Three Point Perspective Made Easy for Urban Sketchers

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Perspective. Now, if you're an urban sketcher or a sketcher looking to improve your skills and three-point perspective and vertical perspective are two techniques you'll definitely want to understand. Not only do they help create enticing, captivating, and 3D images, they're also really interesting challenges to apply ourselves to you as aspiring sketchers. In this class, I really want to give you my framework for understanding these concepts and how I think about them and apply them to my art and give you all the tools you need to go out and immediately start feeling happy in this world of perspective, particularly with these interesting vertical perspective. My name is Toby and I'm known as tobyurbansketch on Instagram, YouTube, and of course here on Skillshare. My style of art is loose, it's splashy, it's got wobbly lines, but I enjoy myself and it's based in a grounding of theory by having that little grounding theory and knowing just enough. I can manipulate things and I can ignore the theory and I can do things which are pretty experimental, but that still work because I understand why I'm doing them. In this class, I want to show you how I do that. We'll start by looking at the basic theory of perspective. We'll then apply that to three-point perspective and analyze some photos to work out where the perspective is coming from and where their different vanishing points are and of course, we then have our final project. Now we'll do this through four different stages. Firstly, looking at a pencil sketch to get those structural lines in, and again, how we find and simplify perspective down to just three points. We'll add some ink on finding the bits which interest us working out a little bit more about our composition before splashing on the colors. Colors doesn't mean we stop thinking about perspective and I'll talk to you about exactly what I mean. How on earth can we use colors to enhance perspective? Finally, we finish off with a few splashes and a nice little bit of old pen work. I'd love you to get involved, to share your project, to ask any questions you have and I'll make sure to come back and answer them. Please do also find me on Skillshare, follow me, and join in with other classes if you like the look of them, or find me outside on Instagram, YouTube, or on my website. Most of all though, let's have a little bit of fun with this class three-point perspective sketching, and let's see what we can do with it. [MUSIC] 2. Supplies: Hello everyone. Now, it is time to have a little think about the supplies. Don't worry, there's nothing too clever and nothing too fancy, and be flexible. You don't need to go out and buy a lot of things just to do this class. What I happen to be using today is a mechanical pencil and a couple of fine liners. Now, the fine liners are waterproof. That's quite important because I'll be adding watercolors after, and I got them in a thin size 0.5 and a quite thick size, 0.5 millimeter. It's quite fun to have a couple of sizes because it gives you a bit more variation in your line quality. The paper I'm using is a simple part of A4 paper, which is cold pressed 300 g/m² watercolor paper, as you can see by Daler Rowney, and it's just student grade and for sketching and making love fun experiment with things. Student grade paper is plenty good enough. My watercolors are here. Now, these are the same work colors I always use for almost everything. There's 14 colors in here, but we're not using 14 colors. The ones we will use are a bit of cobalt blue, a bit of a man orange, which is a nice red color. Some Hansa yellow, little bit of quinacridone gold as well. Then we'll just be using a couple of darker colors. I happen to use a CPR, a indigo and the moon glow and eat Perlin violet, today. I will talk you through these colors as I use them for my final project and they're just ideas. So again, don't need these specific colors, but use your own. Do some mixing, experiment and have a bit of fun. Lastly, there's just the bits that we always forget, but obviously quite important. I've got a really big jug of water. I use a one liter pot so I've got loads of water to play with. I use a towel or some kitchen roll just to mop up the water from my brush, keep it nice and clean. I also put things on a drawing board as when I paint so that I can masking tape down the edges and keep it nice and flat, and in case you're interested, I'll do some demos just in a normal A5 sketchbook today. And that is literally everything that I'm using today. With that, let's get into the lessons in proper. 3. Key Concepts: [MUSIC] Now, this first lesson is very short and it's a revision of theory type lesson. We're going to have a look at basic principles of perspective to make sure that we've got a grounding going forward where we're going to make things more complicated and more fun by thinking about that vertical perspective. In this first lesson, we're going to cover three key points really quickly and they are the key points of perspective. Horizon line, vanishing points, and lines of perspective or structural lines. Now, the horizon line is a line which is level with our eyes. Everything at eye level in a scene will be on this horizon line. The vanishing points for horizontal perspective will then also sit on this line. Now, they might sit on this line on your page or they could be a long way off your page. It could be miles off your page. It depends on exactly how steep the perspective is. From these, if we say that our vanishing points are on the page just for demonstration purposes, you can build up a box for example or a 3D object. If we draw in a vertical line in the middle of the box, we could then build in our structural lines or our lines of perspective. They are straight lines which come from the vanishing point and go outwards. This is two-point perspective. The vertical lines in the scene are all vertical. What we could now do is instead of having this as a box, it could suddenly become a block of flats or house or something like that. What's going to happen is as we go up and up the windows and things like that, we'll angle so these tops of the windows are all sitting on lines of perspective. They'll be another line coming down like this. All of these lines of perspective are coming down to the vanishing point. Like that, you can build up using horizon line, using structural lines, or vanishing. At your vanishing points, you can build up your scene. That is the basics of perspective. In vertical perspective, things start to change. So we still have these vanishing points but now our vertical lines are no longer vertical. In the next lessons we're going to look at why that is, we're