a logical way. And so I'm gonna give an example here of how you can do that. And what I'm gonna do really is around the middle of my scene, I'm just going to put a really straight line. And I'm going to create a subtle convergence of these lines as we move further out towards the edge of the picture plane. And really this is an adult or a winged in three-point perspective. And it's not obviously 100% accurate, but at the same time, it's also not going to be very noticeable in terms of its accuracy. So this is a quick way to get in three-point perspective without having to actually explicitly define that third. Now when we're doing this type of art, where we're drawing imaginative scenes and interiors and things like that where accuracy is not a huge deal, we can do this. However, if you need measurements specific accuracy, then you'll really need to go ahead and put in that exact in specific third vanishing point. That's in this lesson. I'll see you in the next module. 24. Module 3.1 Introduction to Perspective Techniques: Welcome to this module on perspective techniques. In this module we're gonna be learning some basic techniques to expand your capabilities when drawing your fundamental forms in perspective. These are generally good to just know, and they do not represent the entirety of techniques in perspective. Perspective it has many tools that work to varying degrees of depth. But we really want to learn some of these foundational techniques just so that we have enough information to build a solid rough drawing so that we can pin down environments on top of those roofs. So let's get straight into these perspective techniques. 25. Module 3.2 Finding the Center of Planes and Duplicating PLanes: In this lesson, we're now going to learn to do two things. The first thing is finding the center of a plane and dividing it. And the second thing is duplicating planes. In front of us. We have a picture plane, horizon line, two vanishing points, and the grid lines. And then we also have a box, and we can see it has two planes, one facing to the left and one facing to the right. And the first thing we want to learn to do is how to divide a space in a plane. And of course, you could take a ruler to do this, but there are other ways as well. So we're going to learn in the main way, which is called x marks the spot. So what we wanna do is just draw an X shape user using lines from corner to corner. Just like this. And that now shows us the center of this plane, the exact center of the plane where the lines intersect. Then when we want to divide this into half, whether it's a vertical half or horizontal half. We can do that. In this instance. It's go horizontally by pulling from the right vanishing point through that intersection sanction. And now we've horizontally divided this into two. And of course to divide it vertically in two-point scene, we can just pull through like that. And now we've divided the space of this plane into quarters. And of course we can continue to sub-divide by doing X marks the spot on the smaller sections as well. And you can see how we could just continually start subdividing the space in that way. But now that we have the X marks the spot and we've divided horizontally, this method is a great way of showing us how we can easily duplicate this plane, its exact measurements into the distance. And so what we'll do is once we have done x marks the spot, and we've pulled alone from our right vanishing point here through the center. This works on any plane. We can then take a loan from the top-left corner here through this halfway division point, straight down to the line that is defining the bottom of that plane. And I'll use a different color here. And what we now have is a marker location over here. What we can do is pull this up vertically and we have now duplicated the space in this plane. We've actually duplicated this plane to the right. And the distance, the exact same size has been duplicated. It looks quite a lot smaller. And as we continue to do this method, now that we've got that center line running through horizontally, we can just keep going. And we will be essentially mathematically duplicating the space in perspective. You can just keep going on and on and on using that center line technique to duplicate the planes. So let's just mark out these new planes that we've created via duplication. And you can see that once you have that center line down, you can simply constantly pull from the top corner through that middle line and duplicate the space. This is very useful if you want a series of same-sized planes or same-sized of 3D objects. Because of course, if you're duplicating the one plane, you can duplicate all of the planes. That is the simple technique to funding center, creating subdivisions of space, dividing the space and of course, duplicating the planes into perspective. That's the end of this lesson. 26. Module 3.3 Correctly Scaling Objects in Perspective: Utilizing our same perspective seen from the previous lesson. We're not going to take a look at scaling in perspective. And what this means is our ability to keep the size of something in our perspective scene, no matter where in the scene it appears, is it further back as a deeper into the scene? Is it more to the foreground, et cetera? And so how we can do this is pretty straightforward. What we're gonna do is we're going to create a reference point on the horizon line based on where we want the next figure or object to be. And so we have a little rough drawing of a man over here. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a reference point to move the character a little deeper into the scene in this particular direction. So what I'm doing is I'm measuring on the top of his head down to the horizon line. I create a reference point on the horizon line, and then I move that line roughly to the bottom of his feet. And then what you can then do is go into the scene and then redraw the character, keeping the same proportions in mind. And now the character would be further in the distance of the scene, maintaining a relatively believable set of proportions in the distance. So they're being relatively accurately scaled back in the scene, right? And you can utilize this to create a bunch of reference points to move the character a bunch of different ways. For example, if we create some side reference lines and we want to move the character to the side. We can simply do this. And we can move the character horizontally, left or right, and it will maintain the proportions that way. If we want to move the character forward inosine, for example, we can create a reference point, something like this down here. Let's go right there. And over here to the bottom of the feet, over here. And then we can now move the character forward in the scene and then just duplicate this character using Photoshop there, just for example purposes. And I'm going to scale him up. And this creates a relatively believable and a relatively good sense of scaling of sizes of characters in scenes. And you can really move them anyway, utilizing these reference points that we are creating in the scene. And really, it's as simple as that. I'll see you in the next lesson. 27. Module 3.4 Ellipses: What is an Ellipse?: In this lesson, we're going to learn something critically important, and that is understanding ellipsis. What is an ellipse example in front of us? We had a perfect circle on the left-hand side of the scene. And what happens is when we take a perfect circle and we start rotating it towards or away from the distance. We start getting elliptical shapes, as we can see an example here. And so what we see is this perfect circle that is drawn in perspective down here, creating an elliptical shape. Starts slowly rotating up. And we can then start seeing the underside of that shape. An ellipse is a circle in perspective. That's what ellipses. Let's take a look at some of the anatomical properties of ellipsis. So there are two main aspects to ellipsis. And the first is something called the minor axis, which is a line drawn straight across the middle, the horizontal center of the ellipse. And the minor axis has two great features. The first feature is that allows us to compare the top of the ellipse to the bottom of the ellipse in terms of just the basic flat shape. And determined that if they look the same, we have a great and well drawn ellipse on our hands. Some common pitfalls of drawing ellipses or where one side is very chunky and another side is very narrow. Or there are very sharp points in the corners, were in a corner or a rugby ball design. Or an ellipse is just really too thin and long and something's not quite right. And so we can quickly draw a line through the horizontal center, the short side. And we can then compare the size of the shape to determine whether the ellipse is a good shape or not. Here we can see on this digitally draw an ellipse that we have a really good balance of those shapes. The second advantage of the minor axis is that we can measure the halfway point between each side, the short sides of the ellipse. And we now have the elliptical center. And that is very useful to know when we're drawing things like wheels or bold, or things where we want to find the center of an ellipse to add in an extra room or an extra detail. Or for example, we're drawing speakers and we want to draw the center ellipse of the speaker. The minor axis is a great tool for allowing us to know the center of the ellipse. The second property of an ellipse is the degree of the ellipse. And the degree of the lips really just refers to the thickness or the thinness of the ellipse. And so here we have two different degrees of the ellipse. A thin version is slightly thicker version, and then here we have the thickest version. An ellipsis can be almost perfectly circular. Of course, if it is perfectly circular, then it's no longer an ellipse, it's a circle. Last but not least, there is such a thing as the major axis. But for us in terms of our drawing, It's not particularly useful. And the major axis runs vertically across the ellipse. It's good to, to know the major axis exists, but it doesn't really have a lot of practical use for us in perspective drawing. Let's now move on to drawing some freehand ellipses and some techniques for drawing some of these freehand ellipsis. What we want to always do when you're drawing ellipses is be very loose. Draw with your elbow and your shoulder. Try to lock your wrist and just get the feeling. You can draw ellipses are varying degrees. You can move the angle around to make sure you're getting an optimal angle for how you particularly feel as comfortable. What you wanna do is just draw pages and pages of these ellipses. So it's a very relaxing exercise to do. And just fill a page slowly trying to draw ellipses of varying degrees. Once you fill the page, you can then go ahead and draw a quick center line down the ellipses. We'll just do a few here and then go and check. And what I do is I use three symbols and x means I've drawn it poorly. Told means that I've drawn it mediocre. And a tick means that I've drawn a well, and I just go ahead and check the extent of which I've drawn my ellipsis. Some of them may be very poor. Some of them may be mediocre. Some of them are more correct, and some of them are less correct. And that's what you can do in terms of practicing free hand ellipsis. The main thing is to lock your wrist, so don't be too stiff, just don't really move your wrist, move your elbow and your shoulder. And just continuously draw elliptical shapes and full pages like this is great practice. It's kinda fun. It's not very hard to do either. Let's talk a final note on accuracy. So in fact drew the center ellipse freehand first. The one over here is a digitally drawn one. This is the one that I drew freehand first. And then I've overlaid them here. So you can see relatively, There's quite a good level of accuracy. Ellipses are all about accuracy when you're drawing them freehand. So keep this in mind and strive for accuracy. You will mess up a few thousand times. Don't worry about it. The main thing is that you really get the feeling of drawing ellipses. In the next lesson, we're gonna be taking a look at drawing ellipses correctly in a perspective scene. