The 20 Most Useful Perspective Tips I've Picked Up, Drawing Storyboards Professionally For 20+ Years

1. Class Trailer: Just putting ellipses on the end of cylinders at the right angle. Just something as simple as that. There's a trick to that, and that's one of the nuggets in this course. Drawing stairs. Looking down a hill, looking up a hill, Reflections, drawing a panorama. Wide angle or narrow Curvilinear perspective. When does the horizon line go up? When does it go down? What's the deal with those vanishing points? How does your eye level affect things? Spacing things out in perspective, using center lines properly? What's better straight lines or curves when? Training your mind to think in perspective so that you can draw really quickly? I'm Steve Worthington, and for plenty more than 20 years, I've been illustrating and storyboarding for ad agencies, production companies, publishers. You name it? In that time, I've made thousands of storyboards, literally hundreds of times I've found myself getting stuck in a drawing, trying to figure out why won't this person fit in there? Why is this getting all awkward. Over the course of those years, every time I see a little nugget that makes things easier, I snatch it up and it makes me better. Being better has the extra benefit of making you faster because it makes things easier. For the class project, since doing is the way to learn. We're going to make drawings, and they could be really loose sketchy drawings or you could really go to town on them, and you could just pick one nugget and utilize that in your drawing, or you could just try and cram as many into one single drawing as you can. Throw as much in there as you like. Or just do them one at a time. But doing it will definitely help cement them in your mind. You'll be well on your way to becoming a drawing machine. See you in class. 2. The Picture Plane: Let's take a look at the concept of the picture plane. It's essentially an imaginary piece of glass, which is fixed at 90 degrees to your line of sight. I can't flap around, it's always at 90 degrees to your line of sight. Your line of sight is fixed coming out of your head. You can tilt your head up and down, and that is the starting point of it. You can represent the line of sight as a dotted line across the center of your drawing. So the idea is that whatever you can see through that piece of glass, you trace onto it. Here we have our hand with our pencil tracing. If you're staring dead straight ahead, your horizon line would be exactly halfway up. Your picture plane. If your picture plane was a lot further away, you wouldn't be able to see as much through it. So that would limit how much you could draw. If the picture plane became much closer to your head, you'd be able to see more through it, so therefore, you'd be able to draw more. But for now, let's just stick with the picture plane this far away. We don't need to imagine that we have infinitely long arms or anything to draw on it. Let's say that we tilt the head down. So we're about to draw a horizon line. Looking straight ahead, but now we tilt our head down, we're looking a little bit down. What do we notice? The horizon line is above center. Keep looking further down, the horizon line is above center even more. Keep looking down and eventually the horizon line disappears off the top. Look down further and further and your horizon line just gets very far away from your picture plane. Likewise, if we look up, We start looking up and the horizon line drops. We look up further and the horizon line drops further. We look up even further still, horizon line goes out at the bottom of the page, and the further up you look, the further away it goes. That is the concept of the picture plane. 3. Eye Level, Tilt, & the Horizon Line: Let's take a look at our eye level and tilt with a box sitting on a flat floor and it's facing us. So these examples will be a perfectly sort of square box with 90 degree corners, parallel sides. And so This is the horizon line. Our eye level is very low and we're looking up a little bit. Because we're looking up a little bit, the horizon line has dropped down a tad. That's what we would see. Let's say we're looking at our box and our eye level is now halfway up the box, we don't need to tilt down or up, so the horizon line would be like dead center. Let's move at eye level a higher up the box because we're going up a little high to keep our box in the middle of the screen, we're going to tilt down a little bit. Because we're tilting down, the horizon line goes up from the center. So that's what we would see eye level on this last box, we're going to have Let's say at least a couple of boxes high. Okay. So the horizon line could be all the way up here. And then the vanishing point would be from the center of the box off to the horizon line, so that's what our box would be looking like. This is because parallel lines converge to a vanishing point on the horizon line if we're talking about a cube or box with all 90 degree angles and it's sitting flat on the floor and the floor is perfectly flat and goes on forever. One point perspective is defined as just one set of the parallel sides converging to a vanishing point. Okay. And in this case, it's on the horizon line because the box is all square and it's sitting flat. We have one vanishing point happens to be on the horizon line and the horizon line may or may not be within the picture plane depending on how far we're tilted up or down. In this case, we're tilted down, so the horizon line has traveled up outside of the picture plane area. 4. 1, 2, 3 and 4 Point Perspective: Let's do a quick perspective overview. We have our horizon line and our box, which has three sets of parallel edges. One example of no perspective at all would be our box facing us directly, and as it gets further back into the distance, it doesn't get any smaller and we don't see a three quarter view of it. Another way of representing it with no perspective would be in an angled view, but without any of the three sets of parallel lines converging towards anything. Isometric illustrations employ this stylized approach. If you make objects get smaller as they go further back, that's using a bit of perspective, but not using any convergence. A small step further would be one point perspective where only one set of the three sets of parallel lines on our box would converge to a vanishing point. It takes a step in the direction of using converging lines, but there's only one set of parallel lines that are converging and when they're not directly in front of the vanishing point, it becomes more obvious that it's not perfect. Two point perspective goes another step in the direction of describing the world and uses two sets of the parallel lines on our box converging towards two vanishing points. If the box is sitting on a flat ground plane, those vanishing points will be on the horizon line. If the box is hovering above the ground plane but is parallel to it, then also those vanishing points will be on the horizon line. The third set of parallel edges, which would be the up and down ones, we just leave those as parallel lines. Okay. Three point perspective adds another vanishing point either above or below our object. And if our object is below the horizon line, then your third vanishing point goes way off the bottom of the page. And if your object is above the horizon line, then your third vanishing point goes way above. Three point perspective is what you normally use when drawing storyboards, because for the most part, those are the kind of views that you're drawing. If you have a very toolbox which extends above and below the horizon line, then you're going to want to have a vanishing point that's far above the page and far below the page. Using straight lines, you'd have to have an angle on the horizon line where the converging lines from below met the converging lines from above, which is why I prefer to use long curving lines for that kind of situation. I go into curved lines versus straight lines in another lesson. So we can see that the development of perspective is an attempt by us to describe the world in ways that match how we feel we see it. 5. What Vanishing Points Do When Your Box Rotates Sideways: Let's take a quick look at how vanishing