going to look at how to work with that, and then of course we're going to do an example or two. [MUSIC] 4. Adding Vertical Perspective: [MUSIC] With that basic grounding out of the way, we can now move on and start thinking about three-point perspective. With three-point perspective, we're going to take our two vanishing points in our horizon line and we're going to add a third vanishing point, which is somewhere up there, somewhere off our page, usually, and above us. To have a look at this, we're going to do it practically, so there's a reference photo that is in the class resources and we're going to have a look at that reference photo and I'm going to annotate and scribble on it and we're going to see exactly where we find a third point of perspective. Let's have a look at this photo and workout where we can find our third point of perspective. Now, to show you it's got two points of perspective, let's just first start by mapping that out really quickly. We can find our horizon line by tracing all of these people's heads through the scene. We know if we can draw a line and hopefully you can see that that quite comfortably covers everybody's head. That's our flat horizon line. Then we've got all of these lines in the scene so we can trace these, and just by finding a few of them, we'll be able to find our vanishing point. Our vanishing point, as we discussed, may not be on the page, so on this side it's probably just here, isn't it, just off the page. On this side, it's going to be probably a long way off the page. But we can still see these lines are slipping down and probably what, 50, 60 centimeters over that way will be our vanishing point. We've also got other sloping line somewhere. We haven't actually got many vertical lines in this scene which are actually vertically going straight up. If we actually start just tracing out some of these lines, we can see that one's going to slightly to the left, this one slightly less, so this one's going a long way off to the left, really angling. If I just taken the photo wonky, or maybe I've taken this photo a little bit wonky, but then if we look up at this side here, it slopes off to the right. What becomes evident is actually we're going to have all these lines meeting somewhere way up here. Way up off the top of the screen. That's because we have another point of perspective. We have a vertical point of perspective way up here. I've got another example to show you so that we can see that this isn't just in this photo and actually you'll recognize it in all sorts of photos. In this scene, we've got a tall building and again, we trace all these vertical lines. We find the slope up and then we can take a step back and if we just simplify those lines a little bit, we can find sure enough what we've got is a vertical point of perspective which is some way up the page. [MUSIC] 5. How Position Affects Vertical Perspective: [MUSIC] Now I want to have a little chat to you about how our position affects vertical perspective and just how that might relate to how we choose to compose our image. We're going up for a close-up view of something or distant view. How does that feel and why does it look different and feel different? I really quickly again, wanted to just explain and show you why sometimes vertical perspective is so obvious and sometimes it's really not. A nice example would be to take, let's say, a horizon scene from a city. If we just doodle ourselves a little horizon and let's say we're looking at this from miles away. There are classic prints and sketches that you get. What you'd find is basically all of the walls, all the skyscrapers are looking basically vertical so there's not really any perspective at all. Certainly not going up. But suddenly you get really close to one of those buildings and it looks more like this. You could probably not even fit the whole thing into your field of vision and all the windows going up are really steeply angled as well. Up here, really thin windows, down here, thick but with really steeply angled sort lines. Why is that? Why is this happening? Well, it's all to do with the angle of vision, different angle, so confusing but bear with me and I should hopefully make this clear. Let's say we've got this scene. If I just draw one of these skyscrapers here and we're looking at this. When we're looking at this scene, we're standing here, absolutely miles away. The angle of vision, so the angle from our eyes to the top is quite low. This is the angle that we're worrying about. It's what? Ten degrees. It might even be one degree if you're looking at something 100 meters high from five kilometers away, for example. But when we're close like this, if we're all the way up here, our eyes are still at the same height. But suddenly this angle of vision is enormous. This is almost 90 degrees. The closer you get so the more this angle of vision changes, the steeper the perspective will be. The further away you get, the flatter that that perspective becomes. That helps us think about how we are framing a scene. For example, if we're doing a lighthouse, if we want to draw it as a flat distant object, we think about how we frame it within our scene and we frame it as a small object. If we want it to have loads of perspective, it's going to feel claustrophobic because to be really angled, to have massive perspective, you have to be really close to it. It has to feel your vision. Suddenly we've got this lighthouse which maybe can barely fitting into our page. We certainly can't see the top and the bottom. We just see there's a small window here and it becomes this huge part of our vision. Using perspective is changing the feel of the scene, especially with something like vertical perspective, where it implies being close or being far away from it. Hopefully, now we've covered the basic theory ideas understanding, which means we can jump straight in to doing a couple of examples sketches, and then our final project. [MUSIC] 6. Warped Perspective - A Quick Sketch: [MUSIC] We've talked a lot now about perspective, how to do it. Why this? Lots of theory and a little bit of practice as well. But this lesson, I want to just turn it on its head and go, now that we understand vertical three-point perspective, what happens if because we know it, we change it, we make it wrong. Actually just show you really quickly with a little sketch. Again, there's a reference photo in the class resources which you can have a play with. But what happens if we invert it? We can do this because we understand it. Now we can make it have more character, have more fun. Let's have a little play. Before we get started with our final project, which will be about three point perspective, about creating a lovely sketch from three-point perspective. As with all other forms of