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 28. Module 3.5 Ellipses: Drawing Ellipses in Perspective: Now that we've learned what ellipses are, it's time to take a look at how we can draw them on airplanes in perspective. In order to learn the measurements, we're going to use a simple square first and draw a circle in that just so that we can get the fundamental measurements that we need down. So what we're gonna do is we have a square here, which we've used. X marks the spot so we can find center. And then we've used that center spot to give us our vertical and horizontal splits over here. We've got this down. We want to make four points. Point here, here, here, here, on the vertical and horizontal division lines. And then what we wanna do is create some additional reference points so we can draw a circle in the scrap. And how are we going to do that? So we're going to divide each of these lines into three. I'm going to eyeball it just to get a general idea of what the third might be. Something like Yvette, I think it would be something like that. And the dot that matters to us is this outer darkness at a reference point. So what we're going to want to do is replicate this division across all of the lines. Just helping ourselves there to fund those thirds. And so I'm going to create these dots, dividing each of the X marks, the spot salons into three. I'm using the other dots to also helped me here. You can totally eyeball this. You don't really need to be explicitly measurement accurately. Were not architects, we're artists. So you can definitely eyeball it. Seeing a little bit of a discrepancy between these inner ones? It seems okay, and then I'm going to divide this one into three as well. And so once again, we only use these inner reference points to help us distinguish how we can get to this. Third, this one is what matters. And we can then go ahead and actually sketch in a very crude circle linking these boiling points together, right? And so you want to, want to do it quarters at a time. Just try and link the circles together to those reference points. It going to look messy. It's gonna look a little crude. But I want you to just see it as a rough guideline of where you need to draw your ellipse and also what elliptical shape is correct. When it comes to the perspective scenes for that particular plane, that is quite critical. A lot of students get confused as to what elliptical shape is the correct elliptical shape when a plane is in perspective. Here we have a very crude circle and it's an indication to us of what the correct circle should roughly look like when the drawing is cleaned up. So I have 18 circle here and there we go. It's as we anticipated, it's a perfect circle inside a square, alright? But it's there to help us understand what elliptical shape will look, correct. Let's move this theory over into our planes view. So now we have our planes View Record three planes laid out here. And what we're gonna do, it's gonna do the exact same thing. But we're going to not do it in perspective, but we'll use exactly the same measurements. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to get our X marks, the spot over here. Work on this right-hand side plane first. That helps me to find center. And then I'm going to want to draw a center line through it vertically and horizontally as well. Horizontally. I'll need to pull this from the vanishing point. So let's just get the vanishing point in there. Right? The sake of meekness, I'm going to take this marker line out. And then I'm going to mark the points that I need in order to draw an ellipse correctly on this plane. So there's 1234 on our vertical and horizontal divisions. And then I'm going to just do a rough division here on this. Of course, it's based solely on the line you're dealing with. The division of thirds. You don't really do the division based on any other lines. You simply divide that line for the x marks the spot into thirds. Right? And now I have a great idea of what the rough ellipse will look like on this plane in perspective. So I'm gonna go and connect these reference points together. Be very rough with it. And I can see that we have an ellipse here with quite a high degree. It's quite a thick ellipse that is roughly the correct elliptical shape for that plane. Of course, when you clean it up, it's going to look great. Let's do another one. Once again, x marks the spot. Here. We can see this plane is at a very particular angle. Let's pull its horizontal through. I'm going to have to use the vanishing point to help me get that right, clean that up. I'll also have to use this vanishing point to get this split here. Great. And I have enough information now to draw out my reference points. So let's do that again. 1234. And now I'm going to want to divide these lines into three. And it's really on extreme planes like this that you can see how great the system is for helping you figure out what the correct elliptical shape is on a particular plane. Let's go ahead and get these thirds down. Just kinda making some rough estimates here. That seems right. Keeping, keep in mind is again that we are using those outer reference points. We don't worry about the inner ones. And I'm going to go in and now rough out what this ellipse should look like. Relatively speaking, on this particular plane. I said often in drawing courses, don't be afraid to be rough and loose and messy in the planning stages of your work. Because that's what the point is. That's the whole point of the planning stages, just focusing on neatness the sooner can really get you down when things aren't looking correct. And then we can see what the ellipse should look like correctly on that plane in perspective. Alright, let's do one more example. And this way you will hopefully remember it without having to even revisit this lesson. Let's do it one more time. So what we wanna do first is on a particular plane, we'll do x marks the spot. And then we want to get our vertical and horizontal divisions. So this one will have to pull from that vanishing point there. It's about right? And just for neatness, I'm going to take this line out. And so once we have these markings on our plane, you can then go ahead and create our reference points, 1234. And then we want to divide the x marks, the spot lines, each of them into three. And we can really just base this on the line itself. Not quite thirds that one. There we go. Oops. Let's just correct that measurement a little bit. I felt like it was a little bit off. Right? And once again, we have our reference points and this will guide us in seeing what the correct elliptical shape should be for this point in perspective. I'm just going to draw that in there very roughly. Of course, once the rough is in, when you're doing the refund work, can use all manner of tools to get it to look perfect. I would definitely encourage you to strive to try and do it free hand, right? Especially if you're working digitally, you can easily undo and it give it another try. And it really is great practice because if you're getting frustrated, just use the necessary tool to clean it up, especially if you're doing some work that needs to get done. But this effect is exactly how we find out what the correct ellipse is on a given plane in perspective. And this will help you to draw cylinders, cans, speakers, wheels, cylindrical buildings, cylindrical holes, tunnels, etc. That's the end of this lesson. I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 29. Module 4.1 Introduction to Workflow and Composition: Welcome to module four, and it's time for us to really get real about everything that we've learned so far in order to achieve the environment drawings that we want to create. In this module, we're gonna be learning about workflow and composition. We're going to learn about them simultaneously. When we talk about workflow, it really is the logical steps we take to draw out the image from foundations to funnel. What are the practical steps we need to do step-by-step, the how-to plugging in all this theory we've learned so far in a way that will allow us to get the work done and implement the drawing of the drawing. And then we're going to take a look at composition. Composition refers to the laying out of elements in an appealing way. And typically composition has some solid foundational compositional rules. Ways that we know to place objects or elements in our scene, design things. A particular way that helps the image be very appealing and communicate itself well to the viewer. Composition is a very broad topic, but we're gonna be looking at some key foundations are some key cornerstones to composition that will help you to create the scenes that you want to create. While we're learning each of these things, workflow and composition, I'll let you know whether something we're learning is primarily a compositional topic or it's a workflow topic. With regards to composition, It's something that we think about constantly throughout the piece, No matter what stage of the workflow we're on. So that's something important to keep in mind. Alright, enough chit-chat. Let's get straight to the work of doing our work and composition. I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 30. Module 4.2 STEP 1- Vision: World, Story, Feeling and Mood: Welcome to our first step, which is vision. And this step is both a workflow step. So you practically want to get your vision, your story, and your mood down, as well as a compositional step. Because a lot of your ideas and the story itself, or in fact, compositional elements and they really inform how you're going to implement the piece. And so in front of us, we have a kind of ideation board. And this can take many different forms. This is just the one that I created for this particular image that I'm gonna be working on. And what I have here are some reference photos on the left and then not reference photos in the sense that I'm going to be using these to draw from, but rather their reference photos in the sense that they helped me imagine better and get to the core idea that I wanted to achieve. And so when I was thinking about the piece that I wanted to do for this particular module, I thought it would be great to do a darker type of scene, maybe a foreboding evil type of cost or the Dark Lord and his, his headquarters. And I had this idea of volcanic and cloudy scars, triangular shapes, and a lot of spikes and shop things that it felt very foreboding and it felt very dangerous. And then a kind of a Gothic style of architecture. And so thinking about that and also getting this idea simultaneously while looking at the reference images, I've got some images of volcanoes and mountains and sharper looking rocks and things. So here we're looking at some of the references. I've got. There's a field on fire over here and some Gothic architecture. It's very sharp. You can see a lot of the triangles, just some, some images that really sparked my interest in getting me to the feeling that I want to achieve in the final image. And then I write down some of the key things that I want. And that is under this vision and story and mood hitting over here. So here we have those things that I spoke about, the foreboding evil castle, the dark lords are both the volcanic and cloudy skies, etc, etc. And really having a strong vision is absolutely critical. You can for sure go ahead and draw without a vision and a story and try and make it up as you go. But that can often be huge time waster because you keep changing your mind, modifying your vision while you're doing it. And perhaps it may take so long and not come to fruition that you just kind of give up. It's really good practice to have a solid vision, story, and mood from the very start. And really see this as the