points behave when we have our box and we rotated a little bit. We'll start with a box, put our vanishing points here and here. We'll just draw our first box. And I'll just indicate the converging lines. So the parallel edges would head to the same vanishing point. So we would get this parallel edge to this one would be heading to the same vanishing point. So from there, we can work out how our box would look. I might as well draw in the rest of these lines just to make that clear. Okay. We also have a vanishing point down here, but it's a long way away, so these parallel edges would be converging down towards that as well. Let's put a box the same size as this one on top of this one and just rotate it a bit clockwise and see what we get. So from here, What we find is that these two vanishing points would slide over along the horizon line acting as a pair. We can see where they would be by extending that extending that. These are a new vanishing points for our box once it's rotated a little bit. We can work out where this top edge would be, and we can work out where this top edge would be heading towards the same vanishing points as their parallel counterparts on the bottom edge of the box. Same thing goes for the top edge, would go all the way to that vanishing point there and all the way to that vanishing point there. Let's say we wanted to rotate our box a little bit further around. We'll stick another box, the same size on top. Again, these two vanishing points will slide over a little bit as a pair. So this one would end up here. This one would end up like here. So from, we can work out where our other edges go. Okay. And I'll just put these lines in to demonstrate. So what we've learned here is that when our cube is sitting straight and flat on the ground and the ground is flat, as you rotate the box, the vanishing points just move in concert, boink over a bit, boink over a bit more. I will indicate that with a couple of arrows. And there is another vanishing point way below down there where these lines would converge. Okay. 6. How Many Horizon Lines in One Drawing?: I'd like to talk about the horizon line and already, I'll correct myself because instead of calling it the horizon line, it would be better calling it a horizon line. In this instance, it's the horizon line of the ground plane, and anything that is level with that ground plane would share that horizon line. So what do I mean by that? Let's put a vanishing point here and draw a rectangle on our ground plane. So let's Let's say we've drawn out this rectangle, it could represent a parking lot. That is flat and level, where you extend the two parallel lines here to the vanishing point to the point where they converge, gives you that vanishing point and it gives you the horizon line, anything level with that would share the same horizon line. For example, if this was a big hole in the ground and the bottom of the hole, was level with the ground plane, then that would share the same horizon line. And also, if you had a raised surface, like say it had legs that went up, and you were looking at the underside of say a table, This surface here is level parallel with this surface here and the ground plane. And so they all share the same horizon line. Now, if you had a table let's put a new table here, here or its legs. Let's say the front legs were than the back legs. So this surface is now not going to be parallel to the ground plane, and so it's going to have its own horizon line. So I'll draw red over the top of this just to demonstrate. So these two parallel sides would converge to a vanishing point here, and so we could figure out from that the new horizon line for this particular plane would be here. Horizon line for everything parallel with this plane is here, horizon line The horizon line for everything parallel with this plane would be up here. And the same thing goes for any direction that you tip a thing. Anytime a thing is at a different angle, a surface is at a different angle to something that already exists, it's going to have its own horizon line. Even if you have let's put a vanishing point here and a vanishing point here. Even if you have a rectangle drawn at a different angle, as long as it's flat on this surface, this ground plane, it will share the same horizon line. Likewise, up here, you could put a pair of vanishing points here and trace out a flat plane. And this new flat plane will be tipped at the same angle as this one because it shares the same horizon lane. Okay. Okay. Here's a quick example. If we want our city scape to belong to this horizon line here, and we want our spaceships to be banking and traveling at a different plane, then we just have a horizon line for the city scape, different horizon line for the spaceships, you could have spaceships at different angles with another horizon line. You could have 50 different spaceships all tilted and banked at different angles, each one of them would have their own horizon line that you could use to figure out their shapes. So what we've learned is that this horizon line, which we call the horizon line, we should probably just call a horizon line, but it is the horizon line of the ground plane and is shared with any other planes surfaces that are parallel to that ground plane, and any other surfaces that are tipped at a different angle would get their own horizon line. 7. Our Box on a Slope: So what if we want to sit our box on a slope instead of on our flat ground plane? There's a few things we have to consider. First of all, we'll make a floor plan for our wedge that will make up our slope. So we just use these vanishing points here on the ground planes horizon line, and we just make ourselves a slope like that? Now, this is going to go to a new horizon line, which would be above this one because the ground plane because it's sloping up? This would still use this one because it's parallel to to these so we can just drop that in there. So we've drawn ourselves a nice slope. Now we want to put our box on it. What we do is we think of this as our new ground plane. Maybe easier if you just turn your paper around. But we have to ourselves a box based on ignoring everything else and just treating this as our ground plane. So So what we could do is draw what feels about right for one of the sides. Then we can use that to figure out where our vanishing points would be. And then we make a new horizon line that extends between and beyond these two points here. Now we can in perspective, build the rest of this box. Any other boxes you wanted to put on this ground plane, you just use that horizon line. These vanishing points, if it's rotated at the same angle. If it's at a different angle, you just slide the pairs of vanishing points along the horizon line, the new horizon line. If you wanted three point perspective, you just drop your vanishing point for the box way down here and just slightly converge these lines towards that. Of course, this box might need some tape. To hold it in place since there's always a chance it could slide off. We've learned that when you place a box on a slope, you have to treat the slope as a new ground plane and set up the little perspective grid for the new box based on that. With a new horizon line, a couple of new vanishing points. Next, we'll take a look at what happens when this box is actually a building, you would have to make some adjustments for that. 8. Buildings on a Slope: What about if our box on a slope is a building? Well, the main difference being that the verticals would be perpendicular to the main ground plane, and we would draw box. Certain edges would share the vanishing point that's with the new horizon line for the slope ground plane. So that would be anything that's parallel to that. Then for the vertical lines, they would share the way down off the bottom of the page third vanishing point for this particular horizon line grid. And so The top of the box would also be using the main ground plane horizon line because the way we like to live is with floors and ceilings parallel to the nice flat ground underneath. That would be how we would figure that out. That's how you draw buildings on sloping ground. Okay. We've learned that when you draw buildings on sloping ground, we have to consider two ground planes. One is the ground plane of the top of the building and the other is the ground plane of the bottom of the building. If you were to put any divisions with windows and so forth into the building, you would use the main ground planes horizon line to figure that out. Another thing you could do is square off a patch of ground by using the horizon line of the main ground plane, level it so that it matches. So then we could. That's how you arrange a box that is a building on a sloped surface. 