perspective and everything in art and certainly my style of art. To think of vertical perspective as your friend and your tool to do what you would like to enhance your art it's not a rule, but as soon as you are aware of it, you can use it, manipulate it. I'm going to do a little sketch with you now to the reference photo is up here and it's in the class resources fall. This is not the reference I'm using for my final project, but I would welcome you to join in and play with this photo with me as well. I'm just in a normal little sketch book here. Not waterproof paper just can do a lovely ink sketch here. We're going to play with the perspective, and we're going to see what we can do with it. Manipulate it to make it wrong, but make it interesting, and see what that does and see how much character that adds. Let's just start by bringing in the scene. We've got, if I come across a one-page, got a little tree here. Then we got these houses and things. This is going to lead us up very nicely to our church. You see really loose, really quick sketch the edge of our churches here. What we can see if we just have a look at it, what we sketch, we've got a definite bit of horizontal perspective and we the streets disappearing off here. Then with the church you can see it's got its own vanishing point off over there somewhere. We've got definite horizontal perspective and we can probably just make all these vertical lines flat. What we've done, we turn this background into a really quick for fun, loose one-point perspective, background to our focal point. Hopefully you can see that everything through sweeping off, going that way. Now if we look at the church, we can see the churches definitely got some vertical perspective. If we draw this line in, it's quite straight, but as you can over and over, it gets narrow in it means that the top, it's narrower than the bottom. But what if we don't want that to be the case? What if we want to make a feature even more so if this church, there are lots of lovely ways of doing this, but I'm going to say, what if we reverse perspective rather than ignoring it, rather than making it a two-point perspective or a one-point perspective scene where all our verticals come strange. Why don't we do something different? This line can stay strikes already turned it in, and then these ones can come out. Suddenly, instead of what should happen, so this should be getting narrower and narrower, but it's not at the top. What's happening is we're getting wider and wider. We can make a real exaggeration of that. Now, as you would see in reality at the top, it's more exaggerated, but we're exaggerating it the wrong way. We've got suddenly this building just getting wider and wider instead of narrow and narrow. Hopefully if I draw my little structural lines, they're doing something like this. We've always got a vanishing point down here instead of up there. It's not quite done here because the lines are bending because we're keeping the church some way in reality down here, but we could even do it with the doorway. We can bring that doorway and make it wide and just kept couple of these pillars in and they can have that same flow. We just get that flow going outwards. Finding these key features. In some ways are going to have to invent things because we're drawing in a way that doesn't exist, but it isn't totally not exist. All we're doing is taking perspective and stretching and bending it. Which is fine. Why is that fine? Because what we always do, even if we do three or four or however many points of perspective we find, we're still simplifying reality. Reality is we walk around with a constantly shifting perspective as we move. We've got a fisheye vision because we got spherical eyeballs. Everything we do to sketch is a simplification anyway. Warping it one way or another. It's still fine. We're still doing the same thing with a different decision-making process. What's the field? Just as we sketch this, or certainly as I sketch it and please do join in and have fun with this idea as well, if you like. What do you think the feel of this? Churches now that it's coming out of this, instead of being a flat object, instead of being a real hard and fast sketch, then we've got this out feeling. For me, it's adding character is drawing the eye. It's perhaps a little cartoony or illustrative, but it doesn't have to be. That's partly because I'm doing it so loose. What we've done is we've taken our awareness of perspective, understanding of perspective, and that has enabled us to manipulate it, to create something really interesting, really fun. We could do the same and warp some of these lumps as well. We've already got a lump coming in this side which is bent and warped anyway. Then we do the same in the background, these little ones. Now we've got this field. The long and the short of this little example sketch. I hope you have fun joining in with that as well. Do share your warping and you're having fun with things. The long and the short is it doesn't matter if you get perspective wrong. But understanding it and being able to do it does mean you can play, make those decisions and know what you're doing and create really interesting fields. This is my little example we've looked at catching it. Look forward to seeing your class projects if you want to do them. But without further ado, let's move on and we can start our final project together. [MUSIC] 7. The Final Project - Our Task: [MUSIC] So the final project will, of course, be a three-point perspective sketch. What I'd love you to do, if you're feeling up to it, is to join in and share yours in the class gallery at the end. To do that, you will find the reference photo that I'm using in the class resources. Of course, you're welcome to use another photo or go out a real own planner, on location urban sketcher and sketch your scene somewhere around you. I'll show you my whole process step-by-step, fully in real-time and talking about every decision I'm making as I go along. I'll start with a pencil sketch, getting those lines of perspective, getting those vanishing points, and analyzing how we're simplifying our scene. I'll add on some ink, little wiggly wobbly lines that outline the scene, but don't say too much and don't overdo it. We'll add on loose washes of color, keeping drama and variation, but again, not over complicating things and working out how we are using our colors to tell our story and to enhance that perspective before the finishing touches, some bolding and those little final touches of brighter color. Of course, adding our little signature at the end, being proud of what we've done, loving the mistakes as much as we love everything which went well. As I said, it will be amazing. When you're done, just take a quick photo, share