goal. What is the goal of the piece? What is the main point of the piece? What do you want to communicate? So this, again is one example of a sort of ideation sheet. And these can look like a million different things. But really it's just a way to get your thoughts down, your notes down, some reference images down of where you want to take the piece and some things that can inspire the making of this piece. Also very critical, is that you want to get a good solid idea, your perspective and shot details which you can see the bottom right yet. And so I decided this is gonna be a landscape picture plane. They use a low angle shot with three-point perspective because I want to enhance the foreboding nature of this sort of evil dark castle, right? I've got to say while I'm recording this lesson right now, I haven't even done a single thought passed to this ideation in terms of drawing. So you're going to be drawing it with me and we're going to experience moving through the workflow logically to achieve for the final piece based on this vision story and moon. Of course, if you want to work along with your own idea while you're going through these modules. For sure, go ahead and build out your own ideation board. It doesn't have to look like this. It could look a million different ways, but just make sure that you're very clear on what you want to communicate in the piece, the mood that the piece communicates. If there's a story to the piece, and of course, the perspective and sharp details as well, so that you know, or random going to be drawing this kind of perspective. It's this type of shot. And this is the type of picture plane that I want to use. Because once you have that information down, moving forward is so much easier and you have a clear end goal. I've often said it before, but if you're shooting arrows without a target, you're going to miss every single term, establish your target, and then move forward from there. So step one is our ideation phase, our vision, our story, and our mood. Decide what your goals are with the piece and get those essential details down. When you've got that done, then we're ready to move on to the next steps. I'll see you in the next lesson. 31. Module 4.3 STEP 2.1- Drawing in Perspective Foundations: In our step-2 workflow step now, we're going to use information that we've decided on in our vision step to draw in our picture plane and are selected perspective, top and camera angle. So first off, I'm going to just draw in a roughly 16 by nine style picture plane here. So I'm going to have it as a landscape piece, right? And I want the camera to be at a low angle, so it's going to be looking at, and so I'm going to draw in the horizon line at a low angle there. Let's make the horizon line red. Just put it in nice horizon line here. In fact, let's just make it a little bit higher than that. Right? And then what I'm gonna do is define the vanishing points that I want. I've decided to go with three-point perspective, but we're going to really enable that third perspective, grid lines. So let's go ahead and put in the 2 perspective so long. To make the right side one blue. Left side one can be green. And I'm going to draw in these grid lines using the line tool in Photoshop to do this. Just getting those grid lines to receive to that vanishing point. Alright, so let's do the right vanishing points in Redlands. Then what I'm going to want to do once I've finished with these grid lines, is I'm going to want to make them a little bit lighter so that I can more easily draw on top of them. What you can do in Photoshop is you can use this opacity slider here. And you can just lower the opacity of the grid lines. And what you can do if you're drawing on paper is get a kneaded eraser and just lightly rub over the lines to make them a little bit lighter. Let's put in our eyeballed three-point perspective grid lines. Can make these purple. And so what I'm gonna do is just a little bit of three-point angle. The scene, kind of eyeballing that angle out a little bit. And we'll use these to guide and upward tilt in the scene. Just a slight upward angle of that third, implying that third perspective is that a few more lines in here in case we need them. Typically you don't need too many lines. Alright? And so what we've done now is we've established the base foundation for us to move forward in further steps. So I'll try to always recap the steps we use. Step one is our vision and stories step, what does that camera angle? What is our world are feeling? I'm married, I shot types and then stick to our workplace there. Let's just get the grid down, right? I'm going to select these layers here and I'm going to lower this opacity. And we're now going to take a look at step two, composition. I'll see you in the next lesson. 32. Module 4.4 STEP 2.2- Establishing Key Composition: Let's now take a look at state two composition. We've got our picture plane and our perspective and camera angle, a setup. But now we want to compose the image so that it's a visually appealing. And the primary tool we're going to use to do this is the rule of thirds compositional system. So I'm gonna go ahead and draw it in. And then we're going to talk about a little bit. Plus I have some examples and other great guidelines to help you out. So the first thing I wanna do is really just our bull thirds. Here. I'm going to do a horizontal thirds across this picture plane in orange. And then I'm going to do vertical thirds. This doesn't have to be ultra super measure that perfect, just relative thirds should be fun. Eyeballed phones drop the opacity of the picture plane a little bit just so that we can focus on a compositional thirds here. Alright? So when we look at this, we can see we've got a block here and here and here, and they're all relatively the same size. And the rule of thirds system is great because it helps us to compose the image in a logical way, a way that will help the viewer understand how to correctly read the image. And one of the key things with the rule of thirds composition is that we want to keep the primary focal point at one of these key intersecting points here in the image. So when we move on to our step three workflow step, where we're establishing the locations of some of our big forms. We will choose a single location here where the lines intersect and say, alright, I want this area here to be where I want my key focal point to be. In the instance of the piece that we're working on through this workflow, where I'm going to have the sort of darker boat, dock castle type of structure, I would say, alright, I want the focal point to be there. So perhaps in a rough sense, I would have the castles main forms here. I'm just roughing it in scribbling in a little bit here. Right? And that would be the main location in the main focal point would be there perhaps there's a clock tower or something in this castle over there. And then from there, we build out the rest of the focal points. So what we're doing is we're using rule of thirds to define and decide ahead of time. Where are we going to place the key elements of the image? Effectively, we're building in the sentence structure or the reed order ahead of time before we even start drawing. So let's take this one step further. I'm going to say, alright, let's place the structure over here. So I'm going to call this my number one focal point over here. Within this picture plane that we've defined. I'm going to want to find two or three locations in total, including the primary focal point, where I can place it, some other elements so that we can lead the viewer's eye and also create a visual loop and I'll expand on that in a moment. But first time I show you how we can find more focal points. Once we've got our first focal point established. Now, these intersection points, the main ones, are the primary intersection points of the entire piece. So we'd really put number one now, big picture, the main message of the image at those intersection points. We need to find some sub intersection points. So what we do is we decide how we want to divide the space. Again, creating a new rule of thirds that will help us to find new intersection points, plastic and then our tertiary focal point. In this instance, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to divide this space over here as if it were in a sense, it's own little picture plane. Alright? I'm gonna divide that into a rule of thirds. Now, while you've got that in mind, you could also arguably divide this space as a separate space in terms of finding your second focal point. But in this instance, let's just go with the space that I've defined here. So what I'm gonna do once again is I'm going to put in a rule of thirds here. And the horizontals have already been defined for me because we've maintained effectively the same height. And what I now have is for more intersecting points. And so I think in this instance, you can really just pick one. I'm going to say, hey, let's put the secondary focal point here. Alright. Now I've got this on a new layer and what you can do is you can use a new sheet of paper to define this. Or you can define it in a light color. Or if you're working on paper. But digitally using a new layer is great for designing where these focal points are, because you want to keep them in mind and in reference when you're drawing out the pieces. So now let's define a new space for our third focal point. Tertiary focal point shall I say, which we'll use this area here. The vertical divisions have already been defined for us with the initial rule of thirds placement. So we're gonna do is just really define our horizontals. And so what we now have are a few additional locations for a tertiary focal point. And the reason I say tertiary and not just third, is that there's a hierarchy of focal points. Number one, focal point is the main point of our image. It's the main message of our image. And our secondary and tertiary focal points are there to lead the eye to the main focal point. And hopefully we can create a visual loop to keep the viewer enthralled in the piece and looking at the piece longer. Right? So out of these, I could pick anyone to be the tertiary one. Let's go with this one over here. I'll defend this one as the third. So now what I have is my 123 focal points structure. And you don't always have to have exactly three focal points is a very useful tool. Can just have one nucleus of two. I wouldn't go and have too many hierarchical focal points in terms of 12345678910. Because then the message becomes very long and complicated and you really want to keep the viewer focused on the main point, the main message of the image, which is focal 0.1 with a rule of thirds established and our focal points defined. There are two more Good layout rules that we can add before we move on to our next steps. The first one is that we want to avoid placing anything in the corners of the scene, anything important. So we don't want any focal points to be in the corners. We don't want anything too detailed to be in the corners. And the second rule is that we also want to keep a good level of space and keep things out of being too close to the borders of our picture plane. And really this is to create a space that frames our focal point and the main message of our image. When you place things in the corners or too close to the borders of the image, it seems as if this is just a piece of another image. Of course, we wanted to be a world in itself that reads well. So spacing and good spacing is very important in how we communicate the visual message of the image that we're drawing. So don't put anything important in the corners or anything important too close to the borders of the page, especially the focal points, we want to keep them inside this zone. Alright? It's not to say that we don't draw anything in those areas. Of course, we're going to have elements of the image. They land, ground rocks, whatever the case may be, but we don't put anything important into those zones. That's it for this lesson. I'll see you in the next lesson. 