9. Stairs: So let's take a look at how we might do steps. We need a couple of vanishing points. So we could start with, we're going to need a slope. First thing you need when doing steps is a slope. So we'll make a little ground plane rectangle on the ground plane for our slope. Okay. Our slope wants to have a little flat bit, which is the first step. First, we'll draw a rectangle. The rectangle depending on what angle steps you want. If you want really steep steps, you want your rectangle box to be taller than it is long if the steps are going up this way. But if you want more normal looking steps, then you want it to be longer than it is high. We'll do that. Using these vanishing points, we will work out our rectangle box, Okay. That would be where we make our slope. We have the first step at the bottom. Then we also have to decide how many steps we're going to want, we'll do one, two, three, four, six, seven steps. We now have this first step. We can take it to a slope up to this point here, and then we can use this vanishing point to divide this box off into slabs, if you like. And we need another line that would be where our top step is. So we'll draw another one there. We'll do the same over here. We only really need the one there. What we then do is just plot in the side view of our steps. Using this vanishing point and whatever we're using for vertical, if we're in three point perspective, there'll be a vanishing point way down there. We just simply go from one to the next until we have drawn in all our steps. B, there we go, seven steps. Then all we do is using this line here. We just project all of these lines and where they intersect with this line gives you this point on each of the steps. We can go B bonk Okay. And likewise, we do the verticals. And then we just use this vanishing point to fill in the other bits. And then connect the dots really. Since I'm doing this all very free hand and not using routers and stuff. My steps are getting a little wonky in terms of the size of them. But you can spend a little more time on it and make sure that it doesn't do that. Anyway, with our top step, we want a little landing platform. We will use these vanishing points to work that out. Then we can draw a new area where we want the next set of steps to go up and let's make it longer again. Okay. Then on top of that. This is the sloping part, heading off to there, heading off to there, back over to there. This will be our slope for our next steps, bottom step there. Then we can decide how many steps we want to have here. Let's make this one, two, three, five. Using that. We can just divide actually this up into five, one, one, two, three, four, five. I could have projected through to there anyway, whichever way you choose, gives you five slabs, so you can draw your side view of the steps. So we go from here, we put our diagonal in. Use verticals. One, two, three, four, five, use this for there and just use that again. And we would have that down to the other side of that, so we'd have a line here. So, we're not going to see much sticking out there. There's our steps going in that direction. Again, we need to extend a little further, so we have somewhere to be and turn around. So we can continued. And we can have some more steps going up this way. So we'll draw another rectangle. This time, we'll take it above the horizon line. Still using these two vanishing points. And we'll take that we'll decide how many one two, three, four, five, six, and two seven again. So Yeah, we need another we need one of these here and one of these at the bottom. And then we just using this vanishing point. And what happens here is that now this line goes down a little bit because we're above the horizon line. One, two, three, four, five, we got six. Okay. And this is just a kind of quick down and dirty way to do steps that has come in extremely handy on many occasions. Okay. Okay. And again, we just extend this down to this so we'll see that the line is heading down slightly. So we stop seeing the top surface of the tread of the step once we get above the horizon line. So we can see it here, but not here. So there's a steps going in that direction. We'll draw that down to here, connect those Okay. M. Okay, so I can just draw over that with felt tip pen. Slope the middle bit down if you're doing old worn steps where the feet have worn away. So there we have a bunch of steps. 10. Evenly Spacing Things: Let's take a look at how to divide this piece of floor plane into four strips. The first thing you do is draw a line. If you have these vanishing points, obviously, you need those. You draw a line parallel to the ground plane. Okay. And then you divide that line into four pieces. I already marked off these four divisions on a little piece of paper here, just by folding it in half a couple of times. And then you extend to the vanishing point. And you sod in perspective four strips on your piece of ground plane. Now, if you wanted to do the same thing this way, but the convergence was taking this line too far off the side of the page that you could extend this line and then divide up like we did here. If that's not possible, where you just do this side first, and then you just draw a diagonal between the two points of that piece of ground plane. Then using this vanishing point, everywhere this line crosses one of these other lines, You just go over there like that. So we just learned how to divide up a flat plane in perspective. 11. Hills 1: There's a couple of useful tricks you can use to make it look like a road is going up and down. Even if you're just looking straight down that road, but to illustrate the principle, what I have here is a main ground plane with this change of elevation, so I can draw a road across it, and then I can show you what I mean. So we have a slope here and in order to draw to a vanishing point, we have to do instead of the vanishing point on the main ground plane, we have to put a new one that's higher up. So directly above it, we just put one up here, and that's our vanishing point for this sloping piece of road here. Okay. Then we can use this vanishing point for part of the road that is now parallel again to the main ground plane, and we could just connect the dots here. After we've connected the dots here, we can establish another vanishing point directly below for any other bits of road you might want coming down this slope that's heading in the same direction as that road, but going downhill. That would be your vanishing point right there. Okay. And for any boxes that are sitting on that slope for the top and bottom surfaces, edges, you could drive them to that as well. The things that are really useful to establish something being up or down hill is taking something that's a known vertical, and I could say we could use, for example, telegraph poles or something like that. We know they're vertical sides of buildings also. I'll put a building here. And so the top of the building goes to this vanishing point because it's parallel to the ground plane. The sides of the building are vertical because unless it's very unusual building. That's just something that we know, and it's predictable and we can use that as a visual cue. So Okay. So we use these telegraph poles and buildings to establish known verticals. Okay. So having established some known verticals and flat level planes, which would be if these buildings had pointy roofs, they have a sill around the bottom. Use those or flat roof buildings that we understand that's a flat plane, that's a vertical point surface edge. Now we contrast that with some things that are resting on surfaces that are not level to exaggerate or emphasize, I should say, the fact that this is not vertical and therefore is heading downhill or uphill. These lines would be heading up to this