In the previous exercise of creating a "standard unit of measure"
we already touched on the next exercise of perspective and proportion. As above, using and measuring for perspective and proportion may seem a bit too logical and mechanical to be "artistic",
but in order to accurately depict the world around us we need to
accurately represent the object depths, angles, and sizes that we see. And the only way to do this is to measure things. We can somewhat stay away from making our drawings look too mechanical and stiff by not using rulers to measure to the exact centimeter. If we make "crude" measurements using our pencil as the measuring tool, like we did above, we should get a more "organic" feel to the drawing.
I don't think that you need to know the "classic" way of drawing in perspective, I mean the old horizon line and vanishing point idea. That way works, and if you know it, go ahead and use it, but I don't think it's
absolutely crucial to know.
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Click to see the shelves. |
If you look around in the room you're in you'll see that the middle of your
field of vision is where you can only see the front of objects, you don't see the tops or bottoms of objects, this is where the "horizon" line would be. Take for example a stack of shelves. Notice that you only see the front edge of the middle shelves, but you can see the undersides of the top shelves and the topsides of the bottom shelves. This is showing that, in this photo of shelves, the shelf that the toy cars are sitting on is the "horizon line" and that the shelf above this line appears to be
angling down and the shelves below this line appear to be
angling up. In order to accurately do a drawing of these shelves, you would have a lot of
horizontal lines that would represent the shelves, and also you would have to draw a lot of angled lines that angle both up and down depending on if they were above the horizon line (angle down) or below the horizon line (angle up). Also notice that the farther up or down you get from the horizon line, the wider the angled lines open up.
Get ready to do a drawing by putting a new sheet of paper on
your drawing board and sharpen your pencil. Put the paper
vertically on your board because that's the orientation of
the photo. You'll be drawing the shelves above. Click the photo to see how
large it looks for you. Is your monitor big enough to have the
picture open and read this page as well? If not, I suggest you
print the photo out. Get comfortable with your drawing board
in front of your computer so you can draw and read as well.
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See how to draw the shelves. |
Try and draw the above shelves without using a straight edge. To
start, you may want to draw vertical lines that will
represent the front edge of the shelves. Then draw two more
vertical lines on the inside of your first two to represent
the back edge of the shelves. What you may want to do when drawing these shelves is
to measure the length between the front of the shelf and the
back of it and then draw the horizontal lines to represent the
shelves. If you draw the verticals and horizontals you will be
able to complete the angled lines of the shelves just by
connecting the front vertical to the back vertical starting at
the front horizontal and ending at the back horizontal. Click
on the shelves drawing to see an animated explanation of
drawing the shelves.
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