33. Module 4.5 Advanced Compositional Thinking: Let's now take a compositional thinking one step further. And we're going to deep dive some composition on these scenes in front of us. We have our two rough scenes at the top and a refined scene at the bottom, which is a refinement of the middle scene. Let's take a look at this first scene over here. What we have is a low angle shot, one-point perspective, where we are placing the focal point directly in the middle of the scene. This would be the number one. This whole section is effectively the number one. And this is really typical of 1 scenes where we have the primary focal point in the middle of the scene. And this is called an iconic composition, right? It's iconic because everything is in the middle of the main focal point is in the middle, the main stories in the middle. And what we do is we have elements in the scene that really strive to point the viewer and direct the viewer to the middle of the scene. So this is how we want to structure these types of scenes. Now 1 is great at this because really, all the lines really recede to the middle of that scene. Now we can do is use other compositional tools like straight lines, for example, like these sort of towers here, this tower over here, kinda hidden behind this little hut to kind of box the viewer in, in a sense and keep them focused and say, Hey guys, look over here, this is where I want you to see. This is what I want to communicate. This epic sort of causal entry way. Everything else in the scene is really just for rules and added details to add to the story of this gateway. So you wanna think about composition very much in terms of the hidden rules of communicating the scene to the viewer and telling them, hey, this is important. This is not important. And having elements saying, hey, look over there or have things point to your focal point. So that is an iconic composition using one-point perspective. Over there. In the middle scene, we have a two-point perspective scene. And what we have is our rule of three, rule of thirds going on over here, where we have our primary focal point over here. And then the rest of the space has been divided to give us additional focal points. So let's divide that space now and take a look at where those other focal points are. Right? So I'm going to divide this space over here. And let's get a nice thirds grid going inside the space. Alright, and what we see is these birds over here are our number two. And the birds are in fact flying towards this sort of cost or the city over here, we look at the final piece. You can see that the birds are flying there. And the orientation of them or the flow of them is this kind of shape. And that was intentional by me to put them in that kind of flow that would direct the viewer's eye towards our main focal point over here, right? Let's divide the space again to find our number three zone. I'll use purple for this. We're going to divide the rest of the space here. We've got our verticals already placed, which is great. And it's put in the horizontals terms of dividing this into space. And what we see here is these two trees are our number three focal point. Let's go and look at the final image and see how this ends up working out. Alright, so we have our one here and that's the main point of this piece. This piece is called city on a hill. But of course usually you want the viewer to grasp what the main point of the piece is, just by the image alone, which is the city on the hill is the number one focal point here. Number two, with the birds, which they're kinda pointing and directing us to one. And then our number three focal point is in fact, these two triangular trees, these pine trees over here. So what we have is a visual loop occurring. When the viewer sees one, they look around the rest of the scene and edit in some additional compositional elements here as well, which we'll look at the kind of looking at the scene and these trees kind of point to the birds. And then the birds kinda point back to the city. And they'll look around the scene and this not too much going on at the bottom, heavy and they might end up back at the trees. And we have a visual loop occurring. And what this does is it creates a visual interests. It helps tell the story very clearly of what this image is about. And of course, also have additional compositional elements in here, would have to be made aware of to see them if you don't know anything about composition. But basically I've got this river here. It's kinda running up the hill. That's also pointing us back to the town. And it's a great tool to bring us around back to these trees over here. And I also have this path over here that runs along and then it ends up going up somewhere maybe into the city. And again, these are really ways to keep the viewer's eye in this zone of the piece, right? I want to keep them in this zone. These rocks here in the corner or meaningless is not much happening there in that corner. Same thing here, not much happening. Sure. This river is a little bit in the corner, but it's not a, an important part of the composition. The entire story is about our focal point here. And number two and number three, helping to direct the viewer's eye to that focal point. And so what we're doing is we're using visual cues and visual tools to help us lead the viewer. Imply, Hey, look at this primary focal point. How can you keep the viewer's eye engaged in this part of the image? And that is how I want you to constantly think about where you place elements in a scene as you move forward. And as you keep doing this, drawing out your environment, you're going to start to realize how pivots and critically important composition is in all forms of artwork. Because ultimately, you realize that what we're really trying to do is visually communicates something to somebody very clearly. It's not about us when we're drawing out scenes. Drawing out a scene exactly as we imagine it to be. It's more about how we're communicating what we imagined clearly to the viewer. I hope that this has been useful to you. Definitely something you want to think about while you're in your planning stages, when you're putting your rule of thirds up, you're finding your focal points, you're getting your basic camera angle and perspective down. So yes, that is how I want you to think about your compositions moving forwards. And I'll see you in the next step. 34. Module 4.6 STEP 3- Rough Block-in and Establishing Spatial Zones: Alright, it's now time for us to actually get to the drawing of our scene. We're going to take this in stages so that we can build up from a strong foundation up to a nice clean final. Alright, so first thing that we want to focus on at this stage is drawing out our big forms. And we're going to start with the biggest forms and our focal point. Now, when you're just planning your scene, you want to get used to just drawing big blocked forms. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go ahead here to focal 0.1. And I'm going to just draw in some blocked forms. Now, in terms of my vision, I really wanted to have some kind of Gothic style structure. Now, when you're drawing, just be loose and be messy. You don't have to be a 100% accurate to those perspective lines if you do want it to look correct, we can fix this up when we do the clean drawing on top later on. So what I'm drawing in here are just blocks, just big blocks that I'm using the perspective grids to help me define. And what I will do as we move forward in the workflow is turn these blocks into the structure that I want them to be. But for now, I want to get a feeling of the form and the position in space that these forms, these blocks are going to take up. In addition to that, we want to start to establish a foreground and a middle ground in a background plane. As we start adding in elements, we can use those elements to define those planes. Using those winged three-point perspective lines over there to help me make sure that I'm getting that leaning and very tall feeling into the structure. You can see I'm keeping things very loose. I'm loved drawing sort of hybrid neatly. It doesn't look like an architectural drawing. Just trying to get those forms in. I think these forms right now should be sufficient enough for the primary focal point. It feels pretty bold, feels pretty strong. Maybe I'll make this tower a little bit shorter over here. I'm going to do that to still want it to be too close to that top border, just give it some good spacing. Will turn this into a cool structure later on. Thinking to add just some lines to indicate maybe some rocks here. Ryan just being loose with it. And I'll also have my secondary and tertiary focal points to think about was thinking as I drew that structure because of my references, my vision, it would be cool to perhaps at the third focal point, have some kind of bridge, perhaps just done if the bridge should go over or under, let's make it a go under. So just drawing an abridged type of shape here. And possibly, let's have the ground go down. And they could be a lava river or some such that's running across here. So I'm just putting in some form, some little blocks there. And kind of imagining just some land here, some space here. And one to start defining that foreground space. So just for example purposes, I'm going to use red here. So I want to have a foreground zone where the viewer feels like Orion. This zone here is the foreground area. In the middle ground zone is where our focal point will be our primary focal point. And that can be anything in this kind of zone. Of course it could be any, any, could be to any extent you could have tall structures or objects in yet could be to any extent. This is just for example purposes. Then of course the background zone would be here. But you want to start adding in some forms to help you define those zones. Draw a few more things in. So I've got this little bridge structure here. And I'm using those perspective grid lines telling me draw it in, in a logical way. Right? Maybe this mountain rock just goes down and I'm just putting in some vertical lines there. And I'm going to just draw some kind of mountain structure thing here. Of course, I'm making this up as I go using my references in my mind from the vision step to bold at the scene. Right? So we've got kind of a chasm going over here. Right? An S for the third focal point, the secondary focal point. Mind you, I'm thinking what would be kind of cool composition is if there was a moon in the sky, maybe two moons or three moons. In fact, I'm going to make this kind of a quarter moon over here and have it so that it's kind of eerie perhaps, but it's very clearly a secondary focal point. Now the reason I wanted curving this way so that it can kind of point and direct the viewer's eye to this foreboding causal. So perhaps this is a blood moon in the sky, something like that. And I'll add a secondary one here, which is quite cool. I think I've never seen two quarter moons before and image, I'll add a secondary one there. And that creates the bulk of our secondary focal point. So our focal points pointing to our primary focal point and our tertiary focal point here, it's kind of leading the viewer literally on a path that will lead to this castle, probably somewhere far in the distance. Now, something that we're going to touch on a few lessons from now is scale and scale indicators which are critical to creating depth in the scene. When I look at this image right now, the scale looks a little strange, like this bridge looks really huge and my structure looks just maybe like a little house. Don't worry, we're going to touch on that because that is one of the key things that we need to use. One of the key tools we need to use in order to draw convincing scenes. But for now, we've established a foreground in a sense. I'm just going to put a few more lines here. We've got our focal point in the middle ground. And then we've got this moon and the sub moon there in the background. And we can also go ahead and let's add just some basic lines just to indicate some kind of background area. Maybe there's a volcano in the background, but we don't want it to be two. Interesting because then it would start taking up a secondary focal point can't overlook. Right. So we don't want one of those. And I'm just adding in some lines here just to indicate some kind of background space or zone. The next step, we're going to take this further for we do that. I just wanted to remind you of the importance of these zones. So the foreground is there to place the viewer in the scene. Where's the view was standing right now? Are they on some rocky plain? It helps us position them in the scene. The middle ground is where the main action usually occurs, where we will put our main and our primary focal point. Of course, the background can help tell the greatest story of the world and help the viewer understand the world beyond the world that they're currently seeing. So keep that in mind. Draw in your basic forms and some of your key elements at the stage. Just rough them in, be loose, be rough. And then we'll move on to the next lesson. 