it in the class gallery, and let me know how it went and let me know your thoughts and what went well and what you would like to try again or what you would do differently in the future. I'll make sure to come back and give you some feedback, some encouragement, and also answer any questions you might have either there or in the class discussion. So without further ado, let's get into the lessons and see how we're going to start thinking about our perspective. [MUSIC] 8. Step One - Pencil Structure: [MUSIC] Now it is in fact time for our final project. Now, this first section of the final project, I'm going to be doing a pencil sketch. Now, the reference photo, as ever in the class resources, so open that up and have a look at it. I'm going to be firstly focusing, with my pencil, on where are the vanishing points, or at least where are the key lines that we're constructing. If we just take a little moment before I get my stuff up, I can show you a digitally annotated version of the reference photo here. What you can see when we're looking for the vertical perspective is there's loads going on. If we just simplify that a little bit, we can get a feel for where our vertical vanishing point is. It's probably a page height away from the top of the tower. Keep that in mind as we go through this little sketch. That's the easy way of thinking about how high, how angled are our walls going to be. Let's just see how we do with our sketching. The first step is going to be a pencil sketch. I'm using a 0.7-millimeter mechanical pencil. I love a mechanical pencil because it's always sharp. As long as it's got leaded and we can always make it nice and sharp. You don't have to use a pencil. You don't have to start with this step, normally, we just go straight with the ink. But I think for learning perspective, for analyzing perspective, actually, it's really useful to start by using a pencil sketch. With our pencil, let's start mapping in some structural lines and seeing what we're going to do with our sketch to make it interesting. The first thing I'll do is turn this into a portrait because with the portrait sketch we will be able to make more of the vertical perspective. You can see the reference photo, we have a tower in the middle of it. Something in the middle of the focal point creates a little tension, and for me, not that enjoyable. So I'm going to shift it over. If we just squeeze our reference ratio a little bit, this is the composition I'm going to go for. Then from having worked that out, we can start by sketching in our key lines. We've got horizon line which is down here. You might notice that lots of people don't fit on that horizon line. The reason for that is two things. One, there's a very slight slope, but also a lot of those people in our reference are children and the children are shorter than me. Their heads are below the horizon line and it means that they are not fitting our horizon line rule. That had to be lower than it. But if you look at the back near the house, you'll see most people's heads and all the adults' heads in the foreground as well do fit on a nice line. There's our horizon line. We then got a slightly complicated horizontal perspective. We've actually got a vanishing point, which is this building on the left, and that's going in like this, something like that anyway. We then go to our tower which is about here, and we can get in that line there, there's another one about there, and the vanishing point as we looked at before, somewhere at the top. Then we've got another building. This building is on a different angle. We got the building on the left is on this angle, facing down there, building on the right is going this way. We got a vanishing point somewhere over here. We can find approximately that. We can sketch that in itself. Then the building back here is again back on approximately and it's not exactly, but we always simplify things, so it's approximately on the same vanishing points. We can use the same vanishing point or the same structural lines to build it in. Now, just a word of note, why is it not on exactly the same vanishing point while it's not on the same plane? This building is facing like this here. This one here is about this angle, sloping slightly. The one over here is more like this so its vanishing point is on a different plane. It exists in a more complex world than our simple three-point perspective. It's got its own vanishing point somewhere a bit closer. We're going to ignore that. We're going to simplify things as we always do. Manipulate them, making our sketch our world. We're going to use about the same structural lines. Then we've got another one back in the distance here. For the same reason, because it's on a different plane, its vanishing point is slightly different but we can ignore that. We've got basically our structural lines and we should also have a vertical one here, give or take vertical. From there, we can start doing a quick pencil sketch of the scene itself, so I'm going to come in and start just getting the heights of things a bit right. It doesn't have to be perfect, but just approximately right. We can find again, from all these lovely points that we've mapped in already, we can quite quickly just put in the important lines, and we can just find that our perspective-laden scene as complex as it is, just quite quickly and relatively accurately emerges without much fuss. Because all we're doing is we're creating boxes. Then we've got this one which comes across. Just have a look at how far the roof line comes across. It comes across this line here, comes across this vertical line, and so it goes up to the middle, this one then comes across, comes down, and then we've got this canopy which is also on its own lines of perspective. Remember, keep things simple. There's no need to draw everything perfectly. That's a photo. What we're doing is we're creating our world up at the art. At the top, we've obviously got this little dome-shaped popped out in as high as possible. I've not even done enough perspective in these lines, but we can change that when we come in later with our pen. Now we've also got all these windows and things. They can be on their own lines perspective as well. If we map those in, that makes it very easy to just add them. All of these little horizontal lines, we can just scratch here. Remember, they're also going to be heading down to a vanishing point. Again, approximately the same vanishing point as these other horizontal lines we've got. Somewhere over here, all these horizontal lines will meet. Just find these little details that we want to not forget the window, little clock faces, another window. Remember the size of these windows are on those vertical lines of perspective as well. The lowest window is going