vanishing point here. This is kind of an exaggerated box a little over size for a vehicle, but this is what we're using to make the point. We use this vanishing point for edges that are parallel to what we have running along the ground plane, and we use this vanishing point down here for the bottom edge, which is parallel to this piece of road that's running downhill. Then this is what we're looking for is these verticals which are in contrast to what we know are truly vertical. We can barely see the top of this even though it's lower down than the top of this building because it's angled further down, that further emphasizes that it's on a slope. And then we can just draw another one on the level surface to contrast with these two. So we get the sense that things are behaving differently and that gives us the feeling of a slope going up or down. Okay. Another useful tool is when you want to emphasize the down hillnss is draw level tops of walls that kind of step down. Steps are always good for emphasizing, whether they're steps running down the side of the road that people walk down or a wall that's stepped like this. Either way, steps are your friend when it comes to emphasizing the down hillnss if you're in an area that doesn't have buildings, you can use tree trunks, natural things that indicate vertical and something sitting on the road to kind of counter that. All depends what's in your scene. You just have to figure out what you can use to create this effect to counter known verticals with things that are no longer properly vertical by virtue of the fact that they're on a slope. Okay. Another useful device is windows. And if you've got a nice downhill bit here and you want to emphasize that, put a window near it because window sills, every those window sills are parallel to the ground plane. Not to the slope, but you know, their level, basically. So we just draw ourselves a window in here, going to the vanishing point of the ground plane, and boom, that triangular shape there emphasizes and the same thing you can do here. And another good one is where you have a door, you'd want the bottom of the door to be level, so you might have to put your door door clean the same as windows. Do your door like this. And then we know we have this great big triangular shape here that you could use a step there so you could pull out a a triangular wedge that levels the entrance to the door, which emphasizes again that the bottom of the door is not level with the surface the building is on. Just look for those opportunities and take advantage of them. What we've learned is that to sell the idea of a surface going downhill or uphill, you need to contrast known verticals and known level surfaces with objects on the slope that would contradict that and then that sells the idea. Okay. 12. Hills 2 Looking Down (or up) the Road: Let's see how we can do the selling of down and up on a road that we're essentially just looking straight down. So we draw ourselves a piece of road heading to a vanishing point. But that vanishing point is not the main ground plane. Let's say the main ground plane is here. Let's put that in there. Our main vanishing point for that would be there. If we have a piece of road, say the road goes down and this vanishing point is lower, and then we have a flat piece of road that's heading to a normal vanishing point for the main ground plane. Then we want a piece of road that goes up. So we have another vanishing point a little higher and we just take a road up to that vanishing point. We can even take it beyond the main ground plane vanishing point because you could have a hill. I mean, the main ground plain horizon line is often obscured by bits of landscape that are higher than it and get in the way or if you're inside a building and there's walls in the way, it's not the edge of the table that you're sitting in front of that's the horizon line. It's not even the edge of the room. You often can't see the horizon line, so you just have to work around that. Here we have a piece of road going downhill, this is flat, and this is going uphill. How do we sell that? Well, the first thing we need to do is establish some verticals that we know exist. For that, I'm going to do some telegraph poles. I'll just put a telegraph pole here, and going to this vanishing point, I'll put another telegraph pole. Actually, this vanishing point would actually be if we push these would be more like up here. So this is our vanishing point for this piece of road. And so I can use that for my telegraph poles for the tops of them because these two telegraph pools are heading up this piece of road. Put another one up here. And then we can use this vanishing point for our telegraph pole here. And then we can have another telegraph pole on this piece of road and we can use this vanishing point. This will be a big thick telegraph pool very close to us. So now we have more of a sense. But that's not all we can do. Let's not forget that our main vanishing point of our ground plane is right here. So we'll put in some buildings and using this vanishing point. Just for this section that is parallel to the main ground plane, we will put in the bottom of the buildings. We can use this vanishing point for the tops of all the buildings. In fact, we want to because that helps us to sell what we're trying to sell. Now for the bottom edge of this building, we use this vanishing point because that's the vanishing point for the sloping down piece of road. And back to this one for the top of the building because that's how we That's how we're selling this. I'll put the edge of the building in here and we can put another building in and we're using this uphill section of road now, so I'll be using this vanishing point up here for the bottom edge of the building for the top edge of the building, I'll use this vanishing point. So we're going to have a vertical edge, and then that's going to go up there. Now we have some known horizontal and vertical edges and surfaces that we can contrast objects on the road to we can put in some cube truck type vehicles here. We want our verticals to not be vertical because we want the road to feel like it's heading down. We just exaggerate that. Emphasize that a little bit, so we'll put our truck in here and Use this vanishing point for the top edge. And again, we want this vertical to not be vertical like it is here, but to be more sloped this way. So already that looks like it's going downhill. And then we'll draw another truck. Down here and we'll just make sure that that is vertical and use the vanishing point for the main ground plane. So we see more of the top of it, more of the top of this one, which helps us to feel like this one is going down and this one is more flat. Then if we want one to look like it's going up, we use this vanishing point up here. We will do And our vertical, we don't want vertical we want it tilting back this way, so we just exaggerate that a little bit and head towards that vanishing point. You'd see more of the top still, so you'd make that even a little bit longer than here to get that sense. We can put in the sidewalk. Okay. And let's not forget that trick we can use with steps. So we can have a wall that is top surface of it is heading towards the vanishing point of the main ground plane, and then it drops down a bit. Then it heads there. And then it drops down a bit and it would continue going past that truck. Could do the same thing down here. Another useful thing is those windows, let's not forget about those. We use this vanishing point. Can put some windows in here. This just emphasizes the levelness put a door in. So nothing happening there. But over here, we'll put out window and then we notice that we've got more vertical space there than there, which helps to sell the idea that we're going downhill here. For our door, a really good one is the bottom of the door, needs to be needs a step to level up. So we can create this step which further enhances the feeling that this is not level, but this is. Likewise, we can put more windows and doors and things in over here. Put in a few paving slabs just for good measure. Why not add a few wheels to our vehicles, to help sell them a little bit. There we go. What we've demonstrated here is that by contrasting known verticals with verticals on a slope that aren't vertical, level planes with planes on a slope that aren't level that we can help sell this idea of the surface we're looking at being either heading downhill or uphill or being level. 