35. Module 4.6 STEP 4- Use Compositional Elements to Add Depth: I know more than anybody how tempting it is to want to go in and start micro detailing things. But it seems to be a general aren't rule. That is just a bad idea. We need strong foundations and we build things up from the bottom up to the top right, from the foundations, up to the details. And so within man, we're going to move ahead and add in a few more extremely critical elements to this rough as we slowly start to bull in those kinds of elements of more complexity. So the first thing that we want to add in here, or scale indicators, we want some indicators of scale. How big is the structure compared to the bridge? How do we know what the size of anything is in this world? And this is where we need scale indicators. Things like doors, birds, animals, people, familiar objects like barrels or a car, bicycle. Things that the viewer can relate to and say, Oh, that's bike, I know the relative size of a bike. And so everything else is measured in relation to that. Let's take a look at a sample of a scale indicator here. If I go ahead and put in a man over here just kinda like a rough man, your typical stick salesmen man you see in environment pieces. Well, scale looks really weird right now. He's too big and the bridge is suddenly gone insane. Smaller. Conversely, if I wanted to get a greater scale of Epicurus, I can go ahead and put in some indications of what people could be lacking. Maybe put a couple of people here and put some little people over here. It's like really tiny. And now we start to feel like, whoa, this is pretty big scene, I think for the time being, let's keep those scale indicators in their birds are also awesome to use a scale indicators. I don't think I'm going to put birds into the scene, but let me show you the power of birds in this top of the landscape scene. For example, I can put some birds up here and there just sort of little l shapes. And suddenly we feel the height of that structure. For the timing, I'll leave them in there. They may not make it into the final drawing. But this is the importance of scale indicators. The next thing that we wanna do is repeating of forms. And we want to repeat forms from the foreground into the background of the scene. The reason this is quite critical is because often it can be hard for the viewer to tell the depths of the scene, even if your perspective is really super awesome, they need something that repeats from the foreground to the background to help anchor them in the depth of the scene. So I haven't really thought of anything, but that's the whole point of us working through this workflow together, you can see how we would go about thinking about something like this. I do like the idea that it's a very volcanic tuff of landscape. So what I'm gonna do is come in here and I'm going to modify this section over here and just have it so that it's not so symmetrical as it was. And let's go ahead and have some kind of rocky outcropping here that maybe points to our main focal point in some way. And I'm kind of remembering those rock shapes. And what I'll do is I'll make sure that there's two sides to the shapes. I've made a sad one here and Assad to the semi about putting a line in the middle of the overall shape. And I'll put this rocky outcropping over here. It may look a little bit different in the end. But we've got a rocky outcropping there. Alright, and what I wanna do now is effectively I have this basic form. We had to really simplify it. It would be something like a triangle, a 3D triangle that's poking out of the ground. That's pretty much its basic structure. And what I can do is take this form repeated into the distance and make it smaller. And you don't have to scale it like we did when we were learning about scaling because it's not going to be the exact same size. It's a natural object. So it's very likely that it's going to be differently shaped, but could be similar in the distance. And so what I could do is add another one of them over here, something kind of similar like that. And make it very clear to the viewer that these are similar forms. And suddenly just even with two of them, we have a new feeling of grounded depth in the scene. Like there is something deeper to the scene. We have a sense of depth to the scene because these forms repeat. So let's repeat these forms a little bit further. And maybe I'll have some more rocky outcropping here. And I'll have a little tiny one down there. And it may be out of the way in, in the distance, but it adds to the sense of dip. And we don't have to just do this once. So let's say, for example, we have some volcanic holes in the ground. That would be a great idea. So it's kind of like a volcanic type of creditor. Maybe. You can see I'm really just roughing. This isn't sort of hardcore. Being pretty with the art. Have a crater here. And I'm going to just make the line weights a little darker here. It's in the foreground. Will get alone waiting more as we get near the end of this workflow. Now what I can do is just repeat this kind of shape. Just to emphasize depth in the scene. And I'll maybe put one, let's say we'll put a little one. Well, it doesn't seem like a good place for it. I think let's just leave it at two, because I don't want to fool the scene with too many elements. Nevertheless, the key point here is that you want to think about repeating forms and you definitely want to have repeating forms somewhere in your piece, especially with this type of landscape. But even when you're doing interiors, think about air vents, think about plugged points on the walls. You want to repeat some forms so the viewer gets a sense of depth. So, so far we've learned about scale indicators which are critically important and need to be included. And we've learned about repeating forms. Well, we can also do is we can repeat certain patterns. Now we've kind of done that in a sense by defining these two planes on a rock at the bottom right here. Because that kind of general pattern flow has repeated to this rock in the distance. Don't mind these lines. I don't mean to shade. So by repeating certain patterns, we can also give a sense of depth. For example, if I have some rock layer here that's kind of like three rocks, they don't have to be Forms. I can repeat this little pattern as we go deeper into the scene. Just change the zoom level here. And I can repeat sort of rock groupings in a sense. And that can add depth as well. So I'll keep these things in mind while you're drawing out the rough and getting the elements you want to have into the scene. Now something that is also very important are multiple object overlaps. And what that really refers to is that elements in your scene are overlapping, other elements. So for example, you can see here that these rocks that I've drawn over here overlap. The Bolding. This triangular rock over here overlaps the background. Mountains. The buildings themselves overlap their background and mountains. And the bridge overlaps the background of the mountains two, with its little pillars. So you want to make sure that there are a lot of overlapping things. You don't just want something sitting on its own in the scene, not overlapping anything. Overlaps, create more depth. And so what you can maybe seeing is that by having scale indicators, repeating forms, repeating patterns, and multiple object overlaps, we can create some great, great, great depth in the scene. So what I'm gonna do now is add one more element for depth, which you wouldn't typically always add. But for the purposes of you knowing the theory of this, we're going to add it into the scene anyway. And that element is called the extreme foreground element. Now it's used to bring the viewer even closer into the scene to have something really close to the camera so that the viewer feels like they're really in on the action. And so what I think I'll do in this instance, Evan, extreme foreground element, I'm going to erase some of this crater thing that I made here. And I'm going to use a darker line because this object is very close to the camera. And I'm going to bring in some kind of rocky type of surface here that's going to cut through the scene. So it's just some kind of rocky surface. I don't know the details of it. You're just going to keep it rough and keep it loose in the scene. And so what it's doing now is it's kind of stopping the viewer's eye from falling out this section of the page. It's keeping their focus here by R as yet to be rendered in detail out a bit more foreboding castle. It's also placing the viewer more into the scene. They feel like they're much more into the scene. Let's go over those elements again. Scale indicators, things that help us understand the scale of the world that we're presenting to the viewer. Repeating of forms from the foreground into the background. This can be small things, big things. It can be rocks, objects or items, buildings, trees could be many things. But you want to repeat those forms. You can also repeat patterns, patterns on forms or just general grant patents. Maybe the river has a certain rhythm to it and it flows into the background. You want to have multiple object overlaps. We want to remember that overlaps create depth. And finally, when we need it, if we want to use it, we can place extreme foreground elements into the scene to help the view would be even more engaged in the scene. Of course, you typically don't always want to use this. You use it where you need it away. You feel it would be very useful to have an extreme foreground element. I hope you've taken notes from this lesson. Let's move on to the next lesson. 