Week 2, Demystifying PERSPECTIVE and other helpful art tools

Today we looked at several things that help in observational drawing. The first was scaling, that is using a "unit of measure" to measure the bigger whole. An example would be to measure with your arm held straight out and a pencil, the height of a lamp shade, from top to bottom edge. That would be one unit of measure. Next determine how many units from the lamp shade to the floor. This concept, either vertically or measuring horizontally,that is, across the form, can help put things in proportion to each other. A classic example is the head considered to be 1/8 of the body, or the hand as measure for horses. It is similar to laying a grid across in front of your eyes.
The next thing we talked about is determining angles. We looked at vertical lines, being very consistent in an interior space. Then we started to examine horizontal lines. This introduced our main lesson on perspective. First we defined the 3 kinds of perspective: 1 point, 2 point, 3 point and saw examples of each kind. Even though a lot of this information is very traditional, I showed 2 situations where perspective is very useful for portrait and landscape artists. In viewing the head especially a 3/4 view, we see the head as a cube. the eye line, nose and mouth line will all relate to a vanishing point, as will the placement of the ear. I showed an example of 2 point perspective, that helps to create a flat surface, such as a field or water surface. Finally we learned that vanishing points do not have to be on the page. Sometimes they are way off the page. We looked at some paintings and determined what kind of perspective the artist was using. We saw situations where one painting could have multiple vanishing points, all helping to control the space.
Please enjoy our excellent perspective drawings today. Everyone did a great job looking a difficult angles, determining what was happening, and figured out how to put them down on paper. Sometimes it was hard to believe what our eyes were telling us. It helps to have a few tricks up our sleeves to double check where things are.