to be on here. We don't have to draw them all in. Just enough to remind ourselves. What I have forgotten to do is the bottom here of our building and the bottom of the clock tower that probably needs to come down. This is where you can find little mistakes you made. Perhaps you can spot the mistake I've made, which is this canopy is too low. The canopy for some reason is at the bottom of the church, which isn't right, so that's great, we move it up. We just redo our canopy. This is why it is nice to have done a pencil drawing. Now our canopy makes sense in the rest of the scene. A little line for our tree here, and that is my pencil sketch done. Hopefully, you can see this scene already just starting to emerge with just a few little structural lines, followed by reinforcing those ones which seem right and building our scene around it. Next, we're going to be adding in some pen. [MUSIC] 9. Step Two - Adding Ink: [MUSIC] We've got those key lines and we've got the structure in place with our pencil. I'm not pretending everything is perfect or correct. But with our first pen lines which we're adding now, we have the opportunity to move things around and change things if we want. Everything doesn't have to be correct either. Certainly doesn't have to be accurate. But let's just see as we make these firsts of bolder pen lines, how we decide to change things, how we decide to keep things the same as we move through to creating more of a finished final image. Time to add in our pen, as I said. I'm going to start off with just a fineliner. This happens to be a 0.05 millimeter Fineliner and we're going to be contrasting that later with a much bolder 0.05 millimeter fineliner. But using a little gentle fineliner first let us change things, move things, get things wrong. I'm going to start with our focal point. Remember, I felt perhaps I hadn't angled this perspective enough. I'll start on the outside of this line, land up in the inside of it. Now I know I've increased the angle of the perspective. I might even just do the same here, start just on the inside and angle down. It's fine, I'm allowed to exaggerate the perspective of the scene. It's my art and my little world, so I can do what I want. Don't be afraid to make changes which you think are creatively or visually appealing. We can add in the fill line which is not perfectly vertical in the reference, but it may as well be vertical. Again, that just simplifies things. Then we can start building other key parts around it. We've got this roof line, which is partly hidden behind the tree. Then we've got the edge of the house underneath of the roof line. Then we can start in on the windows. By force of habit, I tend to do little continuous lines and link things up. There's no reason that you have to do that. I just love the fill lines, I enjoy doing it. I think it looks cool. That's why some of my lines join up. Then we can come and we can do a canopy, that we were happy we had any pencil sketched in because we got it wrong. Then we can come on to this building and start adding that in. If we look it, it feels right already. This building feels goods so we can stick with it. Remember these vertical lines are also sloping and as I was sketching them in earlier, I wasn't thinking that hard about it. Again, just angle that line a little bit more. That exaggerates our perspective a bit more, and shows that we're dealing with a real three-point tool and character full three-point perspective scene. As we go off to the side here, just losing a bit of detail because we don't want to overdo it. We can just start adding in a couple of suggestive lines of what might be going on off the edge of the scene. Then let's just start finding little details. We can find these little windows and there's a blackboard here. I think this is a blacked out window down here. Then some more and more windows. Remember these vertical lines, again, they're fitting our lines with all these vertical lines fitting up different lines of perspective. Getting more and more angled as we get over. It doesn't matter if they're not perfect, but just remember the feel. Remember the feel because that keeps the character of the scene feeling right basically. You can see I've simplified pets. I've cut out these windows at the top. I've made the roof simpler. That's again, our prerogative as artists, we do what we want. Here's our chimney which again, all pointing at but all fitting that feel of the perspective. Having done a bit of background, let's go and let's make a bit more of our lovely Clock Church Tower, Clock Tower. You can find all these other extra lines. We can find these little details. The clock faces which sit in a little recessed square. Let's even do the clock hand because, why not. Then we can suggest some numbers around the outside, and we can get that window in as well. With the window you can just see a really big frame can't you? Don't forget to make things 3D. We got big frame here, a tiny bit of window. On the other side, it's the reverse. Little frame and a bit more window we can draw some little frame lines in as well. We've got the same clock face, so that's a try and remember to make it about the same time, because that'd be a bit of a continuity error I wouldn't know. We can add in all these little lines and they actually, we've got 123 here. There's one more that we can add in and it doesn't matter if you counted them right or wrong or minor, obviously in slightly the wrong place, but that's fine. I imagined very few people, even people who live next to this lovely church. No, we're just off-hand how many of those lines there are. This also means we're perfectly fine getting it a little bit wrong, not quite getting it correct, perfectly. Going to move up to the top here and this is a very complicated shape, so take it easy and make it gentle, see how it looks and then come back to it. We can just get an idea of it now and we can come back later and see if we like our idea, if we think it needs to move. That again is the advantage of very thin pen. In the background, we've got more of these chimneys. Again, having them slopes, here everything's moving in the same direction. We're almost there with our key lines is what I would say at least. We can start adding in a few more of these little details, and perhaps still making this little touches, as things like little brick marks. There were bits of carabiner on the wall is just a few texture lines finding things we hadn't first paid attention to so the PSP like a tiny sort of roof edge here, little chimney here, and then we can even get texture lines on our rooftops. There's another example, few marks to suggest to the viewer that there's a tiles on the roof rather than something else. Here, we can come back and just see, do want to