13. Circles in Perspective: Ellipses and Cylinders: I used to have a horrible time with ellipses figuring out the exact right angle to put them at so that everything looked right. I mean, if you think of an ellipse as being on the end of a box and that each part of it touches the edge, you can get yourself in ellipse, but it doesn't necessarily look right and I would often find that I just really wasn't happy with my cylinders and the ellipses on the end of them. Until I discovered this great thing, which is the center line running through your cylinder, you, You just do exactly 90 degrees to that line, you draw another line, not in perspective or anything, just 90 degrees, and that is the long axis of your ellipse. Then all you have to figure out is how wide or narrow to make it. So now when I'm sketching a thing, you know, it might be a vehicle or whatever. But if I know it's got to have ellipses and I know that say wheels are going to be coming out here. I just do 90 degrees to these lines or the line that would be the center line and just draw my ellipse on there. Another good thing to be aware of is when you draw an ellipse in perspective, is at the center of it, you just push it a little further that way. If you're drawing a person standing in the middle of a circular arena of some kind or whatever. They need to look like they're in dead center, you just have to push them a little bit further back. That is because if you imagine that thing inside of a square, the perspective of the square would be if you did lines going from corner to corner, the middle of it wouldn't be halfway in terms of distance if you measured it with a ruler, but it would be halfway in perspective, so it's a little further towards the top. 14. Center Lines (Importance of): It's very important to pay close attention to center lines of objects that are symmetrical in order to keep track of good sense of perspective. It's very easy for the center line to creep too far this way in a sort of three quarter view. So just be very aware and mindful of that. They're especially important when you have surfaces that are curved. So for example, if So you can see the center line of an object that's curving convex way like this. The edge that's away from you. There's just so little of it that you actually get to see. Just this little bit here. It's surprisingly small, and it's very common to over emphasize that and end up with objects that are skewed because there's too much of them on the other side. M. In this instance, where you have a concave surface, the side that's closer to depending on the angle of the thing. But in this instance, you can see how little that we see of the surface. Again, it's surprising and a commonly made mistake is to over emphasize that and end up with a skewed object as a result. It's particularly useful when you're say a figure. So we have a front of the figure and a side and the center line. So you can see how little of the figure beyond the center line you actually see as it curves away from us, even if it doesn't curve all that much, it's still. So you can see we have a front side, a side, and the center line. And if I just say draw a line indicating the full width of a thing. You can see how far across the center line often is. It's just one of those things that until you actually start paying attention to, it's very often, it appears too far over this way, so there's too much of the other side and like I said, skewed as a result. Okay. So just having a sense of where the center line is enables you to get to where you're going pretty quickly. You don't need too much to quickly indicate what it is you're drawing. Once you have a good understanding of where the center line is and then how to position the other elements around it, bearing all that kind of convex and concave stuff in mind. We've learned to be very aware of the center line and to be very careful not to let it drift one way or the other and end up with a seed looking object as a result. 15. Reflections in Water, Mirrors, etc: So let's take a look at reflections. If we have ourselves, we'll start off with a reflecting pool here and we have let's say, cylindrical object sticking out of the water. The reflection of it where the object and the surface that's reflective meet. You can consider that a center line and consider this just half of the object and just draw the other half of it as if you were drawing an object irrespective of thinking about reflections. You'd continue it down. And in perspective, this would get a little bit smaller, so it would basically look like that. So what if our cylinder is poking out of the water at more of an angle, let's say sticking out like this where it and the water intersect, we think of that as the a center line that's wrapped around an object that is symmetrical. So we just draw the rest of the object in perspective. So we would just draw it this way and we wouldn't see the top surface because if it was a symmetrical object that we were seeing the other half of because it's pointing it would be facing away from us more, so it would look like that. What if our object is sort of not directly contacting the water, but sitting on something else. So let's say we've got a little island type of thing with our cylinder sitting on top of that. How would that look? Well, if we consider this to be the center line around our object that is symmetrical, if we were going to draw the rest of the object, you would immediately realize that this is all sloping kind of into view, and anything on the other side of the center line would be sloping away from us out of our view. So you would hardly see any any of that. Then this being this high above the center. Then you'd have to imagine it sticking out the bottom side of this looks like a bar of soap or something. Then you'd have this thing sticking out down here. I would still be getting slightly smaller in perspective as you went away from us. Okay. And let's say we've got a barrel floating in the water. Let's say our barrel is so there's a little bit of barrel under the water, but we don't see that. So what we think of is this is the center line of an object that is symmetrical and we just draw the rest of the object in. So we have in perspective, we would have the rest of this object kind of point drawing the ellipse. Like this. If you had a empty barrel that was, let's say, Well, if it was exactly halfway filled with water, it would look like this. Let's say the water would be like this would be the reflection. This would be the halfway line around our object and the reflection would be obviously everything below that. But let's say this was sticking up a higher or let's have it sunk down a lower. We can have That's a barrel. Now we have to think of this as the halfway center line, so we draw the rest of it like that. So assuming the water is something you don't see down into, and all we're seeing is the reflection, that's what we would see. Okay. That's how you deal with objects reflected in a flat surface. Let's say we have an object sitting on a table in front of a mirror, but the mirror is not vertical, same as our object. It's tilted towards it like this. So we can draw that there all the way up there. How do we deal with that? The first thing we have to do is we're going to make our object reach the mirror. And this is our new shape. And this new shape is what we're going to we're going to treat this as the sort of line around the middle of it. Okay. And draw the other half of it. So it's a symmetrical object. So we have to draw it because this is hitting an angle. We have to draw a similar angle on the other side. And likewise with this, we have to draw that up at an angle two. And so this would be represented by this. And so we have a sort of invisible portion, which we had to extend to meet the mirror. We have the same thing happening on the other side, and then we have our actual box here. So this is what it would look like. So a reflected box. Would be here. This part represents this part which we had to extend to get it to meet the mirror. We