Lessons
Lesson Info
Basic One Point Perspective
(whirring of machine) So I've come down to the first floor of my Mill building here. See this awesome hallway where I'm gonna show you some really simple steps to make drawing one point perspective easier. So this is an industrial hallway. There's small industry in my Mill building. There's factories working as we speak, and so the noise that your hearing is something that I hear everyday. To me it adds to the ambiance of working in a space like this. I love this hallway it's rustic, it's industrial. I love the color of it, I love everything about it. So you're looking for your inspiration first. I walked all over the Mill, and I was like, "I want to draw here." So I set up to draw and then I thought, "Uh, it's so complicated. How am I ever going to do this." And that's something we often feel when we come up against something that we really feel inspired by that when we sit down to draw and then how do we actually do it? So I want to show you some simple steps, and show you some simpl...
e concepts around one point perspective to make it so much easier. So, right now I have this basic outline of the hallway. And, what I'm going to do is a little quick overlay to just talk about a few one point perspective points, and then I'm going to reveal a trick that I use a lot to make it easier. So, right now this is just a Sharpie version of the hallway, but if I take this overlay and lay it on top, it teaches us a few things. One of the first things I ask myself when I go to do a drawing like this is, "What's my eye level?" So, sometimes I imagine I have a laser beam shooting out of my eyes, and I'm looking down the hall. And where that beam, would hit the furthest point out, that is my eye level. So in this overlay, this red line here shows my eye level going down the hallway. That's really important, because where I find myself within that, I'm looking straight down the hall to this point right here. It's to that one point, one point perspective, that all of these diagonals are going to converge. It's true actually, and it's hard to believe, because we look at a hallway and we think, "How could all these line converge to that point?" And one of the things you can do, is you can sight angles. So the pencil is a great tool to do that with. What I can do with the pencil, is I can line it up. Let's say for instance along the line of where the floor meets the wall. To my eye, I can line that up. It's on a certain angle, and that angle can be brought directly to my drawing, and can help prove that that's exactly what that line is doing. So setting angles is definitely a technique you can use to make this easier. But, an even easier thing to do, is a little trick I'm going to show you that. So I'm going to take this off. You've seen the eye level. You've seen how all these diagonals converge. The diagonals of the floor boards, the ceiling, all these lines converge pack to this point. But if I take this off completely, this is actually on a piece of plexiglass, and what I sometimes do to help students actually believe that this is what's going on, is I have them trace their interior onto a piece of plexiglass, and then that is really a proof for the segue to the beginning of their drawing. So you can use this overlay to help you get to this place. Because sometimes people don't believe that the diagonals are on the extreme angles they're at. So when I reach the place of the drawing on paper, what I'm going to show you is a few ideas about, this is just graphite on paper. I've used my sighting angles, and I've used my overlay to help sort of place things in space. But what I want to show you, is how when you get to this part of the drawing and you start to lay in your diagonals, putting a little point where your eye level is, where your seat brings you all the way back to that point, and noticing how all of these diagonals feed back to that one point. Just like we saw in the diagram. Where the floor meets the wall, where the floor meets the wall. Even these bricks. Here the bricks are, as they go back into space are actually horizontal. They are not coming upwards, and they're not coming downwards. So here, the bricks angle up towards our eye level. Here the bricks angle down towards our eye level. So we have all the diagonals are kind of coming together to this point. And that's what really helps to create the space. So the diagonals can help with depth for sure. As these lines converge towards the vanishing point here, this is the vanishing point, my one point in the distance. You can see how the hallway gets narrower, and also I like to think about how this door is the furthest thing away from me, it's my destination in a way. And the things up front are really close to me. And when you start to develop the things up front, like this canister here, you can start to add in a little bit more detail up front. Kind of playing with texture and line quality. And what's happening in the distance, you can let it fall away a little bit, and let it be a little bit more vague. And that helps with the perspective as well. One thing that you also may want to work with is overlaps. So another device for creating depth, is any any time a line... like this is the line of the floor. This canisters in front of it. Make that canister feel like it's in front of where the floor intersects it here. Also, this wall coming up slips behind this wall. So there's all these little junctures. This little corner slips behind the brick wall here. So all these moments where you can start to create these little overlaps is also going to help you create distance and space. So using this device... and it's really simple. You can just buy a piece of plastic and a sharpie. Or even one of those markers that you can erase. You can do multiple ones of this. Using this as a proof, and then starting to work towards your final drawing, is a way to make one point perspective in drawing interiors so much easier, and much less daunting. And it's actually really fun. So give it a try.
Ratings and Reviews
Nora Masters
Inspiring and fresh. Amy does a wonderful job of teaching me information efficiently, showing the beginning of processes and the more finished process, as well as lots of alternative ways of approaching the practice. i love the student work shown as well to reinforce the lessons.
Marcus
A miraculous teacher, with very refreshing talk. But to me has not become clear completely as with the Perspex disc functions practically without achieving absolutely shaky results. Could one not have shown this still briefly?
Student Work
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