change anything, modify anything. Then we've got our foreground features, we've got our tree. I'm going to do is basically make the tree a bit of an outline. The nice thing about trees and natural objects when it comes to perspective and architectural scenes like this, is that they, they do have perspective but they are so natural in their shape flowing that actually they often feel like they're breaking that perspective, they're unpredictable. Having something like this in your scene is a nice counter foil towards these straight lines, it stops everything feeling like it's just having to flow up. Suddenly we've got this object which isn't, it's got this different feel. What I've done, I've just a really gentle outline, lots of random leaf-like shapes, and we can do few more in the middle of the tree. But it's quite transparent, isn't it, and it really it's got a few golden leave mostly on this side. But you can see through it a lot, and it's more about the branches and things. Rather than drawing all the branches as a line and wash sketcher, what can be nice is to draw the outline and have it as just a slightly more abstract thing in our sketch. Now what else is that? We've got all these people haven't been so we have our horizon line, which is great. We can start just loosely adding in the people where we want them. We can find people in the scene and add people from the scene into our sketch. We can add these younger people and just remember to make them appear young, change that and the proportion. A younger person, as well as being below the horizon line, will have a bigger head to body ratio. Just by doing that, it makes them appear younger. Then we can come back and we can start adding in more people. We can add an adult to the foreground just to show that these really are our people. I want to say add a look at these shapes I'm making are very loose. I'm certainly very lose, but that's fine. That's not what the scene is about. The scene is showing it's busy with these people. It's great, but it's about the perspective. It's about more than just trying to draw people already perfectly. I think we're pretty much there as well now with our ink. I'm going to stop that before if done too much, and then we can come back and we will come back and add some more touches at the end. But now what we're going to do, just stop and add a little bit of watercolor, splash on some loose colors to bring the scene to life before reinvigorating with some bolder lines, that perspective and getting control of the scene again. [MUSIC] 10. Step Three - Loose Colours: [MUSIC] With all that lovely ink work done, it's time to add our color. This first layer of color, which is going to be the main color we add in this lesson, is going to be loose. But we're going to be thinking still about perspective. How can we apply our color in a manner that highlights the key feature of this image, which is that vertical perspective? Now, it is time for some color. Color may not feel like necessarily part of perspective, but actually, it really is a part of perspective. I'll try and talk you through as we go why I think that is. It involves, for example, using colors to reinforce the feel of lines, but also making sure that things which are distant in perspective are paler or less intense, less saturated, things which are more important or closer are more intense, more saturated. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is the sky. I'm going to apply lots of water, and I'm going to apply this water to either side of my little tower. I'm going to leave the top for now; I'm going to leave the top and see what it looks like because by applying that water either side, we're going to be accentuating this upward feeling, and we're not going to be enclosing the top of the tower. I'm hoping that what we get is this feeling of the tower breaking through the sky. That's the first way that we're thinking with our colors about perspective. How to put the color in, I don't have to paint it. What do I mean? I mean I just put the color down, and look, it paints itself. This is a bit of cobalt blue. Watercolors are more than happy to paint themselves if you give them the right environment. You can see with all that water, the fascinating shapes it makes. We can come in, we can squish around with our brush so we can make more shapes. Look at the reference photo for a moment. You see how dramatic some of those colors are, see how dramatic the gaps in the sky are. Also, have a look at how the sky also feels. It does have perspective as well, everything has perspective. You can get a feel for that just by having a quick glance at it. You can see how it's got this field of perspective. We're trying to emulate that activity interest in the sky. Next, I'm going to just get a little bit more drama with a couple of dark colors. First, some indigo. Indigo is a lovely, I'm sure you know what indigo is, is a nice, lovely, dark blue. Almost a bit Payne's gray in color. We can just touch that in in a few places. Do you see how it's settling, how the paint is settling into the image already? We can already see that actually, we could take a bit more blue or something like that. I also keep my towel nearby so I can dry off my brush, and I can use that to lift up a bit of water and manipulate the sky a little bit more. Again, that's just trying to get that dramatic feeling going. Having done that, let some blue paint itself again. Well, let's paint a bit more blue, touch a bit more blue into that sky. There are lots of choices like this that we can make as we keep moving. We could keep working on this sky for ages if we want it. We keep making it more and more dramatic. Of course, we're going to have to stop at some point, so just a few more touches here. Then I said a couple of darker colors, so I'm also going to add a bit of moon glow, which I think is a really wonderful, dramatic color. Then I'm going to soften some of these edges where we've got these really hard obvious edges everywhere. The edge of our sky. I'm just going to soften them and see what happens. I think a few touches of color above the tower. But I want it to have that breaking-free feeling. Now, next, we've got these lovely roofs. What I want to do is just get rid of a little bit of that water at the bottom of the sky. Now, I like colors bleeding together. If you don't like that, then I would let things dry a bit before moving onto the roof. If you don't know if you like that or if you do like it, I'd encourage you to experiment and just try adding a little bit of painting where everything's going to be running together and bleeding. I'm taking a bit of red, this happens to you Mayan Orange, I'm going to touch into the roof, and it will go into the sky. Just by touching it in, letting it