have to draw the whole shape. Let's say we have the edge of the table, make the table small. I may want that to be part of our reflection as well. It would be parallel to this edge, so it would go to here, it would go up here and it would be a little bit over here, parallel to this. Okay. Okay. And we can throw in a put shading down this side of our box on our reflection. And we can have a bit of cast shadow coming over here. And in our reflection of the box on the table coming over here. That's how you handle that. Here's something that could be fun. We'll draw ourselves a person. And they will be looking at a reflection of themselves. So we'll just draw them over here a little smaller. Halfway between them would be the center of a mirror. We'll put a mirror here. We'll make it a wide mirror and you'll see why it needs to be a wide mirror in a minute. Maybe we'll make it a little bit taller as well, so it doesn't go all the way down to the feet. Now this person here it's going to be standing on a platform. And that platform. Is going to be sticking out of some water. This is where we consider this to be the center line of our symmetrical object and we're only seeing half of it here. Now we just have to draw in the other half of the symmetrical object which is stuck onto the underside. The feet would be on this surface down here facing that way. So we would just draw them there, that would be the head, there's our person and their reflection. We can draw that in real quick. And then we have to have a reflection of the mirror, so we can drop that down, say the point that's between the two of them. We can draw in we'll indicate where this other person's head would go. Just using perspective here and they would be his feet, his feet would be about that far apart, so the feet would be there. Okay. And the mirror would be it's a bit higher than feet and it's halfway between this guy's feet and this guy's feet, so about here, but a bit higher in this direction, so we can make it here. So this is the mirror. But as you can see, all we're going to see is just his face reflected in the mirror. So for a bit of artistic license, I'm going to draw his face very artfully and his shoulders and draw the mirror, just cheat a little bit. Artists cheat a bit all the time. Okay, so I'll get my lines kind of paralleling these other lines. So there we have a framed mirror, and we can put the mirror on sticks coming out of the water as well. And that's how we handle him reflecting in the mirror straight ahead, and then the whole business reflected in another mirror underneath. 16. Panoramas: So here's something quite interesting. If you're standing on the side of, say, a road and you're looking dead straight ahead, you see the other side of the road in front of you. If you then turn 90 degrees to your left and you look at the horizon, you'll see the road that you're standing on the edge of disappearing to the horizon like that. If you then turn back to facing where you were before, which is directly across the road and then turn another 90 degrees and look in that direction, you'll see the road disappearing to the horizon straight in front of you there as well, which means that if you're wanting to connect all these things up in a single drawing, you're going to have to curve. And the road could going to have to curve that straight road into the road coming towards you when you're facing to the left and facing to the right. So you would end up with something like this. Okay. And that would look a little bit strange, but it works when you're doing a panning shot. So there's the horizon line, there's the road you're looking at. You turn and face to the left, you see that. You look back the other way and you see that. And you can draw other buildings in there as well. If for instance, you wanted to have a bunch of houses, along this road, you'd put your vanishing point, say here and do a bunch of houses and you'd have other vanishing point here. So we could have and we'd see less and less as we turned further, the houses would get smaller, as they head towards this vanishing point and the same goes in this direction. Then we draw the roof of our houses, and the points would form a line that goes towards that vanishing point. I guess you imagine little beach houses. Same thing goes in this direction. And then you just use this vanishing point to work out the other parts. So you can see when you pan across. If you're only looking at a small piece of this at a time, the curves won't seem strange. And when you pan across, it will just look like you're looking from one end down to the other end of a road that you're standing on the edge of. Useful for anematics. Yeah, you can run into a lot of trouble if you try and do everything perspective wise with straight lines. Quite often, curves are a lot. We can put some clouds in too. Plus, you can always draw the houses in onto this side of the street, too. Like why is over here. Flow in a few potato cars. In order to get an effect of where you're looking say north and then you look more east and then you look more south if you're standing over on the west side of the street. In order to accomplish that and make it feel realistic, you're going to need curved lines. You're not going to be able to do it with straight lines, which is why trying to do perspective with just always rulers and straight lines can get you into a real mess, especially when you're doing wide panning shots. The curvature of objects within the scene when you zoom in on them is less pronounced, but when you pull back and see the whole thing, wider than you would ever see it in a single view, that's when you see how necessary it is to use curves in order to maintain that realism as you pan from left to right and vice versa. 17. Straight vs Curved Lines: Sometimes it's better to use curves and straight lines. I like to use curves when I'm trying to convey that. I'm very close to a thing because it enhances the feeling of a wide angle lens. And since I'm a storyboard artist, conveying a sort of lens type feeling is sort of in my DNA, I suppose. Another time that curves are kind of essential is if you're doing a panorama, we have 180 degree turning left and right lesson. So I would check that out because this might not make any sense to you without without looking at that. Another time that curves are great is when you're wanting to create the feeling of say security camera footage and stuff like that. Everything around the edges has a very bowed look. It's fun to get yourself a wide angle lens and just hold it up to your eye and wander around and feels a little disorienting, but you get the hang of how to curve the environment that you're drawing to feel like it's being seen through that kind of a lens. There's another good time to go with curves. When I'm drawing storyboards and drawing interiors inside a room, and I free hand draw it, it just naturally seems to have a certain curvature to it because I guess I'm just trying to see it in my mind through the lens of a camera. When I then would try and draw over the top of it for a more finished version and use of ruler for edges of rooms and stuff. It just took away from it and I ended up not doing that after a while, because I just prefer the look of it. It's just a bit more cinematic. I prefer slightly curved lines over really straight lines a lot of the time. Sometimes straight lines are just exactly what you need. But other times, you want to use a curve. 