36. Module 4.7 Finalising the Rough Drawing: With most of our key elements put into place, we're ready to get into drawing out all of the elements and really fleshing out the scene. As we do this, we want to think carefully about composition, leading the viewer's eye to the main focal point, drawing out the main focal point, getting in all of its details, thinking about the background of middle ground and the foreground plains, and getting in all those elements we need to make the scene feel complete. But keep in mind it is still the rough stage. So now we wanna go ahead, get in all the elements we need to get in and finish the rough drawing. And once we're done with the rough drawing, we can then move on to doing the cleaned up drawing, which is going to take about five hours longer because you'll find that drawing roughs is pretty quick. So I'm gonna go ahead and draw out all the elements into the scene. And then we'll move on to the next lesson. Moving into a four times speed time-lapse. Let's take a look as I go ahead and draw out the rest of the image. And so I start there at our tertiary focal point and I decide I want to have some kind of interesting structure or archway or gateway, help the viewers. I lead into the main focal point. I play around with some ideas of little banisters or things on the bridge. At this point, everything is game for being changed. So go ahead and change the positioning of these smaller moon. And I go and flesh out a few extra mountain areas, creating a bunch of overlaps to add more depth to the background planes and the fallback areas of the middle ground planes. What you're really doing in the stages you're going in and trying to get all the pieces fit, final pieces of the puzzle in getting all the details, in fixing any kind of messed up or broken perspective. Honestly looking at it now I still see areas of perspective that are not 100% correct. But it's not a big train smash. I'm really just going to sort that out in the final where we make sure that everything is perfect. You can see me starting to work on some of the details of the focal point. And that's really a key thing to remember. The focal point is by far the most important part of your piece. It's the element you want to put the most time into the most thought into. You want it to be the most correct in terms of perspective. And you want it to be the most detailed and compelling part of your image because that's the entire point of the entire image, is the focal point. And make some changes to that sort of foreground rock shape there. And I add some extra rocks to the bottom of the structure. I'm really trying to repeat that pointy little rock shape a little bit more into the distance. And so I made a new opportunity for myself to do that. What I did initially, you'll see I'll change the size of the little doorway are added to the bottom of the structure, but I added a little S shaped path there that helps the viewer understand that we're going back into the distance. I do eventually make the doorway significantly bigger than it is. And that's because I wanted to adjust the feeding of the scale. Going through this process with you. Live helps you to see the reality of thinking through drawing the scene. And I think also the peace mostly meant my visions, but it also became its own thing. I think at least it's 25 to thirty-five percent its own thing that it evolved as I was drawing it. And that's a good thing. That often happens when I'm drawing them in. A lot of artists are drawing where the work starts to take on its own life. In this instance, it was that this semi Gothic sort of fortress e type of structure ended up becoming almost the job of the hot, hot out to type of structure in the middle of this volcanic plane area. And I started to have thoughts that, that's some, many ethical Gothic type of mob boss or vampire Lord. In fact, a ran this fortress in this desert plain. Old volcanic plane. You'll notice that I've flipped the image at times. This is something that is crucial to do just to check things are correct and your eyes get very used to seeing the image one way if you don't flip it, if you're working traditionally, you simply hold a mirror on one side of your image and look into the mirror to see the flipped version. And it just gives you a great perspective to seeing floors and seeing things that you didn't see before because your eyes gotten used to it. I'll go in and add some extra planes in the background. Change the scale. A little bit of the people on the bridge. I think of the funnel, I'll add more people as well. I had a drainage pipe to the side of the building. If few extra design elements of design quirks to the structure. Here I want the moon shape to be a little bit more round. It is definitely a more stylized piece, but it's coming together nicely. Eventually I will change the scale of the moon's to make them smaller. But now that I look at it, I think I will scale them back up to that size because it really does look appealing. Overrule the far distance behind the main focal point, but worked a little bit on the mountains there and added a few distant mountains. Something that is key to note with land weights is that when objects come closer to the camera, the weight or the thickness of the line increases and the darkness increases. And when objects are further away from the camera, the line weights should get lighter and thinner. That helps the viewer understand that things are far away in the distance. This is mirroring effect known as atmospheric perspective, which is quite important to know for drawing in general. Here I'm adjusting some verticals that weren't really aligning very nicely with the 3 perspective grid lines. And then I'm adding some additional design details to the bridge. I tried to replicate that shape but it didn't look right. So I ended up doing something else that I felt looked to better. Of course, it's all very rough. Low, you'll see over time it does tend to come together. And of course, when you bring it into a clean drawing, you have an opportunity again to fix any mistakes, add any extra details will take things away even where you need to. And that is essentially the end of this rough stage. 37. Module 4.8 STEP 6- Professional Cleanup Stage: Refining and Creating Clean Lines: We've used a lot of theory to get us to this point. And we're now on our final step where we turn our rough but solid drawing into clean and professional piece. Typically this is the easiest part of the workflow, but it is also the most time investment oriented. This can often take upwards of five hours or more, depending on the complexity in detail in your piece. What we're gonna do is we're going to move through a time-lapse of me cleaning this piece up using clean, quick, and professional lines to make it look neat and to make it look finished. The real-world Tom will appear at the top right-hand side of the image. You can see that it took me around one hour and 15 minutes to do. As we go through this workflow, I'll be telling you what goes through my mind as I clean up a piece. So let's get straight into it and let's clean up this environment. Before I start the cleanup step, the first thing I do is blow up the roof to the size I want the final image to be. Now if you're working traditionally, a photocopier to increase the size of your rough drawing. Of course, if you're working digitally, you can just use the transformation tools to do that. Then what you want to do is select a medium, line weight, something that's the middle ground between being very thick in the image plane and being very thin and light in the image plane. And I start by drawing out my focal 0.1. Some artist's leave the focal point for last. Because sometimes if you draw the focal point out first, you get a feeling that the piece is pretty much done or the main point is done. And you're kinda lazy to draw out the rest of the piece. But nevertheless, you can do it in any order you wish. I started primarily getting the straight lines down on the focal point. In Photoshop, I'm using the line tool for this. You are drawing traditionally you'll want to use a ruler because you really want to get those straight lines, straight. Of course, learning to draw freehand straight lines is ultimately much faster and better. I would say it looks nicer because you have a nice taper. In this instance, our opted to use the line tool so that I wouldn't be zooming in and rotating this image too much while I was showing you the demo, it can be very irritating to watch a time-lapse footage is constantly being flipped around and rotate it. Nevertheless, I use the line tool and I go in and get a lot of my straight lines down because a lot of them really are on the structure. I start working the rest of the lines in the image, which are of course more natural objects. And my movement here is quick and loose, using a single line, being very quick and making sure it tapers well. And it has a lot of energy in it. The energy and align reads really well when you're quick and loose and the line has its directional flow to it, right? It flows and it kind of has a point in a tip, a start, and an end that appears to be moving in a particular direction. My goal is always when cleaning up, start with clarity of both the foundations of the composition and all of the theoretical foundations that perspective the camera, angle the shaft up using my elements to multiply things into the distance. Repeat shapes, repeat patterns have multiple object overlaps of Donald that theory and the rough. So my goal with the cleanup is to make everything that I've already done look clean, neat, and professional. Clarity is very important at this stage. That said, composition is always something you have to keep in mind and everything should always be game being changed or modified or adjusted. Now that's one of the great things about working digitally. You can select things, you can resize things, you can change things, you can rotate things. So editing is very easy working digitally. Of course it's a little bit harder working traditionally, you really need to make sure when you're working on paper that you have a very, very solid rough and that you are 110% happy with a rough because of course, changing things in ink later can be pretty tough if not near impossible. I'm moving through the piece and I'm thinking about things that can help embellish the piece a little bit more. I'll add in details, little menu details that weren't there in the rough. But of course this is all bolt on the solid foundations of that rough. Ultimately, this piece ended up being a sort of Nightmare Before Christmas. Tim Burton, niche style kind of structure is sort of very random architectural styles mashed together. And yet we're still in this volcanic plains. A move through the piece, continuously cleaning up elements, making sure that my repeating elements of my repeating forms and patterns are reading into the distance well, with the arrow shaped rock which is currently at the bottom right. I actually ended up taking that out because that big shape was competing very much with the bridges shape. When you have two competing elements in an image, two competing graphical elements, they can be more distracting than the focal point. And of course, the focal point needs to be the main area where the viewer looks. And so the conflict between two shapes to very big elements can be more of a focal point to the focal point itself. And that can be a problem because you're not able to then communicate the images message clearly. What I do is I end up actually erasing out that very sharp pointy rock which is now at the bottom left and putting in a path something that's a little bit more common. It doesn't compete with the bridge. And that helps keep it balanced in the piece and keep the focal points in the correct hierarchy. The moon's the bridge, and then our primary focal point, which is the structure. You may notice that I've used a thinner, lighter line for the very background of mountains. Of course, you definitely want to do that. Things that are further back in the distance should have thinner, lighter lines. Things that are more in the foreground should have thicker, darker lines. And then the middle ground should be a sort of a medium type of line thickness. And you'll see later on, I will go in and use thicker lines to render out foreground elements and also to just add a little bit of thickness to other elements in the foreground. Just to clearly communicate to the viewer that, hey, this stuff is closer to you and stuff that has thin lines is further away from you. The little steeple area on top of the bridge entryway was actually going past the mountains. And I was feeling at this point like the scale wasn't reading super well. And like I said earlier, everything is game. You need to make the changes for the sake of the image that it reads well. So I took the little steeple, kind of pointy area away, brought it underneath the mountains to help better create a sense of grand scale in the scene. And in fact, I'll go more into this later on and make the entire bridge and that whole entryway even a little bit smaller because I'm trying to make sure the scale balances and reads well. With the