touch the blue, we'll get this lovely mix of red and blue which, of course, form a neutral to purple-type color. The closer we get to orange, the closer it will get to neutral because orange and blue colors which neutralize each other, they are complementary colors. You see this subtle soft blending and bleeding of colors. I'm going to continue, I'll wash down the page. Look at this really bright house. I'm going to use a Hansa Yellow, a really bright yellow to get that. As we get into the distance, so as I said, with atmospheric perspective, the further back you go, the more washed out colors are, the less saturated. There's some color in these distant houses, but I'm making sure it's less saturated, so it's not as in your face, and that helps make it feel distant. Along with this linear perspective, that is the distance. This building over here is much more mellow color, so using a little bit of Quinacridone Gold mixed with a little bit of indigo from my palette. Again, you may not like these effects, but I love them, so I'm going to have these colors just come down the page. A little splash here of our lovely yellow. Just the pooling down in the corner over the other side, if I get a little bit more Quinacridone Gold, I can get that pooling down. Much like with the sky, whilst this is still wet, we can still fiddle and play and let it paint itself, as I say. Just move things around. I'm going to come in to do our see-through and tree now. Remember how we sketched it as an outline here? Well, I'm going to come in just with sepia, initially, kind of mellow, lovely mellow brown. I'm going to get that outline. I'm going to leave this middle blank and just see how it feels. Then come down the tree trunk. Again, just try and get these lovely soft color to mingle where the tree is see-through, this feeling of mingling with the background colors. Also, we talked about lovely gold, so let's get a bit more of that Quinacridone Gold and see what it looks like mingling in. Just taking it step by step, keeping things wet means we've got it all to play for. We can edit it, we can have fun. I'm going to keep these sweeping feelings going with that color, we're just building it up and seeing how much we want to do really. I'll leave it there for now. We can come back and we can do more with the pair, more of the colors, or whatever in a bit. Now, the lovely tower is obviously our main point, but it's also not got a huge amount of obvious color, so what it does have is shadows. I'm going to start by using just a little bit of indigo from the corner of my palette here, and I'm going to add a bit of shadow to this side. I'm going to exaggerate the difference in shadow between the two sides. Actually, to make it a little bit more interesting, I'm going to add a little bit of Perylene Violet to that murky purple. Then we can still bring that in under all these horizontals, and again, to see how it feels. But I also want plenty of white coming through underneath. You can find then that actually it's more convenient to have this tree gold over this white because it explains a bit more. I think we're almost there. Last little bit. Just this foreground feels quite empty, isn't it? Just a gentle bit of tone popped in there, a little bit of indigo. Again, we can bring it to the lines of perspective. We can make it follow lines of perspective. By doing so, it enhances that linear feel going around. I'm going to let this dry now and then we're going to have a look at it and see. I think a few finishing touches, and suddenly, this will all come together. [MUSIC] 11. Step Four - Bringing it All Together: [MUSIC] With that color done, it's time to do the finishing touches. The finishing touches today include both some pen work and this second little touches, the second layer of color. In the next few minutes, what we're going to do, add a slightly, but a much bolder line. Again, we're trying to think, where do we reinforce perspective? Where do we break perspective and where do we add a little bit of extra detail? Then with the color, just having seen these bold lines, how do we make things feel colorful, bright, and alive? We're back and we are pretty much totally dry. What are we going to do? We're going to finish this off with a few little touches. I'm going to start with my pen. Reason I start with my pen is because that will bring everything together where these colors got mad or loose or not quite within the lines. We can re-evaluate our lines. We can also re-focus those lines which are important for our perspective, and then we can add highlights and deeper shadows and things with our watercolors if we want. Let's start up here with a focal point and that will let us know how bold our lines are looking. That will let us in turn workout how bold our less important lines need to be. This is a very bold pen. This is a 0.5 millimeter pen. Much bold than I often use, but it's fun to experiment and change up often what you're using. Also, when we do such a drawing as this, something where lines are really important, then having a bold line to emphasize it might be more interesting. What I'm doing, just going to find those key lines. Not every line, but those key lines, including things like these chimneys we found in the background. There's ones which define the perspective of those certainly the key lines. It doesn't matter if I go a bit wrong. This one is a bit wrong, isn't it? Doesn't matter. We can just play it fast and loose. Have a bit of fun anyway. This doesn't matter. Here are a few mistakes here and there. That's the humanity of the art. As we get further out, again, just making those lines a little bit loose, a little bit scratch here. We can come down here and got most of complex shapes going on, but we can find them and just loosely add them in. With a nice bold pen, we can very easily create these very dark areas, create very bold contrast. Let's find again this hand, things like that. Perhaps some of the final areas like these little frames inside the windows we want to leave and maybe come back to with a fine pen if it feels necessary in a moment. Now might be the time where we start just defining this bold a little better. Now that we can see it in comparison to everything else, we can add a few little extra pen details, for example, and maybe just this hard to see, but it's hard to see in the reference. Let's block it in, get a real deep contrasting shadow. Then let's come in. Just look at this lovely tree and find some of these shapes. Now we can get this overlapping thin pen, thick pen, find the colors and the edges of the colors have got to and use that to define the translucent or see through transparent even tree. It can extend it past where the colors have gone as well. It didn't have to be limited to what's