18. Fields of View Explained: Wide, Normal and Long: Let's take a quick look at the difference between wide normal and long lens views of our box. If we park our box in front of the camera with one edge facing directly towards the camera, we know that these are 90 degrees. These two sides are heading off at 90 degrees. If our camera lens allows lighting from a wider angle than 90 degrees and we were to draw a line across here, we can see the vanishing points would be inside the edge of the frame, and it would look something a bit like this. This is a horizon line and we put our vanishing points inside and we project a few lines. This is what the top of our box would look like, very distorted perspective, and that's a wide angle. If we try a more normal angle, we'll put our box in front of our camera again. Again, we have 90 degrees between these two lines if we project them out. This time, instead of bigger than a 90 degree angle, we'll have smaller than, so it'd be more like 45 degrees coming into the lens. We can see that if we drew a line across that the vanishing points would be outside the edge of frame, and that would look a bit like this. So we'll put our vanishing points there and there and we'll draw ourselves our box. And it's more normal looking. It's not so extreme. That's more of a normal lens. If we were going to do a long lens, we put our camera down here, and we'll move our box far away because when you're using a telephoto or long lens, normally you're filming something that's far away. So in this instance, I'll use this straight edge. So we can see that the These lines project out to go way beyond the sides of the frame. So if we were to see what that might look like, we would end up with something like horizon line. Our vanishing points would be just miles away. So we'll just put one all the way over here, one all the way off the page, miles away over there, so we'll draw a square or at the top of our box. And so what we end up with are lines that they do converge, but the convergence is so slight that you hardly even notice it and everything flattens out and looks very perspectively, not very distorted at all. So that's what happens with a long lens or if you prefer to call it a tele lens. So we've learned that when the camera allows light in from wider than 90 degrees, the vanishing points of our box when one corner is facing directly towards camera inside of the edges of frame, and that's a wide lens. And when the angle is narrower than 90 degrees and our box is one corner pointing towards us, the vanishing points outside the edges of frame. That's a normal lens. And a long lens or telephoto lens is when the angle is very narrow and the camera is usually very far away from the object that you're filming and that's a long or telephoto lens. 19. Wide, Normal and Long in Practice: Let's look at wide normal and long lens versions of a little scene where you've got two people sitting at the table and two people kind of body guards or something standing on two of the corners. So we'll kick off with a wide lens, and we'll put our camera where we can get a look down the middle of everything and see all the people in frame and the whole table. So let's It's drawing the table. We need to make make sure there's enough room for the tallest standing people. So we see this one here. Okay. And this one back here. So we can tell already that our horizon line is a little lower than the tops of these people. Then we have our seated people and their heads up here. About belly height. For our normal lens, we'll keep looking straight through the middle of everyone. But because the angle is narrower, you have to be a little further back with the camera, in order to accommodate everybody, we're going to have to be back here somewhere. And so that would look like, we need to make sure we have enough room above all of this for the tallest of our characters, can have their arms folded across their chests again. And then there's one of our characters. So horizon lines around here, so we have to make sure these two heads are about the same height. Okay. Unless one of them is way taller than the other one sitting down, so that would be a normal type of a view. If we're going to do a long lens, then again, we'll keep center of the view going right through the middle of these people here. And our camera would be way back over here somewhere. And the look you'd get would be very different than a wide or a normal What? Because everything is so much more compressed. The table the lines would feel more parallel than converging to the top of the table. Again, making sure we leave plenty of room for the people to be standing around. The difference in size is not going to be so great. The all the way back here and the person all the way forward here are pretty much the same size because we're so far away, the difference between that and that from back here is almost nothing. Was from here, this person would be way bigger than this one, as you can see. So that would be a long or telephoto lens. So it's important to make sure you can fit everything table tops of heads into frame when you're figuring out shots like this. Then once you've figured out where the heads go, you can just work out the tilt and horizon line from that. What we've learned is that the closer you are to thing or a group of things and the wider the angle ives of the light that's coming into the lens. That gives you your wide angle type shot. A normal view is more like somewhere in the realm of 45 inch degrees and the camera is a little further back, that gives you the normal type view and the long lens or telephoto type view, the camera is way far back, and the angle of view is very narrow indeed. 20. A Full 360 Panorama: If you're standing facing ahead and you're looking at an image that extends so far out to the sides that you can wrap it around the back of you and seamlessly connect both ends, you can look at a drawing of a panorama that goes 360 degrees around you. Just to keep it simple, we'll have our person standing in the middle of a road, dead straight road just goes from one side to the other, and we'll say that our person is standing in the middle of that road facing east. And lining that road on both sides are just a row of sort of little beach houses or something. So if you turn to the left, you'll be now heading or facing north. You don't move, you just turn. You turn 90 degrees to the left, you're looking north, and that's what you'd see is just the road disappearing to the horizon line. The same thing would be the case if you were facing south and if you were facing west, you'd basically see the same thing as you're facing east because we've got the same houses running down both sides of the road and the road is just a straight line. So for the grid for this to keep things simple, we'll just keep the verticals straight up and down, no converging there. Then we use curved lines to connect the North point and the south point, the vanishing points north and south and we use another set of curves to connect the vanishing points east and west. If you were standing in the middle of a cross roads, you'd have corners of buildings facing you, you'd have to use those curves to figure out where the corners of the buildings are and use one set of curves for one side of the building and another set of curves for the other side. So there's one way of doing a 360 degree panorama where you could stand in the middle of it and turn yourself around. 21. A Curvilinear Perspective Grid: Here's a pretty small drawing I made, which I've blown up on a photocopier so you can see what I was aiming for. It's a 360 panorama, and also you can look up to a certain extent down. And it all looks very weird until hopefully, when you push in a little closer and then we take a little tour. So you can see the horizon line there on a motor bike. There's like a moving stairway that heads down to the harbor. And if we look a little further forward, we can see a guy here in his taxi, having a look at his phone. If we go back up to here and then turn right, we see a street that only goes over so slightly up hill. But we can look up anyway and see some buildings and some birds and Mulbor man on the side of a building. And we come all the way back down again. And if we look up if we look down here, we see a woman walking across the street and she is now opposite where we started from, and she's looking uphill along that moving walkway. So we'll just do a quick at Southwest. That's looking north. If we look to the east, we're seeing up that road there. If we look to the south, we're seeing up hill up the moving walkway to the very tall buildings and the birds flying off in the distance. If we go round to the wet, we go up another road. And then we come down and we see a motorcyclist and there we're facing north again with the harbor in the distance. Well, here's my drawing. I made a copy and stitched the two of them together so that I could go across the road that runs west without running into the edge of the page. You can see the horizon line and the eye level, a couple of cars high. I also just jotted down there the northeast south and west positions. I kept the verticals vertical rather than converging them to points above. Just seemed like it would be a little bit simpler since things were getting a little bit confusing enough with all those curved lines there. There's the ones that connect north to south and they're the ones that are used on certain sides of the buildings, and then another set of curved lines connecting east to west to use on the other sides of the buildings and also on the edge of the road and pavement and stuff like that. And so when you add the verticals in, that's pretty much what your grid looks like. I kept it very loose. I just lightly sketched out some curves where I needed them and had that all kind of bearing in mind while I was drawing it. I used to live in Hong Kong, so I just thought it would be fun to see what I could remember and incorporate it into a drawing that allowed you to rotate 360 degrees. 