moon's being a, another sub focal point, I decided to go with more of a realistic moon shape. I created two shapes. I ended up going with a second shape that I had done showed a little bit more of the moon's surface area. And I think the scene was already looking very fictional. So I wanted to add a little bit more realism. They had a little bit more of a realistic moon shapes, so you'll see me change to a final moon shape later on. This is all really intuition. You're using your intuition at the stage and your taste and your stylization to make things look cool and to make things look more appealing. The bulk of the work is done in your rough, the fundamentals are done in your rough. So you're really free in the cleanup step to go ham and make things look as cool as humanly possible. Even in this piece, I feel like I could really put two more hours in and go and amp up the line weights, go and amp up some of the shapes, adding more details. And you could imagine if this had, let's say ten times the amount of detail, particularly on the focal point, it'd be quite compelling. I don't want to say, let's not take ten town. There's a five times where I'm going to add more little notches, more little grooves, more little details around the windows and really pull out that detail and just really make that focal point pump. There are make some slight adjustments to the moon position, the position of the moons. And I really just wanted to make sure that the composition feels balanced at this stage. And then I'll finish off by adding in some extra line weights and some of the foreground elements. And I'll also go in and add some clouds in the background just to a little bit more atmosphere into the scene itself. At the end of the day, I have a cleaned up environment drawing describing a particular scene that is based on the vision that I originally had. And it has come to fruition utilizing all these tools and compositional techniques that we've learned as we've moved through this workflow. At the end of this module is a breakdown of all of these steps that we followed in order to get to this final piece. And I really encourage you to learn that workflow and use it as your foundational workflow, where you can use your own subjectivity in own intuition to modify it as you need to. Because of course we can all teams to work a little bit differently from each other. There is also a full version of this particular cleanup step where you can watch the whole thing in real time from start to finish. So that's available to you in this module as well. If you want to watch the entire cleanup process. That's the end of this lesson. I'll see you in the next module. 38. Module 5.1 Dr Vigyl's Lab Time Lapse with Commentary: Welcome to this time-lapse demo with commentary, we're gonna be taking a look at an interior perspective scene. And this one was done using some Photoshop tools to set up the initial Perspective Grid. Some working on the final image size here. And we have a two-point seen with the horizon line. We put our left and right vanishing points. Then go ahead and try and figure out what kind of composition I want or how I want the flow to be as more of an S-shaped kinda flows more visual loop. And then move into just drawing the basic layout of the room. So we were looking into the corner of a room here. And I start roughing in some of the elements that I need. The visualization stage for this piece is quite strange actually, did it years ago, four or five years ago. This was a scene that I wanted to draw some kind of futuristic, yet a little bit of a mad scientist kind of vibe. Where we have a lot of electronic devices and equipment, a lot of experimentation going on, plus a bit of a casual vibe in the scene as well. I use a lot of vertical lines here just to help me figure out where to place elements just helps me to see and feel the 3D a little bit better. And then I go ahead using the perspective lines to go and drawn basic forms and then add small, little kind of indications of detail to the rough forms themselves. You can see a lot of the time it's always going to start out with doing a basic block in, before that basic 3D block is turned into something more dynamic looking where we're adding curves to the shapes or adding some indicative details to those forms. What I wanted to have was the main experiment as the focal point. And then had this display on the side here pointing to that. And using the lava lamp as sort of an extreme foreground element. That's kind of keeping our eyes from drifting off to the right of the page. It also works as a visual pointer. Keep us looking at that main experiment that is happening over there. When drawing the scene, I had to think a lot about elements that would logically be in a lab type of environment. For example, air vents, perhaps emergency systems, the wiring, the plug points, the computers, any kind of specialized equipment that may be in the scene. Of course, the visual research stage is extremely important in terms of helping you adding things you would never have thought of putting into the scene because you start to realize, especially I realized when I was doing a scene like this, that your visual library can be extremely limited at times, especially in terms of things you're not familiar with. I'm not really into science that much. So for labs, I suppose. And so I didn't really have the strong library of lab top of equipment in my mind. And so I had to go and just look at a few images of labs and see some of the devices and the equipment that were in there and try and integrate some of those ideas into the scene the best way that I could. As I move through this workflow, I think about all of the workflow steps. One to have a lot of object overlaps, especially with an interior scene where we don't have a lot of distance in a sense to play with. We can't receive far into the background like we can with an exterior scene. So object overlaps are very important in interior scenes to help us get that sense of 3D. But at the same time, I do scale some objects and we have a lot of relative size objects to help the viewer understand the size of the scene. So I put that coffee cup in there next to the display because it gives us a sense of like, okay, that's a coffee cup size. You get the idea of the relative size of a human being would be in the scene. And so it helps the viewer to understand their scale with regards to the scene. A lot of the forms are of course, fundamentally based on the perspective. But I'm doing the rough loose drawing here. I'm winging some things, but it's a winging that is based on the perspective itself. So things are not, of course, measurably explicitly, you know, a 100% accurate. The key thing is that things read well and you'll see, I'll mess around with things, draw things, redraw things because they need to feel correct in the perspective and look correct and the perspective. I had a lot of fun adding in these elements, but at the same time I think are super regretted it when it came to the cleanup phase because really this piece took about six or seven hours, I think, to clean up the entire piece, it took a really long time simply because I had drawn in so many details. Of course, the way to not have to do that much cleaner is not to draw in less details, but to imply more elements, to not draw every single object to a very high level of detail. Keep things more simple, keep things more basic. Keep the quantities of things less. And try to imply a sense of a lot of stuff in a room without actually having to go and render and explicitly draw every single element. As I continue drawing, I'm thinking of ways to really expand on the scene. Drawing some cool things, refund some things I've already done. Really create a very cool lab. I want the lab to feel cool. And if you were to walk into the lab, it would be a fun place for you to play with the dials and buttons and explore all these interesting pieces of equipment that appear in the scene. Of course, I'm using those workflow fundamentals all the way through everything we've learned is being implemented in some way into this piece. And then once I'm done, I create a new layer. And I go in and I start doing the clean lines. Like I said, this took extremely long term. I think any scene with a lot of man-made objects in it will take quite a long time because sometimes in order to describe a particular man-made object, you can't really shortcut it too much. You actually have to go in and draw in these particular things. Do a lot of the straight lines freehand, some key straight lines. I use the line tool to just get a nice clean ruler like line in there. And getting the ellipsis in freehand can often take a few tries when you're trying to do the clean line, but just keep doing it. And the more you practice drawing and freehand ellipses, the better you get at drawing free hand ellipsis. Effectively, the cleanup step follows on as you would expect, a kind of been careful to think about what thickness of lines I'm placing where in the scene we do have a foreground, middle ground, and background with the background in this type of scene, in interior type of scene like this, it's a very small percentage of a background. It's just the things that are very far in the corner. Things that are in the world beyond, perhaps something that is beyond that window behind the main experiment over here. And so I'll move through cleaning up every element using a stencil, for example, I use the circle tool led to get that perfect a circle shape. And I'll move through this piece, cleaning up, being neat, being professional, and obviously also thinking about the composition continuously. As I move through this piece, looking at the big picture of the piece and trying to get everything looking really, really good and neat and clean. And then I'll finish off by adding in land weights. I'll let the rest of this high-speed Tom, let's play through so you can see the workflow. And I'll see you in the next demo with commentary. 39. Module 5.2 City on a Hill Time Lapse with Commentary: Welcome to this time lapses demo for the key city on a hill. In this piece, I'm going to be drawing effectively a city on a hill. And that is a fantasy type scene where we have a very big environment that we're dealing with. An initial perspective grid is set up on the final image size here I'm using the gods tool in Photoshop, and I'm also using the polygon tool to create the grid lines very quickly. And then I go straight into the rough. Now I do have a lesson for you that you can use to use these tools in Photoshop, which you can find in the bonus. This section. Might notice that I did not go and do the compositional step that we've done in our workflow here. I am actually doing it. I'm just doing it in my head. In this particular piece. I knew that I wanted to have the city as my main focal point here and have the rule of thirds sort of we're replacing that focal point on that third intersection point. And so what I'm doing is effectively on building out the big forms first, the big block in forms and the biggest sort of main shapes can see there's not really any definition detailing on those structures at this point. They're just kind of blocks. This particular RAF was actually reasonably quick to do because they weren't a lot of elements in the piece per se. Most complex part of this piece was this sort of walled in city and the rest of the scene is effectively just environment. And so I'm going to begin defining my foreground, middle ground and background 3D spaces. At the same time, thinking about the composition and how I can lead the viewer's eye to this focal point. I'm going to put in that path. And that path is one tool that I'm using to start to get a feel for the scale of things by having a pocket smaller as it goes into the distance, also lead the viewer's eye composition to the focal point. And then draw a line on the horizon line. Need to really give the viewer a sense of that's where the ground plane anions in the distance. Now