happened already. We can redefine things. Get a nice bold trunk coming down. Test run the trunk if we want. It is after all in the foreground, it's an important part of the foreground as well. I'm just making these semi-random leaf-like shapes and bringing them in towards the tree trunk in this scattered pattern imitating the branches that we've gotten in the reference without copying them. Influenced by rather than necessarily directly trying to copy or get the exact tree across. In the background, reminisce with these windows, you can do a little bit of hatching to get the idea of the depth of color in them. Same here. Do you see how now this translucent tree is working? It's there, but not there. The house behind it is, again, there with a building there, but not quite there. But that's the same effect we get in the actual reference. I'm not going to try and overdo the drawing either. We've got these very bare-bones bits, for example, this canopy. I'm not going to try to overdo it. I'm just going to take the lines we have got and make them into something which represents the idea. There's a lot of shadowing confusion underneath, but we don't even have to do this shadow. We can just leave that. So let's leave it as essentially negative space and just see how it feels at the end. I think that's going to be fine. It's complex, but uninteresting for me at least, uninteresting part of the reference photo. Again, these are just the decisions that we make as artists, as sketchers, drawers, painters, whatever. We're making our own decisions about what we want to include, and then see how that impacts our world, our vision. Again, just using these basic shapes we already got. We can add little details like couple of hands and things like that. But essentially just very loose sketched people, suggestions of people. [NOISE] My advice is don't spend too long in one place, so moving around the image. I did this house second, I think originally and only just coming back to finish off the windows, but by jumping around, moving from place to place, we ensure we never really overdo it too much. What I'd love to do is add a few more little touches with this fine pen now. Just like in some of these rooms getting a bit more, we did a few bits of roof texture, but they've disappeared a bit now. Just coming in and doing some real scratchy lines of texture, could do the same in the foreground here. It felt a bit empty and then we added this color and I think turned out to be really great idea. We do the same. We can invent breaks and things. We can just find ways to increase the density of line work, which increases the complexity of the image and makes it more interesting without having to exactly copy details. Just where did it feel a bit empty? Where does it feel like we could just make it a bit more interesting and then add that texture or just add what you you at that point is needed? Then we can come and I said we might perhaps do a little bit more of these framed details with our thin pen. That's our time to do it now. There we go. I think actually that's our pen work done. Then it's just those last little touches of color. What can we do? I'm going to use a slightly smaller brush here. This is a size 12 round brush, but it's much smaller. It feels more like a size 8 really. I'm going to take some of our bright colors. Got our hands a yellow medium. By touching it in a few places we create a bit of variation in our wash. This is where we can, again, just get these drips and give them, again, another punch of color. We can come in to where we had this quinacridone and we can do the same perhaps this time just bringing in the edge of the tree, but also maybe splashing in so that it's got this natural field and it feels like it's spreading into the environment. You can take a bit of indigo, do the same to give it a two tone variation. Maybe up in our tower, just this purple is actually working quite nicely, the Perylene violet. Just a few little touches, not too much, but a few touches, especially as we get lower and it feels like it's more enclosed and in shadow, so we can enhance that field with a few just touches more of the paint. I think not much more to do really. Last thing I'm going to do, just to increase the interest in our sky. Just a few splashes and then we do some more concentrated splashes as well. Maybe the same, just a little something in the foreground. Not too much, just a little touch here and there. We can ground some of these people with little suggestions of shadows. There you go. I'm going to call that my rather loose in terms of color, but quite tight in terms of perspective. Sketches a line and wash, sketches of urban sketch style sketch using three-point perspective, using loose colors to enhance that, but mostly using our pen work to really get that upward feel and that push over those linear perspectives. I hope you've enjoyed that. Let's move on to the final lesson. We're going to do a little unveiling and we will talk about next steps. [MUSIC] 12. Conclusion and Thank You: [MUSIC] Thank you everyone for joining in and getting all the way through these lessons. I hope that you've enjoyed it and I hope it's given you something to think about and a new tool, a new little weapon you're sketching arsenal. This is my finished sketch and as you can see, I can unveil it, take off the masking tape off, and we're left with this, which I think is worked rather well. Good bit of fun. That vertical perspective pointing high up into the sky. What it really does is it just accentuates and exaggerates and just really shows off the height of the buildings and it makes a scene feel more real and more 3D. Now, have a play because one of the lessons we looked at taking a vertical perspective and warping it. You can also do other things instead of doing a three-point perspective, you can do a one-point perspective but the only point of perspective is up in the sky. Now that you have all these tools at your disposal, there's lots of ways that you can manipulate them and have fun and enjoy yourself. Now, I'd love you to share your final project in the project gallery. I'd also love you to share any experimenting you do in the project gallery. Do ask any questions you have in the discussions as well. More than happy, I love responding to questions and things as well. Of course, having done this course, I'd love you to have a look at my profile, perhaps follow me on Skillshare and see if there are any others, which you feel cool out to you. You can also find me on my socials, on Instagram, and YouTube @tobyurbansketch. I'd love to connect with you as well as on Skillshare. More than anything though, I hope that you just have a little bit of fun, get a little bit of inspiration and go out or stay in and do some sketching.