22. Mind Training Via Memory Drawing: So drawing this from memory isn't actually quite as hard as you might think. You just have to start with all the big things and then work your way down. And so when I was sitting here, the first thing I figured was I'm sitting inside of a cube which kind of runs up to that point there, goes over there, and then there. And then it was a little longer than a cube, so it's a cube and a half. So to the end wall there, you're basically looking at a cube and a half and everything on the table, I've made previous drawings of by just studying and seeing how well I can draw them when I get home and then, you know, seeing how badly I did when I go back and notice the mistakes next time. Interestingly, the cup that I use every single day for years and years and years to the point where I've worn off all the rubber on the handle. My first go at drawing it. It was pretty awful. I mean, I was concentrating on everything other than this cup. So it's not a question of just memorizing everything you see around you as a matter of course, you actually have to really concentrate. And if, you know, if you try and draw the dashboard of your car without looking at it first, even though you see it every day, you'll probably do a horrible job of it or any other thing that you use every day, if you don't drive, you might just I don't know, your computer keyboard or anything really. Anything you see every day, but you don't pay any attention to. You will probably have a hard time drawing it. So all these different elements I've drawn before, and these chairs are the ones in that room there. And this is that room there. In fact, that little tiny figure there is where I was sitting when I drew this one and I would be sitting about exactly there. To draw this one. Yeah, you know, once you've divided up your square, you just kind of figure, there's a countertop here, it is pushed in further on this side to make room for the legs. Not so much the other side because it's full of cubby holes. There's an area here to prepare pies. There's a cooler that has pies in it. There's something up here with more pies and stuff on shelves and plates on shelves. Then once you start thinking How am I going to remember that there's these lights here. You just remember, that light is pointing at the breakfast specials board. These lights are pointing so the customers can see what's going on in here. And then you just kind of add it all up as you go sort of thing. Bucky was doing something there for a while. He was wandering around a lot, too, and I did notice that he kind of holds one hand behind his back when he walks a lot, which I wanted to draw, but in the end, I just did this. And there's like a T shirt hanging on a pipe through there, people having their breakfast in there. And this woman here, actually, I cheated. She was at the post office, the day I drew this or the day before. She was standing in front of me. This guy I just made up. There was a guy sitting here, but he was blocking out too much of this, so I didn't bother drawing him. And then when I was memorizing these lights and stuff, I was just imagining that to be like a UFO bottom of a UFO with the legs sticking down and the other half of the UFO kind of hanging down underneath it kind of just just ways to kind of remember the weird shapes that things are. And these pictures, I didn't pay any attention to what art was on the wall. Harry rotates constantly different artists. So there would have been stuff in these frames, interestingly, didn't pay any attention to the actual up. So, there's another picture frame there, so should probably draw something in there. Okay. And I think I noticed that there was like a thermostat on the wall or something kind of around there. So I just stick something in there. Yeah. I mean, and then you just sit there waiting for your breakfast, just memorizing and memorizing and memorizing. And for instance, this large coffee pot that they keep over here. I just thought, well, how does it differ from my cup of coffee pot? And the main difference was that one's fat at the bottom and mine's fat at the top. The handle on that one is kind of angled sharply on the inside and curved on the outside, mine is more the opposite. So that's all I remembered about that. And actually, having looked at mine again since I got home, the handle actually comes out not from the top there, but from here. So, you know, you'll notice loads of things that you mess up and get wrong. And then the next time you go back to a place you can just, you know, fill in the blanks kind of thing. Also, if this weird perspective is designed so that you can move the camera over it and it looks like kind of normal. Wherever the camera is. I'll do that in a second, so you can see. But this curve here, as you can see, this curve in curves bode that way. This one should have been bow that way as well, so I kind of messed up there. And these are blinds Because a friend of mine sits here and has whatever meal once a week, every week. I did actually showed him this one and said if you can guess where it is, and I was a bit disappointed. He didn't know it was Harry's because he goes there every week, but then he said, well, he always sits in that room over there. So this time, I've drawn that room over there, so hopefully he'll recognize it and make me feel better. Anyway, yeah, I guess that's about all there is to say about that. So now I'll do the little moves the camera over everything. So I'll start with my cutlery. Okay. And the idea being that wherever you go with the camera, it looks like you're just casting your gaze around the room. And the perspective should work okay for that even though it looks kind of weird. When you see it in a wide shop. Okay. It wasn't very busy, so there weren't too many people sitting on these chairs, but Yeah. And I also memorize these lights that the lights were halfway between head height and the ceiling and there was two groups of two of them and, you know, all that kind of thing. And these window framees it's always good to boxify them a little bit, just put lots of indentations in there and gives them a little bit more reality. Oh, and these chairs are different than all the other chairs I've drawn from Harry so far. So I made a point of remembering the weird bend on the back legs and stuff like that. They should probably be a little bowed more back of the chair. But anyway. I will have another look at the next time I'm there, and I should probably say that I don't really study things like this when I'm somewhere with someone. I just happened to be there on my own. Otherwise, I'd be very dull company indeed. So there you go. All right. Cheers. Okay. 23. Class Project and Thanks!: Okay, we're done. You've made it to the end. Now it's time to apply what you've learned and make a few class projects. You can make lots of drawings where you just put one thing you've learned into each one, or you could make some drawings where you cram a few in or one drawing where you try and put literally everything in. They can be really loose, quick sketches or finished illustrations entirely up to you. If there's anything else on your mind, you can post a discussion, feel free to leave a review. You can find me online around here and there, and thanks again for taking my class.