add the river to the right-hand side as well. Go and add some kind of waterway there onto the city just to kind of give a little bit more context to why that river might be, there could just be a river that has run through the city and the city is just channeling through the city itself. And I go back to defining some of the foreground areas here. Moving into the background, be even in the rough. I'm using latter lines for those background mountains. I'm using line overlaps to really help just show that there are two sides to things and that there are overlapping objects and multiple object overlaps. Now sometime around this point, I realize that I'm going to need some additional focal points. I think the piece worked okay with just one focal point here. But I really wanted to bring in some extra elements just for some extra flavor in the piece as well. Can see I use two sets of birds here. I've placed the biggest set of birds on the left as one of my secondary focal points. And since most of the foundational elements of the rough ER and I start adding some rough details and some other rough elements. Here I put an extreme foreground Bush just to kinda help place the viewer. It could be a bush, it could be a bunch of trees. It's, it's meant to be more vague in what it in fact is, just so that we can really look past it. It's not there to be looked at, It's there to be looked past so that we can get the viewer to focus on the main point, the main communicated message of this drawing. I've placed the figure in there. The birds also help us to get a sense of scale of this piece. I eventually do play with the scale of the human figure, just to make sure that I feel like the scale is reading well to the viewer. I really start to feel like I need something more in the scene composition and eat. So I'll eventually add two trees to the bottom left-hand side of the image. And those really helped keep the viewer's focus in the scene and create a nice visual loop of the tree. So the burden and the birds to the city and really looping back with a path and the river back to those trees. I get really stuck in at this point adding in some more additional rough details to the city. And the trick here is to try and get the scaling correct because you don't want the buildings to look too chunky or as if they're too close to the viewer. Or if this is some kind of strange miniature city or kind of a little fake city that was bolder facade of a city on the hill, right? It needs to look like an activity. Huge scaled city. Zooming in on the piece as I go ahead and draw in some of these additional rough elements, I can draw in context. So I'm always thinking in the context of the overall piece. Sometimes when you zoom in, it can be a big problem that you start drawing in detailing things and using perspective in a particular way where you're not drawing in the context of the entire composition. And so that thing that you've zoomed in and drawn up to a good level may look good when it's zoomed in, but when you zoom out, it may not fit into the entire piece. So I always encourage you to strive to, for the most part and draw zoomed out. Or if you're drawing on paper, always keep the entire context of the image in mind. Don't go into a small little section and go hotter on that section, always drawing the context of the overall image. I start adding some extra lines and elements just to add a bit of texture to the scene. I used those triangular mountains in a sense to create some overlaps, some lines to show the flatness of the ground and areas. And as for that archway, I really consistently struggled to have it reading well, and I did make some significant changes to it because I did feel at some point that having the archway face as opposed to the background, it didn't really work well composition. And it was less interesting than having the archway faced with us. So you'll see that I've mentioned go and engineer that archway to face us so that we feel like as a viewer, we can walk along that path and eventually enter the city itself, which is much more exciting than the archway being the sort of nondescript backward facing entry into the town. You can see me, they re-scaling little dude silhouette of a character there. And that's just to try and keep the scale reading well, I also have some other little people on the path just a bit further back. It's to help us get a sense of how big this environment is. You can see that I've started to use repeating forms of these trees. Repeating them and scaling them back in the distance so that we get that sense of depth. And what I start doing here with these two foreground trees is of course turning them into a tertiary focal point. And that can help us into the hierarchy. Lead the viewer to the main point of the image, which is the city on the hill. Fond of the background of the image also draw even smaller trees. And it is this repeating of objects into the distance, but scanning them smaller. Repeating shapes. Repeating the object overlaps, have multiple object overlaps in the scene, but the trees in the foreground overlapping the path. We've got the mountains overlapping the mountains behind them, etc. We have these elements that we've learned about in our workflow. These are your core tools because ultimately with an environment scene, whether it's interior or exterior, trying to persuade the viewer that there is dead, fair? This is in a world, right? This is a space. And so I then move into the refinement stage. And once again, I'm thinking about line weights and the line thickness based on the position of space of elements. Go in close here when I'm doing cleanup because of course I want some accuracy and some fun details in that zone. And I'll spend quite a bit of time working on this particular focal point because I need the city to read while I needed to screen look up knee and also having to make some changes here you'll see as I go through it, because I want the city to be in the correct scale. And it can be hard when you're trying to get your scaling right, you'll find that. Scaling is one of those things that you have to play with while you're doing your image to get it to look right. So once again, I'll move through the piece, striving for clean lines, striving for professionalism, being loose. I'm doing a lot of free hand straight lines here. Use the line tool a little bit for the main sort of form structures. But typically you can be a lot faster when you're rotating the page and just doing those free hand straight lines. And I'll move through the piece, cleaning up every element and making compositional changes where I need to make sure that the final image reads really well, looks good, and is extremely engaging for the viewer. I'll leave you to watch the rest of the cleanup phase. And that is the aim of the stem or commentary. Okay. Okay. Right. 40. Conclusion to the Course: Congratulations on finishing the course. I hope it's been an awesome experience for you and expand your mind to just what is possible with solid foundational perspective theory if it's your first time through the course and really recommend going back and revising anything that you think you don't fully grasp it. And definitely doing assignments, especially on the perspective TBS, to make sure that you're really clear on how each of these prospective types can be used and adjusted to building the world's that you need. Thank you so much for taking the course. I hope it's been a five-star experience for you. I'm always open to suggestions and feedback. So feel free to get in touch with me, whether on the online communities or directly via message or email. You've now got the tools you need to create worlds, interiors, exteriors, landscapes, environments, and scenes. Go forth and create. And if you need me, I'm right here with you. So just let me know. Cheers. 41. Bonus: Perspective Grids Drawing Shortcuts in Photoshop: Hey guys Scott here. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to quickly and easily create perspective grids and horizon lines for your environment pieces and any works where you need a perspective grid. So first things first, you're going to need the rulers in Photoshop app. By hitting Control R, you'll be able to toggle on and off these rulers. So if they're off, hit Control R and bring them up. Once the rule is up, you can drag horizontal and vertical lines from them by simply clicking on the roulette and dragging. And you'll get a turquoise colored guideline, just like the one you see here. If you hit control and hover over the guidelines, you can then move the guidelines around or docket back into its original position. I'm using the environment painting horizontal template here. So let's create a grid quickly using this template. So I'll drag a guideline down to be my horizon line. And then I'll insert the grid lines. And to do that, we're going to use the polygon tool, which is this tool over here. It may look different on your screen if you click and hold, it might look like the rectangle tool. Simply click and hold on the Rectangle tool and select the polygon tool. And then there are just a few settings we need to modify before we can start drawing on our grids. The first thing is that you need to ensure that the sod Xboxes says 99. Then click the small gear icon. Ensure there's nothing in radius. Smooth corners is unchecked. Star is checked. Indent sides by is set to 99 per cent and smooth indents is unchecked. Once that's done, it's good to have a grid lines of different colors which help you to recognize easily, especially when you're zoomed in or working on section of the piece, which grid line represents which vanishing point? I'm going to choose red. And we're gonna put our first vanishing point in. What I do is I simply just select a point somewhere on the horizon line guideline. And I drag out and be sure to drag pretty far outside the borders because of the lungs that this creates change to taper and fade a little bit. And then I'll often align the star shape to the horizon line. And then we have our first vanishing point. I'll select a different color, let's say green. And then I'll select a point on the horizon line. Click and drag and pull another star out of that VP. Also dragging outside the borders. Let go. And there I have a top-down grid for my environment piece. So a very quick and easy way to do a perspective grid. Now, you can do this multiple times as well. Let's use the three-step Photoshop templates for environment designs and do the same here. So what I'll do is I'll click and drag horizon lines. Let's put a rising line there. Let's put one here. And perhaps in this shot, bottom shots, It's really top-down and you won't even see sky. Then I can use different layers. For each one. I'll call this one good one. And I'll make sure my polygon tool is selected. And I will define the vanishing points on this grid. Selecting green or whatever color. Let's use turquoise, this one, and defining my second vanishing point. And now I have a nice grid on a single layer for the scene. The same can be done for all three. Of course you do them on different layers because you don't want the first picture planes grid overlapping the second and the third picture plans. So certainly do them different layers and then you can turn the layer visibility on and off for each one as you create them. One last thing before I go. It may be a bit of a pain to actually hit Control and constantly move the horizon line. So you could draw in your own horizon line. Or what you can do is head to the View menu. Go down to show and then de-select guidance. And God's will no longer be shown, but they're still in the project. You click View again and you go show again. You can then select the gods and they'll show again. There's also a shortcut for this in the View menu. And you can bind this to a key. So it's Control plus semi-colon. Great, I hope that's been useful to you guys. And that is essentially how you make easy perspective grids for any works that you need perspective in.